Peter Cushing

Professor Van Helsing and Dracula meet again in this kung fu horror spectacular set in the village of Ping Kuei. After learning about the Seven Golden Vampires of the village, Hsi Ching, Vanessa Beren and Mai Kwei offer to guide Van Helsing and his son to Ping Kuei to free it from the curse of Count Dracula. Throughout their journey, the party encounters several unwanted attackers until they arrive at the golden vampires' derelict temple, inhabited by Count Dracula.

After Hammer Studios' tremendous success with The Curse of Frankenstein, they struck a deal to adapt Universal's catalog of classics and set their sights first on Dracula. Christopher Lee removes the monstrous makeup from the earlier film and makes his entrance as an elegant, confident, altogether seductive Dracula, a frightening figure of flashing eyes and erotic allure. Peter Cushing, with his hawklike profile and piercing eyes, turns his rationalist intensity to Van Helsing: man of science as crusading vampire hunter.

Peter Cushing delivers his most cold-blooded portrayal of the mad Baron in his fifth turn as Dr. Frankenstein. Abandoning his latest experiment after a drunk stumbles into his secret lab (upsetting a severed head) he hurriedly finds new lodgings with a sweet young thing (Hammer glamour babe Veronica Carlson) whose boyfriend (Simon Ward, in his film debut) works in the local sanitarium.

Britain's Hammer Studios had been making films for decades before they suddenly redefined themselves with this lurid remake of the Universal Studios horror classic. Prohibited by Universal from copying their blocky makeup (and their script, for that matter), Hammer returned to Mary Shelley's novel for inspiration, and then went in its own direction. Peter Cushing plays Dr. Frankenstein as the rational scientist turned cold-blooded criminal in his campaign to discover the secret of life, committing murder to further his ends, or to remove an inconvenient mistress.

A young party traveling to the Carpathian Mountains receives a strange warning from Father Sandor, the Abbot of Kleinberg, telling them not to proceed with their plans. Despite his advice, the Kents continue but are prematurely abandoned in a forest by their coachmen, who refuses to continue after dark. Finally, their luck is changing it seems, when another mysterious black coach appears and delivers them to an enormous, errie castle where they are offered the hospitality of Count Dracula.