For The Horror of Dracula Fisher confronted the themes of sexual aberration and monstrous pride present in The Curse of Frankenstein and re-directed them. Here the forces of scientific rationalism are sexless and repressive: seeking to stamp out the irrational sexuality represented by the vampire (played by Lee in perhaps the defining role of his career) lest it contaminate their sense of moral propriety. Just as the Baron fought with his self-control, here it is Dracula, the monster, who can barely restrain his delight in vampirism, a process directly paralleled to both sexual liberation and especially drug addiction. Fisher’s people have a driven agenda and here he cleverly suggests that those who seek to remove the curse of vampirism do so in order to preserve a repressive social order. Indeed, the staking of the vampires has a sexual dimension that suggests such killing is a perversity to match that of the vampire himself. Ironically, many English critics at the time did not grasp this irony and objected to the fact that staunch Christians, out of a moral necessity that is essentially hypocritical, perpetrate much of the violence. With this film Fisher brought his tales of sexual perversity beyond individual psycho-pathology and into the realm of social allegory and warped morality-play.
The greater tension and bolder, hotter use of colours, costume design and tints in The Horror of Dracula suggested a mounting sexuality seeking expression. Fisher was beginning to escape physical entrapment into the wider community and in turn rooted his aberrant characters in a distinctively English societal order based on what might be termed “moral entrapment”. Here, his passionate style and elaborate depiction of characters acting within a strictly enforced, repressive idealism so ingrained that they are often unable to question it lent tremendous energy to the film, an energy that made it a sensual experience, ideal for the examination of what Fisher apparently thought was the paradox of British sexuality. The film revealed that it was sexuality itself that English Christian civilization considered threatening and demanded repressed. Visually this was an absolutely striking movie and surprisingly subversive in the way its sexualized evil is attractive, seductive and even transcendent although yet again finding its parallel in humanity’s need for repression. Questions thus arose: is evil in the repressor or the liberating drive? Does society in turn inherently, violently mediate desire and repression? Irrevocably? In so doing, The Horror of Dracula is complementary to The Curse of Frankenstein. read more