Cuadecuc, Vampir (1971)

 

Director: Pere Portabella

Cast: Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Soledad Miranda, Jack Taylor, Emma Cohen, Jesús Franco, Colette Jack, Jeannine Mestre, Paul Muller, Maria Rohm, Fred Williams

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #183 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

Who would think, when drawing up a choice for a Christopher Lee film, you can have as a choice an avant-garde behind-the-scene documentary on one of his other films to choose from? The result itself, arguably Pere Portabella's most well known film for some outside his homeland of Spain, is a strange collaboration between Jesús Franco, Hammer Horror and Spanish experimental cinema.

The film is a behind-the-scenes look at Jesús Franco's Count Dracula (1970), one of the few big films in Franco's career, out of his over one hundred productions before his passing in 2013, at a time (including two Fu Manchu films with Lee) when he was scouted for British co-productions. Ironically, Count Dracula is not likely as talked about by Franco fans, unlike films from just before (Succubus (1968)) or afterwards (Vampyros Lesbos (1971)). Also, whilst there could be some dangerous elitism, as this is a high art film based on a production by a filmmaker who for decades was dismissed as a muckraker, this is a befitting cross pollination between two Spanish filmmakers. Franco is undeniably an auteurist filmmaker, with his own idiosyncratic style of countless films, as Portabella is a very idiosyncratic one as well. Likewise, in context as two Spaniards having to work within the era of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship, Portabella (from a Catalan heritage) would have been an outsider having to deal with the censorship of Spanish cinema at the time, and Jesús Franco's work would become far too transgressive for his homeland as well, leading him to the multi-European co-productions like Count Dracula that he was already starting on onwards for the next decade.

Cuadecuc Vampir, whilst a documentary is effectively itself a retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Count Dracula itself was an attempt at a more faithful version of Stoker's work, part of the complex web that this creation has been a part of. Knowing of who the real Dracula is adds to this. Vampire lore exists, but Dracula the character is a purely fictional creation of Stoker's than a legend, based on Vlad III or as he is more known as, Vlad the Impaler. Even before his history as a vampire in lore, he was notorious during his reign for his obsession with mass impalement and a legacy of murder that, in the modern standard, would have had him put on trial for mass genocide, his horrible behaviour already being written of and told as tales that were popular before Stoker turned him into a legendary creature of horror storytelling. In hindsight, the character's legacy is darkened by a horrible real figure, but history has separated the pair. It feels befitting this is of note because this film, in only an hour or so, tells Dracula in a condensed form with almost no dialogue or sound, only music, itself part of a constantly fluxing text of Dracula the figure, himself as flux of a real life figure.

There are constant reminders of this world we see as a film production, such as when we see the fog machines being pulled along on a woodland road, leading to a horse drawn carriage that introduces Dracula. The immediate thing that stands out in Cuadecuc, Vampir is how gorgeous the film is visually. A striking and at times even blurred monochrome which can evoke Edmund Elias Merhige's Begotten (1990); it turns even the banal modern world, like a shot of a modern train passing by, into something part of a dream-like world that can co-exist with the period horror tale we see replayed.

The film presents a fascinating paradox. As the tale of Dracula retold - Jonathan Harker goes to Transylvania to close a deal with Count Dracula, who comes to England to terrorise the locals - and cutting to behind-the-scenes content of the production crew. It is straight forward and very easy to digest baring that, for some, a complete lack of dialogue barring one important part could catch people off-guard. It is undeniably abstract though, as the production filming another production, with Jesús Franco (known for acting in his own work) even having an on-screen cameo, does skewer the world of filmmaking with a significant change of aesthetic.

It is undeniably eerie in tone, especially as the music whilst with some lightness is full of ominous drones or sound effects such as footsteps isolated which are atmospheric. The film is fascinating in lieu to Portabella, a director of very high brow world on the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach (The Silence Before Bach (2007)) or short documentaries with Joan Miró, finding himself on this shoot and, regardless of his views of Jesús Franco, giving him one of the most respectful documents of a director by another. He takes what is not held as a great film even in Franco's filmography, or obscure, and turns it into this new form where he, Lee or Soledad Miranda (as Lucy Westenra) look striking onscreen. For the later, some of the only light heart, jazzy pieces of Vampir usually score images of Miranda, in costume, onscreen.

Jesús Franco, interestingly, for a director who made a lot of erotic and even outright pornographic work has however a reputation for the couple of actresses he worked for who were empowered in his films nonetheless. His soul mate Lina Romay, who came into his work not long after this, was an honest-to-God example of the liberated figure comfortable to work both in his softcore and hardcore, the sexually liberated woman and the male director obsessed with sexual desire having arguably one of the sweetest romantic stories of all of cinema, as not only did he film her as one of the most beautiful women to be onscreen even when she was an older woman, but they stayed together until her death in 2012. Soledad Miranda is just as striking and iconic, shown here with an aura around her even if, ironically, she is playing Lucy rather than Mina Harker, something poignant as when it comes to the scene of Dracula first seeing an image of Jonathan Mina Harker's wife, Portabella cuts to Miranda rather than actress Maria Rohm, who played Mina. There is something haunting about these scenes, in knowledge that tragically it would only be 18 August 1970, the same year as filming Count Dracula, that when Miranda would die abruptly as the result of car crash injuries. For Franco fans, the little she made is held as iconic enough thankfully to immortalise her, even this too just as sweet a tribute.

The behind-the-scenes footage, far from jarring, is playful as scenes are set up and then witnessed, as actors like Miranda are shown as humble, waiting patiently before scenes, like Harker first encountering Dracula's brides for the first time, play out. It fits the complex history of Dracula as a source text - with a Hammer House Dracula in Christopher Lee here too, and Miranda being the vampire in Vampyros Lesbos - as if the fact, with the plot and monochrome visuals, my mind also kept going to F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), the "unofficial" adaptation and a classic in its own right that we may have lost if Stoker's widow to have all the prints of the film destroyed. That that film itself has a meta text too, the fictional Shadow of the Vampire (2000) where Murnau was envisioned hiring a real vampire, which was directed by Begotten's Edmund Elias Merhige for accidental connections, adds a befitting thread to this web of adaptations.  

If anything, filmmaking here is seen as regular work but with positivity to this. Never was there a film in this stark and eerie production that showed how fun it can be but also depicted the nuts-and-bolts hard work of everyone on the set. The cobweb generator, like a fan which creates fake webbing, especially looks the coolest tool to watch being used, to spray anything from doors to Christopher Lee (with his mouth and nose protected) as he lays in a coffin ready to do his scenes.

And yes, Lee still stands out with an aura too. In fact, this is not the only time the legendary British actor appears in a Pere Portabella film, as he would be in Umbracle (1972). He also has the only spoken words, so we do not miss his deep and wise voice, fittingly having the last scene. He kills Dracula himself by first taking off the makeup, then by explaining (and reading aloud) how the fiend is defeated in Stoker's text. Minding how slight the passage is, reading its entirety in his dressing room during the production, what you still get however is how humble and engaging Lee is as he concludes a fully told version of Dracula the story and finishes Cuadecuc, Vampir perfectly.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Eerie/Meta/Playful

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium