The Vampire Lovers Reviews

THE VAMPIRE LOVER is the first entry in Hammer's "Karnstein" series, which was based on characters and incidents from Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. The lovely Ingrid Pitt stars as Mircalla Karnstein, a sexy vampire who arrives at a remote Eastern European town to exact revenge upon the townsfolk, who killed off her family of vampires several years before. Mircalla seduces her way into the household of the respectable Gen. Spielsdorf (Peter Cushing) and his beautiful daughter, Laura (Pippa Steel). Soon afterwards, Mircalla manages to bed Laura and slowly drains her blood after numerous lesbian encounters. Having killed off the daughter of one upstanding villager, Mircalla next moves on to seduce Emma Morton (Madeleine Smith), the young best friend of the now-deceased Laura. Once again Mircalla begins to slowly suck the life out of a young woman during sex, and after Mircalla kills the girl's doctor, her father enlists the aid of famed vampire killer Baron Hartog (Douglas Wilmer) to investigate. Together with Gen. Spielsdorf, the baron seeks out Mircalla and destroys her. At the time of this film's making, Hammer was looking for a way to revitalize their horror series, and hit upon a combination of soft-core sex with lesbian overtones and violence even more graphic than in their previous films. While THE VAMPIRE LOVERS is an interesting and entertaining effort, containing excellent performances from both Pitt and Cushing, writers Harry Fine and Michael Style and director Roy Ward Baker seem to shy away from actually addressing the questions of sexuality and repression inherent in the material. Hammer exploits instead of explores. Nevertheless, the film was a hit and was quickly followed by LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1970) and TWINS OF EVIL (1971).