Stephen Volk - Whitstable

Peter Cushing as the General looks on, presiding over his party. He kisses the hand of the delightful Madeline Smith, bidding her and her father, George Cole, goodbye. Or rather: “Auf wiedersehn.”

Until we meet again. Obviously. The audience knows he will appear later in the picture. He’s one of the stars, after all.

He watched Dawn Addams as the Countess introduce her daughter Mircalla, played with languid hunger by Ingrid Pitt—plucked from her brief appearance in Where Eagles Dare after Shirley Eaton (from Goldfinger ) was deemed too old, even though they were actually the same age. Perhaps Eaton, he thought, simply hadn’t given Jimmy Carreras what he wanted, as Ingrid with her European eroticism undoubtedly had. Poor Ingrid, who’d spent time with her family in a concentration camp—(“concentration camp: that’s true horror”)—and for whom he’d organized a cake and champagne on the anniversary of her father’s birth: Helen had wheeled it onto the set and Ingrid had blown out the candles with tears in her eyes.

Peter Cushing asks the Countess if she would like to join in the waltz. “Enchanted,” comes her reply.

“The invitation to the dance.” A voice in reality: one he recognised all too well.

Without turning his head, he saw the usherette’s torch hovering at the end of his row of seats. A silhouette moved closer, given a flickering penumbra by the fidgeting and then departing beam. The donkey jacket seemed almost to be bristly on the shoulders, like the pelt of some large animal, especially with the long, flesh-coloured hair running over its collar.

Eyes fixed on the screen, Cushing felt the weight of Les Gledhill settle in the cinema seat beside him. He detected the strong whiff of carbolic soap and Brut after shave, a multi-pronged attack to cover the daily tang of blood and gutted fish.

Jon Finch is waltzing with the General’s niece, Laura, and Ingrid—Mircalla—is looking over at them. Laura thinks she is eyeing up her boyfriend but he says no, it’s her she’s looking at. A sinister man enters the ballroom dressed in a black top hat and a red lined cloak. His face is unnaturally pale. He whispers to the Countess, who makes her apologies to the General. She has to go. Someone has died.

Peter Cushing as the General tells her, “It’s my pleasure to look after your daughter, if you so wish.”

Sitting beside him in the auditorium, Gledhill’s face was entirely in darkness.

“Don’t tell me you’ll tear down the curtains and let in the light. You’re not exactly as frisky as you were back in the fifties, are you?”

“I thought you didn’t watch my films.”

“Only when there’s nothing better on. They’re okay for a cheap laugh, I suppose. All they’re good for nowadays.” The General says goodbye to the Countess and watches her depart in her coach. Ingrid stares out. The pale, cloaked man on horseback in the woods gives a malevolent grin, showing pointed fangs. “Things have moved on, haven’t you noticed? Blood and gore, all the rest of it. Nobody’s scared of bats and castles and bolts through the neck.” Mircalla fondly places a laurel on the General’s niece’s head. Puts a friendly arm round the young girl’s bare shoulders. “They’re just comedy. Nobody’s afraid of you anymore.”

Cushing chose not to point out that their Frankenstein’s monster never had bolts through its neck. “I believe I still have a small but devoted following.”

“I can see. We can hardly move for your adoring fans.” The man he spoke to knew as well as he did that they were the only people in the audience. “They’re dying, these old films. Everybody knows it. The last gasp. It’s tragic.”

“I think you’ll find this film has been a box office hit. Significantly so, in fact. It’s rejuvenated the company.”

“Really. Look around you.”

“You’ve got to remember it’s already been released for five months. And this is a backwater town. And a matinee.”

“You’re living an illusion, mate.”

“Am I?”

“You need to get a grip on reality, old feller. Before you lose it completely. Choc ice?”

Cushing imagined it was not a serious inquiry.

Peter Cushing’s beautiful niece is sleeping now. Swooning in some kind of ‘wet dream’—if that was the expression. He remembered that this was one of the many scenes that Trevelyan and Audrey Field, who had been campaigning against Hammer for decades, were unhappy about, even with an X certificate. The censor had strongly urged the producers to keep the film “within reasonable grounds”—meaning the combination of blood and nudity, the very thing Carreras was gleeful about now they’d entered the seventies (“The gloves are off! We can show anything!”) . In monochrome a hideous creature crawls up the bed. Wolf-like eyes out of blackness become Ingrid Pitt’s—Mircalla’s. To Cushing the girl looks as though she has a bearskin rug crawling over her. Nevertheless, the dream orgasm so worrisome to the BBFC is curtailed with her scream.

“You saw the bitch,” Gledhill said in the gloom. “What did she say? You know she’s a liar.”

“There seem to be an extraordinary number of liars in your life, Mr Gledhill.”

Peter Cushing and an elderly housekeeper run in and calm Laura down. They say it was a nightmare, that’s all. He kisses her forehead and they leave the room. They think of checking on Mircalla, but when they knock there is no answer. They presume she’s sleeping. But the bedroom is empty. Ingrid Pitt is outside under moonlight looking up at the window…

“I thought she seemed perfectly charming,” Cushing said, his eyes not straying from the screen. He pretended that it absorbed his attention. “Another woman with another boy who perhaps doesn’t dream of vampires, like Carl, but of another kind of… creature of the night.”

His companion remained silent. He found it uncommonly difficult to deliver the lines he’d prepared in his head.

“She told me you’d invariably take him off to bed, rather than her. That you’d spend time reading him stories, as a doting father should. Quite rightly. Your, ah, special time you called it, I believe… I wonder what your son might call it?”

“Now you are starting to bother me, old man.”

“I’m rather glad about that.”

The Doctor, played by reliable old Ferdy Mayne, tells Peter Cushing that his niece just needs some iron to improve her blood. Cut to Ingrid Pitt at the girl’s bedside. Laura tells her she doesn’t want her to leave. Ingrid lowers her head and touches her lips to the girl’s breast…

“What are you going to do? Organize a torchlight parade of peasants to storm up to the Transylvanian castle, beating at the gates?”

Peter Cushing tells a visiting Jon Finch that his niece doesn’t want to see anyone but Mircalla.

For a moment Cushing was taken aback by his own close-up. In spite of the make-up he looked tremendously ill. Of course he knew the reason. It was the toll of Helen’s illness, even then. He could see the strain in his eyes. But it was a shock to see it now, thirty feet across, vast, on display for the entire public to see. He’d been oblivious to it at the time. He’d had other preoccupations. Now it hit him like a blow and it took a second for him to steady his nerve, as he knew he must.

“You think you’re safe because you consider everyone to be as selfish and self-interested as yourself.” Cushing did not look at the other man as he lit another cigarette. A scream rang out: the General’s niece, after another nocturnal visitation. “You really are unable to contemplate that someone might act totally for the benefit of another human being, even though they themselves might suffer. And that’s where you’re misguided, and wrong. That’s precisely your undoing, you see.”