Two arrogant British couples find themselves, through excessively unlikely circumstances, in Dracula’s castle ten years after the vampire’s destruction. A previously unknown servant drains one of the men over a tub, reconstituting Dracula (Christopher Lee). For no good reason, the resurrected Count ignores the other couple and they escape, teaming up with a Van-Helsing-ish abbot (Andrew Keir) to fight the undead.
Eight years after The Horror of Dracula, Hammer brought Lee back to his iconic role, though this time without Cushing’s Van Helsing. While Lee’s name was good for selling tickets, he wasn’t so good for the film, through no fault of his own. The biggest failing is that Lee never speaks. He claims, and I have no reason to doubt him, that the lines in the script (including “I am The Appocalypse!”) were too horrible to utter and he refused to do so. Hammer claims otherwise, that there were never lines for him, but that makes even less sense. Whatever the case, the result is a villain with no personality. He hisses and growls, which some find entertaining. Worse, he is once again a wimpy villain. He does very little and ends up unable to deal with a comically small and artificial ice flow.
With unlikeable protagonists and a mute monster, it is left to Andrew Keir to carry the film, with an assist by an undulating Barbara Shelley as a brief vampire who gets to speak. Keir does an amiable job, as he usually does, though he isn’t in the film enough.
The movie is not theme-heavy, but what is there has not aged well. Dracula represents an excape from repression and the most important thing for any society to do is to keep those wild, free urges, particularly sexual ones, bottled up. It’s the rules of Victorian society, and it is hard to figure why Hammer thought those should be the rules of the ’60s. The image of a group of men, standing around the sexually awakened vampire girl, and staking her to rid her of her fowl desires, is uncomfortable at best.
While no one would be shocked by Prince of Darkness now, in ’66 it was thought to be even more titillating than Horror of Dracula had been eight years before. The blood draining and staking were often noted for their graphic gore, and Dracula pressing an intended victim to his chest was the height of mid-sixties horror sex. Now it is tame. Without that kick, Prince of Darkness is a mild and simple film.
The other Hammer Dracula films are: The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Brides of Dracula (1960)—which lacked Dracula, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Scars of Dracula (1971), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974).