Eyes Of Blood: The Hammer Films [Paperback]

Jack Hunter is author and editor of over 20 previous books on cinema, including EROS IN HELL and MOONCHILD, as well as the popular book on Japanese art, DREAM SPECTRES, and the counterculture classic FREAK BABYLON.

From Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman, cinema has seen a huge succession of screen Draculas. Yet none have ever equalled the power, charisma and feral magnetism of Christopher Lee, who first claimed the role in Hammer's 1958 classic Dracula, and went on to make it his own over the course of a further six films between then and 1973. When we think of Dracula, we think of Christopher Lee. Despite growing dissatisfaction with the role, particularly with regard his dialogue (or lack of it), Lee took his portrayal to successively more intense and almost satanic heights, personifying a terrifyingly seductive charge of sex and death which burned from the screen into his audiences' mind's eye. All this beneath an outwardly urbane, austere and disdainful veneer which at first glance belied the beast within. Physically perfect to the point of beauty, elegant yet clearly capable of unleashing psychopathic carnage, Christopher Lee's Dracula remains a consummate creation, and one which ranks amongst the very few most memorable in the history of cinema, on a par with Karloff's Frankenstein monster or Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter as an iconographic avatar of our collective subconscious. Eyes Of Blood is an extensive visual and verbal tribute to Lee's Dracula, an overdue recognition of one of the great screen-acting achievements. It also serves to commemorate seven movies which remain amongst the very best made by Hammer Films, and acts as a flash-frozen document of an era and style of cinema which will never be repeated.