From the London Daily Mail:

Maverick's back: Cruise jumps on eighties remake bandwagon as he plans Top Gun II. By Emily Sheridan.

First it was Rocky, then it was Rambo and more recently Indiana Jones, and now Tom Cruise is following the eighties remake craze by filming a Top Gun sequel.

Twenty two years after Maverick sang his way into the heart of his instructor Charlie with 'You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling', the fighter pilot will take to the skies again.

Movie bosses are keen to resurrect the mega-successful 1986 movie, which launched Tom onto Hollywood's A-list and earned $350 million worldwide.

Cruise, 46, is in talks with studio bosses to reprise his role as Lt. Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell in a long-awaited follow-up.

An insider tells The Sun: 'The idea is Maverick is at the Top Gun school as an instructor - and this time it is he who has to deal with a cocky new female pilot.'

The original Top Gun starred Cruise as an cocky aspiring pilot who falls in love with his beautiful instructor, Charlie Blackwood, played by Kelly McGillis.

If Cruise agrees to reprise his role, Top Gun II would be a surefire box office hit.

The actor's film career has been remarkably less successful in recent years after previously dominating the highest box offices receipts since the 1980s.

His last big hit was War Of The Worlds in 2005 - which was released around the same time he started dating his now third wife Katie Holmes.

Mission: Impossible III in 2006 performed below industry expectations, taking less money than the first film in 1996, which was a huge worldwide success.

His last film, Lions For Lambs, which opened last November, failed to make an impact at the box office and was critically mauled.


From The Irish Times.com:

Chinese artist asks cartoon maker to bare all

about panda conspiracy

A CHINESE ARTIST is suing Dreamworks in a Beijing court, demanding an apology from the Hollywood studio for the cartoon film Kung Fu Panda 's depiction of China's national symbol.

Zhao Bandi is best known for using panda images in his art, including racy black-and-white clothes designs. The film, a tale about an overweight panda-cum-noodle-chef called Po who aspires to be a kung fu master, has broken box office records in China since it was first screened on June 20th.

The Chinese are hugely proud of kung fu and they also love their national symbol, the giant panda.

Dreamworks Animation has been widely praised for addressing these two big issues sensitively in Kung Fu Panda. Zhao, who likes to carry a stuffed toy panda around with him, says the fact that Po's father in the film is a duck is an insult to all Chinese, and also the panda's eyes are green, which is an evil colour.

"Designing the panda with green eyes is a conspiracy. A panda with green eyes has the feeling of evil . . . we would never use green eyes to describe a kind-hearted figure. So I ask them to open their creative meeting records of this film and explain why the green eyes?

"Next, why is the panda's father a duck? Many foreigners think the giant panda is not just China's symbol, but also the Chinese people's symbol. Drawing the father of the giant panda as a duck is an insult to the Chinese people. In a few years' time, I'm worried some young Chinese people will think their ancestor is Donald Duck," said Zhao.

His earlier calls for a boycott of the film because it could upset victims of the Sichuan earthquake prompted the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, which controls the entertainment business, to delay its release in the earthquake zone. However, there was an immediate response online calling for the film to be released.

Zhao said he was not seeking any money, he just wants an apology from the film makers. Beijing Chaoyang District People's Court has formally accepted his lawsuit.

(Ed. Note -- But on the other hand...)

You must not be rude about a panda. By Jane Macartney. 

From Reuters:

Dark Knight tickets sell for $50 on eBay
Web site rep doesn't recall seeing this many movie ticket auctions
   
It seems that 4,366 theaters weren't quite enough.

As hype for new box office champ The Dark Knight reached a fever pitch over the weekend, moviegoers were surfing eBay and Craigslist for tickets, sometimes paying five times face value for them.

The hottest items were tickets to Imax showings. The movie opened on 94 Imax screens, and company executives did a good job letting folks know that director Christopher Nolan shot many of the biggest action scenes with an Imax camera, making it was the best venue for viewing the film.

