The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) is a British film based on the novel The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore. The film was made by the British film studio Hammer Film Productions and was shot at Bray Studios.


The story is set in 18th Century Spain. A beggar is imprisoned by a cruel marques after making inappropriate comments at the nobleman's wedding. The beggar is forgotten but manages to survive another fifteen years. His only human contact is with the jailer and his beautiful mute daughter (Yvonne Romain). The aging, decrepit Marques makes advances on the jailer's daughter when she is cleaning his room. When she refuses him, the Marques has her thrown into the dungeon with the beggar. The beggar, driven mad by his long confinement, rapes her and then dies. The girl is released the next day and sent back up to "entertain" the Marques. Instead she kills the old man and flees. She is found in the forest by the kindly gentleman-scholar Don Alfredo Corledo (Clifford Evans) who lives alone with his housekeeper, Teresa (Hira Talfrey). The warm and motherly Teresa soon nurses the girl back to health, but she dies after giving birth to a baby on Christmas Day (a fact that Teresa considers "unlucky." since the child was born out of wedlock)

Alfredo and Teresa raise the young boy, whom they name Leon. Leon is cursed both by the evil circumstances of his birth and by being born on Christmas Day. An early hunting incident gives him a taste for blood which he must struggle to overcome. Leon grows into a young man (Oliver Reed) and leaves home to seek work at the Gomez vineyard. Don Fernando Gomez (Ewen Solon) sets Leon to work in the wine cellar with Jose Amadayo (Martin Matthews) with whom he quickly forms a friendship. Leon soon falls in love with Fernando's daughter, Cristina (Catherine Feller), but when he is arrested and jailed on suspicion of murdering Jose, he grows increasingly violent. His wolf nature rising to the surface, he snarls and drools his way through the village by the light of the full moon. Shocked and disgusted by his appearance, the local people summon his scholarly step-father, who has been preparing himself for years to face this moment. Though torn with grief, the wise Alfredo shoots Leon dead and covers his body with a cloak.

-From Wikipedia


CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
TERENCE FISHER  (1961)
HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS
91 MIN
UK

Kiss of the Vampire (1962)

The Kiss of the Vampire also known as Kiss of Evil, is a 1963 British vampire film made by the film studio Hammer Film Productions. The film was directed by Don Sharp and was written by producer Anthony Hinds credited under his writing pseudonym John Elder. Gerald (Edward de Souza) and Marianne Harcourt (Jennifer Daniel), are a honeymooning couple in early 20th-century Bavaria who become caught up in a vampire cult led by Dr. Ravna (Noel Willman) and his two children Carl (Barry Warren) and Sabena (Jacquie Wallis). The cult abducts Marianne, and contrive to make it appear that Harcourt was traveling alone and that his wife never existed. Harcourt gets help from hard-drinking savant Professor Zimmer (Clifford Evans), who lost his daughter to the cult and who finally destroys the vampires through an arcane ritual that releases a swarm of bats from hell.



Originally intended to be the third movie in Hammer's Dracula series (which began with Dracula and was followed by The Brides of Dracula); it was another attempt by Hammer to make a Dracula sequel without Christopher Lee. The final script, by Anthony Hinds makes no reference to Dracula, and expands further on the directions taken in Brides by portraying vampirism as a social disease afflicting those who choose a decadent lifestyle. The film went into production on 7 September 1962 at Bray Studios. This is the only credited feature film screen role of Jacquie Wallis who plays Sabena. The film's climax, involving black magic and swarms of bats, was originally intended to be the ending of The Brides of Dracula, but the star of that film Peter Cushing objected that Van Helsing would never resort to black sorcery. In fact, the paperback novelization of Brides does use this ending.

Alternate version Retitled Kiss of Evil for American TV, Universal trimmed the original film for its initial television screening so much that more footage had to be shot to pad out the missing time. Additional characters - that didn't appear at all in the original release - were added, creating a whole new subplot. Every scene that showed blood was edited out, e.g. the cinema release's pre-credits scene in which blood gushes from the coffin of Zimmer's daughter after he plunges a shovel into it. Also, in the televised version we never do find out what Marianne sees behind the curtain, a sight which makes her scream. A couple of the cuts result in scenes that don't make sense any more: while the theatrical release had Harcourt, when he frees his hands after being clawed by Tanya, smearing the blood on his chest into a cross-shaped pattern, keeping the vampires away as he escapes, the televised version omits the blood-smearing, leaving the vampires' inaction unexplained. The abbreviated running time was made up for by the addition of scenes of a family who argue about the influence of the vampiric Ravna clan, but never interact with anybody else in the movie. The teenage daughter throws over her boyfriend in favor of Carl Ravna (unseen in these scenes) who has given her a music box which plays the same hypnotic tune that he plays on the piano elsewhere in the movie. The middle-aged parents are played by Carl Esmond and Virginia Gregg (who gained fame by voicing Mother in three of the Psycho films), while their teenage daughter is played by Sheila Welles.

From Wikipedia

 

 

KISS OF THE VAMPIRE
DON SHARP   (1963)
HAMMER PRODUCTIONS
88 MIN
UK

The Witches (1966)

The Witches (US: The Devil's Own) is a 1966 British horror film made by Hammer Films. It was adapted by Nigel Kneale from the novel The Devil's Own by Norah Lofts, under the pseudonym Peter Curtis. It was directed by Cyril Frankel and starred Joan Fontaine, Alec McCowen, Kay Walsh, Ann Bell, Ingrid Boulting, Gwen Ffrangcon Davies and Rudolph Walker. This was the final big-screen film role for Fontaine.


A schoolteacher (Fontaine) has a nervous breakdown after being exposed to witchcraft during a rebellion led by witch doctors while teaching as a missionary in Africa. In an effort to recover, on her return to England, she is hired by a wealthy brother and sister (McCowan and Walsh) to become head teacher of their small private school in a rural village. Gwen soon detects a sinister undercurrent beneath the pleasantries of the village life, starting with Alan admitting to Gwen that he is not really a priest. Soon more suspicious events start to occur, such as the disappearance and reappearance of a doll - found headless.

There she also becomes suspicious of the way the villagers are treating a 14-year-old girl (Boulting); her investigations point to witchcraft. The village of Hambleden, Buckinghamshire was the filming location for the fictional village of Heddaby. Interiors were filmed at Hammer's usual studio at Bray in the same year the famous horror film company vacated their home altogether for (mainly) Elstree and Pinewood. The cast featured child-actor Martin Stephens, then 17. The supporting cast also included Hammer regular Duncan Lamont, as well as John Collin, Michele Dotrice, Leonard Rossiter and Bryan Marshall. The score was by Richard Rodney Bennett. In a later magazine interview Nigel Kneale said he was dissatisfied with the way the film had turned out. Personally he found modern black magic practitioners to be fairly risible and he had intended to poke fun at the idea of an English coven. However his blackly comic touches were smoothed out by the production team, who wanted the film to be entirely serious. - From Wikipedia


THE WITCHES
CYRIL FRANKEL  (1966)
HAMMER
90 MIN
UK