The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula



Photo by Ashley Bird

In 1970 Anthony Hinds of Hammer Films wrote The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula (originally titled Dracula – High Priest of the Vampires) as the intended follow up to Scars of Dracula, relocating the vampire count to India where he was to spread his evil influence. Writer-producer Hinds devised the script primarily to take advantage of frozen assets that Warner Bros (who financed and distributed Hammer’s output) had in India at that time. Ultimately, however, financing proved to be problematic and Hammer dropped the script in favour of updating the series to present day London with Dracula AD 1972.

Unquenchable Thirst, along with another mooted series reboot, Vlad the Impaler, ended up in the Hammer vaults where it sat for decades until De Montfort University’s Cinema and Television Archive (CATH) became the custodian of the Hammer archive, a collection of over 300 scripts, as well as books, posters and other memorabilia. In 2014, CATH’s Director, Professor Steve Chibnall invited Mayhem Film Festival co-programmers Chris Cooke and Steven Sheil to delve into the archive where they stumbled across Unquenchable Thirst, the Hammer Dracula that never was.

At this year’s Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham, UK, Cooke and Sheil presented the unfilmed screenplay for the first time in a live reading on Saturday 17^th October 2015.

Read my review here.

Wes Craven (1939 - 2015)

“What a horror film does is not frighten so much as release fright. It is a vent. And all these fears are in us all the time, from our lives, from our youths, from the world at large; everything from the most complex societal things of waging war and class struggle to very simple primal things like fear of the father and mother and fear of abandonment as a child. So these are all inherent in us and civilization tends to gloss them over, encapsulate them, deny them; it teaches us a thousand ways to act like everything’s fine but underneath this surface there is a sort of cauldron. So what a horror film does is tap in and release that tension and it does it in a way that’s entertaining, amusing and safe.”
- Wes Craven, RIP

Forthcoming Books - Update!

It's been quite a while since I last posted on this blog, mainly because I've been hard at work on two new books. The first is a monograph on Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind for Auteur Publishing. This book is now submitted and I'll post updates on the release date when I have them. The second is a follow-up to Subversive Horror Cinema for McFarland & Co, a study of 'gruesomeness' in 1930s American Horror Cinema. The manuscript for this is due in October so it's still nose to the grindstone for me until then! Meanwhile here are some photographs that I took during a recent research trip to Hollywood, L.A.

At Paramount

Finally found Maila Nurmi's grave in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Ready for your close up, Mr De Mille? C.B's grave at the Hollywood Forever.

Which classic 1930s monster movie is this script page from?

Glad to see Subversive Horror Cinema in the USC library!

Subversive Horror Cinema Nominated for Best Book of 2014 at the 13th Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards.

The nominations for this year's Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards ("honoring the best in classic horror research, creativity and film preservation") have been announced. I'm thrilled to say that Subversive Horror Cinema has been nominated for Best Book of 2014!

Making it all the sweeter, my good friend James Gracey over at Behind the Couch has also been nominated, for his excellent article on Tobe Hooper published in Diabolique ("Family Man", issue 20, March/April 2014)

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