Blacula/Scream Blacula Scream

Abstract

[...]is the stereotyping of this film that I did find myself wondering whether I wasn't watching some kind of rather subtle satire: at one point, one white cop actually turns to another and says, 'How can you tell?

Blacula (Dir. William Crain) USA, 1972

Scream Blacula Scream (Dir. Bob Kelljan) USA, 1973

Optimum Home Entertainment

One of the great joys of genre cinema is that occasionally an actor will give a performance so brilliant that not only does it threaten to overwhelm the film in which it appears, but it can define their careers and even, I like to think, justify their lives. Ernest Thesiger managed the unique trick of pulling it off twice, both times for his protégée James Whale, in The Old Dark House (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) - and on both occasions succeeded in stealing the film from performers as iconic as Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, and Cohn Clive. Such a list would also include Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night (1945), Niall MacGinnis in Night of the Demon (1957), Margaret Johnston in Night of the Eagle (1962), Charles Gray in The Devil Rides Out (1966), Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973), and Jim Siedow in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). It would also include, with a vengeance, William Marshall's performance as the African vampire Mamuwalde in Blacula. The difference is that while most of the films I just listed are great, and those that aren't are not bad, Blacula is frankly rubbish. Thing is, nobody told William Marshall this, and so he thinks he's acting in an altogether better film, and possibly the greatest film ever made. While everyone else involved knows damn well that they're making a Blaxploitation quickie, as far as Marshall's concerned, he's Othello with fangs.

Blacula opens in 1780, with African Prince Mamuwalde and his wife visiting Castle Dracula, to seek the Count's assistance in ending the slave trade. (Told you it was rubbish, though in the film's sole moment of wit, Mamuwalde notes that he has been particularly impressed to meet a 'Dr Duvalier' at the Count's dining table.) In Charles Macauley, the film has possibly the worst-ever screen Dracula - worse than David Niven in Vampira, worse than John Forbes-Robertson in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, perhaps even as bad as Marc Warren in the BBC's calamitous 2006 adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. I wondered whether this wasn't deliberate, as a kind of inverse counterpoint to Marshall's magnificence.

Mamuwalde is vampirized by the Count and imprisoned forever in a locked coffin. The film then shifts to 1972, when Castle Dracula has been bought by a pair of gay antiques dealers, seeking 'the very crème de la crème of camp'; and so Mamuwalde's coffin is shipped Stateside. Honestly, what is it with vampires and gay antiques dealers? Stephen King must have been taking notes here, I think, as readers will already have spotted that this is the exact same premise which animates the vampire attack in 'Salem 's Lot, published not long after, in 1975. King's Barlow and Straker may be gay purveyors of 'old things, fine things', but they are nothing like the camp pairing in Blacula - it was as though Larry Grayson and Dick Emery had somehow wandered off the stage of Sunday Night at the London Palladium and into a Blaxploitation movie. I think one of them actually does say something like, 'Shut that door, you honky mofo! Ooh! You are awful! But I like vouV, though I may be misremembering slightly. In fact, such is the stereotyping of this film that I did find myself wondering whether I wasn't watching some kind of rather subtle satire: at one point, one white cop actually turns to another and says, 'How can you tell? They all look alike.' After all, the film does have a kind of wacky anti-slavery message, and does refer in passing to Black Panther violence, as well as to the black middle class moving out of the inner city and into the suburbs. Perhaps, like Richard Matheson in I Am Legend, Crain, Marshall and company are actually using the vampire narrative as a comment on American race relations. After all, The Omega Man, the adaptation of Matheson's novel released the year before Blacula, had famously featured an inter-racial romance between Charlton Heston and Blaxploitation regular Rosalind Cash. Perhaps William Marshall knew something the rest of us didn't, and Blacula is rather a good film after all.

Well, perhaps not, but it does have all the usual reasons for watching Blaxploitation movies - huge Afros, great threads, a brilliant soundtrack (featuring disco legends the Hues Corporation), and a vivid feel for 70s urban cool. These are in themselves substantial reasons for wanting to watch any movie, though Blacula also has a number of incidental pleasures for us genre-hounds. Elisha Cook Jr's in it, of course, as a sleazy, one-handed mortuary attendant; as is Ji-Tu Cumbuka, less terrifying than usual, but still a badass dude. Perhaps best of all is former chanteuse Ketty Lester, easily the scariest thing in the fdm as vampire cabbie Juanita Jones. Lester's probably best-known for her 1962 transatlantic Top 5 hit, 'Love Letters'. You know the one: 'Love letters stake through your heart / Keep us so near while apart... ' (At least, that's what I think she sang, though again I may be wrong.)

The pleasures of Scream Blacula Scream are, as a result of the Law of Diminishing Returns, all incidental, but still quite gratifying, firstly, there's the unimproveable title, which justifies the whole endeavour by itself. William Marshall's back, as imperious as ever, and he's joined this time by an actual screen legend, Pam Grier (playing a voodoo priestess!). There are a couple of notable TV cops in supporting roles: Bemie Hamilton, Captain Dobey in Starsky and Hutch, pops up as a kind of voodoo hobo; and here's Michael Conrad as a police lieutenant, practicing the kind of ostentatiously formal diction that was to become his trademark as Sgt Esterhaus in Hill Street Blues. My favourite bit of the film has future Dynasty star Richard Lawson as Willis, Mamuwalde's superfly apprentice vampire, genuinely aggrieved that he can no longer see his spectacular pimp outfits in the mirror: 'This really ain't hip! '

The two Blacula films may not be aesthetic monuments to the human condition, not exactly, but I was very pleased to see them again. Well done to Optimum for releasing them in a double bill like this.

Darryl Jones