Earlier this evening ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I watched Destry Rides Again (1939), which neither of us had seen and therefore had not understood just how much in addition to Dietrich it had bequeathed to Blazing Saddles (1974)—I mean it as a compliment to both films—and then I wandered around the house for the next three hours knowing I had recently had a similar insight about another pair of films and I couldn't remember what it was.
I was trying to remember that last week we had watched Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) for the first time and I suddenly realized how much of that film had gone straight into the DNA of Fright Night (1985). It wasn't even the premise of vampires vs. teenagers plus stake-wielding elders and the camouflage of modernity that made it click for me. It was the confrontation between Peter Cushing's Lorimer Van Helsing and Christopher Neame's Johnny Alucard, the point at which the occult, for the grandson of the last Van Helsing to grapple with Dracula, comprehensively ceases to be his family's theoretical study and becomes the messy fact of a willing Renfield doing its best to tear his throat out while he holds it off with his bare hands and a silver cross and reflected light and it's a close thing—Cushing never made his victories over evil look easy, but this one especially might not have ended well for him if it hadn't been daybreak already and his adversary hadn't sluiced himself in clear running water trying to get away from the skylight in the bathroom. He's an aging academic, not a professional vampire hunter, in that sense much closer to Stoker's Van Helsing than Hammer's usual; he can say confidently enough to the skeptical police inspector that "silver bullets are impractical and garlic is not one hundred percent reliable," but he does a lot of scrambling in his actual fights. Being patched up afterward by the detective sergeant who was confusingly not a young Christopher Lloyd, he looks exhausted and hurting and resolute and anxious and at that point a Roddy McDowall-shaped light flicked on in my brain. The scene is not one-for-one with Peter Vincent's confrontation with Evil Ed, but it's close enough that I can't imagine a writer-director who named his semi-fearless vampire killer after Cushing and Price not having it in the back of his head somewhere while writing. There is fortunately no equivalent to Charley in Dracula A.D. 1972, but I wish Stephanie Beacham's Jessica Van Helsing had been more of the next-generation vampire-ass-kicker we were hoping for and less of an Amy-like object, most important to the plot as something to be stolen from the hero and turned by the villain in revenge. At least the police in this film are willing to entertain the possibility of vampires as opposed to your garden-variety Satanic-panic murders.
Anyway, in an ideal world I will combobulate my brain enough to write properly about Dracula A.D. 1972 because honestly it delighted me, but I wanted not to forget the lightbulb moment—again—in the meantime.
spatch and I watched Destry Rides Again (1939), which neither of us had seen and therefore had not understood just how much in addition to Dietrich it had bequeathed to Blazing Saddles (1974)—I mean it as a compliment to both films—and then I wandered around the house for the next three hours knowing I had recently had a similar insight about another pair of films and I couldn't remember what it was.I was trying to remember that last week we had watched Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) for the first time and I suddenly realized how much of that film had gone straight into the DNA of Fright Night (1985). It wasn't even the premise of vampires vs. teenagers plus stake-wielding elders and the camouflage of modernity that made it click for me. It was the confrontation between Peter Cushing's Lorimer Van Helsing and Christopher Neame's Johnny Alucard, the point at which the occult, for the grandson of the last Van Helsing to grapple with Dracula, comprehensively ceases to be his family's theoretical study and becomes the messy fact of a willing Renfield doing its best to tear his throat out while he holds it off with his bare hands and a silver cross and reflected light and it's a close thing—Cushing never made his victories over evil look easy, but this one especially might not have ended well for him if it hadn't been daybreak already and his adversary hadn't sluiced himself in clear running water trying to get away from the skylight in the bathroom. He's an aging academic, not a professional vampire hunter, in that sense much closer to Stoker's Van Helsing than Hammer's usual; he can say confidently enough to the skeptical police inspector that "silver bullets are impractical and garlic is not one hundred percent reliable," but he does a lot of scrambling in his actual fights. Being patched up afterward by the detective sergeant who was confusingly not a young Christopher Lloyd, he looks exhausted and hurting and resolute and anxious and at that point a Roddy McDowall-shaped light flicked on in my brain. The scene is not one-for-one with Peter Vincent's confrontation with Evil Ed, but it's close enough that I can't imagine a writer-director who named his semi-fearless vampire killer after Cushing and Price not having it in the back of his head somewhere while writing. There is fortunately no equivalent to Charley in Dracula A.D. 1972, but I wish Stephanie Beacham's Jessica Van Helsing had been more of the next-generation vampire-ass-kicker we were hoping for and less of an Amy-like object, most important to the plot as something to be stolen from the hero and turned by the villain in revenge. At least the police in this film are willing to entertain the possibility of vampires as opposed to your garden-variety Satanic-panic murders.
Anyway, in an ideal world I will combobulate my brain enough to write properly about Dracula A.D. 1972 because honestly it delighted me, but I wanted not to forget the lightbulb moment—again—in the meantime.