All the publicity didn't hurt Imax stock, either: It gained 18 percent last week. The Dark Knight, meanwhile set a new weekend record by selling $155 million worth of tickets.

The going online-auction price for an Imax Dark Knight ticket seemed to be around $50 — with many sellers asking $60 and many buyers offering $40.

An eBay spokesperson said she didn't recall seeing this many, if any, offers to buy and sell movie tickets on the site before.

And eBay has seen a surge in activity related to Batman in general, with nearly 23,000 items listed on Friday. As for movie-related Batman gear, Christian Bale paraphernalia is the most popular.

The online auction house said that 2,147 collectible items related to Bale's Batman were listed, ahead of Val Kilmer (823), Michael Keaton (768) and George Clooney (184).

Some of the more popular items include movie posters, action figures and animation cells that are being offered for as little as $5 and as much as $1,000. The big-ticket item thus far was a Batman comic book that sold last month for $30,000.

From MSN:

The Smart Night: Is The Dark Night the Smartest Superhero Movie Ever Made? By Erik Lundegaard.

You know the feeling. You've seen the trailers, heard the buzz, read an article or two. You think, "They're not going to do that, are they? They're not that dumb, are they?" Then you see the film and they do that. They kill Professor X, make someone besides the Burglar responsible for the death of Uncle Ben, cast Jessica Alba as the Invisible Girl. You leave the theater shaking your head, thinking, "I can't believe they did that. How could they be so dumb?"

I had the opposite experience with The Dark Knight.

I'd just written an article about the history of Batman on the big screen . I'd been struck by the fact that if you divide the two Batman serials and six feature films into their three natural groupings -- the '40s serials along with the 1966 film, which was a hipster comment on those serials; the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher movies of the '80s and '90s; and the current Christopher Nolan films -- the same pattern develops: Batman starts out as a vigilante, becomes a crime-fighting institution, then descends into camp. I warned that, as dark as the Nolan series was, this process seemed inevitable.

There's an inherent problem with the Batman myth. Batman becomes Batman to strike terror in the hearts of criminals. That's why he wears the suit. He's supposed to terrify. In 1943's Batman, he takes a crook into his "bat's cave" and scares him into confessing. In 1989's Batman, he's an urban myth, "The Bat," who may or may not drink the blood of his victims. In 2005's Batman Begins, he can ultrasonically call thousands of bats to cover his getaway. Of Batman Begins, I wrote, "This incarnation of Batman is effective even after everyone realizes he's just a man. Because if a man is nutty enough to do what he does, what won't he do?"

Once he becomes legit, however, once he's aligned with Commissioner Gordon, once you bring him out of the shadows and into the daylight, what's there to fear? He's actually kind of absurd. Put him in a room with Gordon and you basically have two cops -- but one is dressed like a bat.

The bat signal, as cool as it is, encourages the hero's passivity. Look at the two Tim Burton movies. In 1989's Batman, we first see Batman prowling the rooftops in search of crime. In 1992's Batman Returns, we first see him as Bruce Wayne doing ... what exactly? Sitting at Wayne Manor. Brooding. He doesn't stand and act until the bat signal appears. He's a dog. Come, boy.

Worst of all, the question that terrified criminals -- what won't he do? -- has now been answered . He has rules. He has a code. He won't kill anyone. So what's there for criminals to fear? The whole raison d'etre of Batman -- striking terror in the hearts of criminals -- has been expunged.

To distract us from this inherent problem -- that Batman only works as a vigilante, not as a law enforcer -- filmmakers generally add more stuff: Bat-this, bat-that. Robin, the Boy Wonder. George Clooney. Eventually the whole enterprise can't help but descend into camp. Nolan's series, I assumed, would simply follow this path.

(At this point, please accept the usual SPOILER WARNINGS.)

