Dracula rises again in Leicester Square
Hammer’s gloriously restored 1958 classic gets a red-carpet London premiere – complete with footage British audiences have never seen.
Nige Burton joins Hammer royalty for an unforgettable night with the Count
On Monday evening, the Vue Leicester Square played host to the kind of gathering that might have tempted even Count Dracula to venture out a little before sunset. Jamie and I were fortunate enough to be among the guests at the London premiere of Hammer’s newly restored Dracula from 1958, and what a night it turned out to be. From the moment we stepped on to the carpet to the final, crumbling frames of Christopher Lee’s Count, the whole evening was choreographed beautifully by Hammer, and as the guests filed in a string quartet set the mood perfectly, weaving James Bernard’s famous theme among a selection of classical pieces with a distinctly Gothic flavour.
The foyer was positively thronged with Hammer dignitaries. Hammer chairman John Gore was there to welcome everyone, as were the two surviving members of the film’s cast, Janina Faye and Paul Cole. A dazzling line-up of Hammer’s leading ladies from other films had also turned out in force – Madeleine Smith, Caroline Munro, Pauline Peart, Judy Matheson, Valerie Leon and Virginia Wetherell – and they were joined by relatives of some of the studio’s most important figures, among them family members of Dracula director Terence Fisher, iconic actress Ingrid Pitt and Hammer writer and producer Brian Clemens. It was almost impossible to turn around without bumping into a slice of horror history, and where else, one wonders, would you find quite so much Hammer pedigree under one roof outside of Bray Studios itself back in the day?
Janina Faye, who played the young Tania, was as charming as ever, and when I spoke to her she admitted that watching her younger self on screen remains a curious experience. “Even now, this might sound a bit bold, but if I watch myself, I think, ‘you weren’t bad as a kid’, but it’s like looking at somebody else.” For the record, she was a good deal better than ‘not bad’.
Paul Cole, meanwhile, has earned a lasting place in Hammer lore as the lad who brings a message to Melissa Stribling’s Mina, and although his time on the film was brief, his memories of it remain fond ones. “Going to Bray Studios, I was obviously hoping to meet Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, but they weren’t there on that day – it was only a day that I went there, but the people I did meet… I was a fifteen year old boy, they treated me very well, and it was a happy setup. They were a nice crew, a nice unit, and I enjoyed it.” Missing out on Cushing and Lee might sound like the ultimate case of bad timing, but sixty-eight years later he was finally sharing a cinema with them, which is surely not a bad consolation prize.
The real star of the evening, of course, was the film itself. This new 4K version, prepared by Hammer and Silver Salt Restoration in collaboration with The Warner Archive Collection, has been painstakingly pieced together from archival materials sourced from around the world. Most excitingly of all, it reinstates long-lost footage that, until now, had only ever been seen by audiences at the film’s original 1958 Japanese theatrical release – scenes that have never been part of the full cut seen in Britain or America. Little wonder, then, that John Gore was as eager as anyone in the auditorium to see how it would land.
“We’re able to show this footage that’s never been seen apart from a small group in Japan in 1958, so I’ll get to see the audience react in that moment, and even I have not watched it on the big screen. I’ve seen the rough cuts, I’ve seen the bits of the assemblage, but I will be watching it for the first time with everybody else.” It isn’t often that the man in charge of the company gets to share the thrill of discovery with the rest of us, and there was a lovely sense of everyone being in it together.
And the result? Simply glorious. Bernard Robinson’s sets have never looked so rich, the colours glow with a fresh lustre – not least that famous Hammer blood, which is now so vivid it almost drips off the screen – and details that have been lost to murky prints for decades suddenly leap out at you. It turns a beloved film into something extra special. All the nostalgia is there, but nostalgia has never looked so good.
Just as impressive is the sound. The restored soundtrack is breathtaking, and hearing it at full volume in a packed auditorium is a powerful reminder of just how important James Bernard’s score was to the impact of the film. Bernard famously built his main theme around the three syllables of the title – Dra-cu-la – and that hammering motif, crashing in over the opening credits, still sends a shiver down the spine. Has any horror theme ever announced its villain with quite such ferocity? I would argue not.
As John Gore put it when the restoration was first announced, “Dracula changed horror forever.” On Monday night, it felt as though it was doing so all over again.
The restored Dracula opens at almost 150 UK cinemas on the 16th of October, and I would urge you to catch it on the big screen, where there’s nothing quite like sharing those gasps with a full house as Lee bares his fangs. Then, once you’ve seen it as audiences did in 1958, you can relive every glorious frame at home with the 4K Limited Collector’s Edition, released on the 23rd of November, and pore over the details at your leisure, as often as you like. The Count has waited sixty-eight years for this, so why not give him the welcome he deserves twice over?
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