So, early in Nolan's latest film, The Dark Knight, I found it interesting that, despite the bat signal, Gordon tells the press, "Official policy is to arrest the vigilante, the Batman, on sight." I thought, "Good for them. They're holding onto Batman-as-vigilante as long as possible." I knew it wouldn't last.

Midway through the movie, things got more interesting. The Joker taunts Batman about his moral code. There are things Batman won't do, he says, but there's nothing the Joker won't do, which is why he'll win. It's a familiar dilemma for any hero: The hero has to work within the lines, however, the criminals don't. But the film echoed the problem in "Batman as institution," which was where it was heading. It was inevitable.

Then I watched the last five minutes.

To say I was surprised is an understatement. Here's how I ended my history of the big-screen Batman article:

But the easiest way to save Christopher Nolan's Batman is to yet again follow Frank Miller's lead. In "The Dark Knight Returns," Miller simply introduced a new, tight-ass commissioner to Gotham, one who didn't like Batman, and thus returned the caped crusader to his primitive vigilante state. Consider it like Mao's perpetual revolution -- except with a hopefully happier ending.

The Dark Knight didn't bring in a new, tight-ass commissioner, but the film still took care of every single problem inherent in the Batman myth. I was floored.

There are still problems with The Dark Knight, however, Nolan's direction is so relentless that the climaxes never feel climactic. At the same time, I realize that relentlessness has been the formula for blockbusters since Star Wars, or at least Raiders of the Lost Ark, and these blockbusters keep speeding up. They've probably just sped past me. In other words, relentlessness won't be a problem for 99.9 percent of the audience. It is, in fact, what they came for.

There are better superhero movies out there: Spider-Man 2, certainly. But the reason why Spider-Man 2 is better -- it satisfies us by giving the hero (Peter Parker) what he's always wanted (Mary Jane) -- is one reason why Spider-Man 3 was so awful.

What do you do after you've given the hero what he's always wanted? I guess you take it away again. Only to give it to him again. Yawn.

But The Dark Knight, directed by Nolan, and written by Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, with a story credit to David S. Goyer, is the smartest superhero movie ever made for all of the above reasons. It actually solves the dilemma inherent in Batman. Nice work, gentlemen.

It also raises this intriguing question: Does the film's ending give its hero what he's always wanted? Food for thought for the sequel.

Ebert and Roeper leaving popular movie review show

CHICAGO (AP) -- Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert says he's cutting ties with the television show that he and the late Gene Siskel made famous.

In an e-mail to The Associated Press on Monday, Ebert said Disney-ABC Domestic Television had decided to take the show "in a new direction" and he won't be associated with it.

His announcement came a day after Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper said he was leaving the nationally syndicated "At the Movies With Ebert & Roeper."

Roeper said in a statement Sunday that he had failed to agree on a contract extension with Disney-ABC Domestic Television so his last appearance on the show will air the weekend of Aug. 16-17.

"Several months ago, Disney offered to extend my contract, which expires at the conclusion of the 2007-08 season," Roeper said. "I opted to wait. Much transpired after that behind the scenes, but an agreement was never reached, and we are all moving on."

A message seeking comment was left for a spokeswoman for Disney-ABC Domestic Television early Monday.

Roeper said he intends to "proceed elsewhere ... as the co-host of a movie review show that honors the standards established by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert more than 30 years ago."

"I will be free to share the details on that program in the near future," he said.

He also said he wishes Disney "the best of luck with their new show, whatever form it may take."

Roeper joined Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert on the show in 2000, after Ebert's original co-host, Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel, died of a brain tumor in 1999.

Siskel and Ebert had begun reviewing movies on television together in 1975 on Chicago public broadcasting's WTTW, which eventually took their program national. The pair jumped to commercial television through the Tribune Co.'s TV syndication wing in 1982, switching to Disney in 1986.

Roeper was chosen from among a large group of contenders to be the permanent replacement for Siskel after his death.

Ebert has been sidelined the last two years because of health issues that have robbed him of his voice.

"Over the last two seasons, as Roger has bravely coped with his medical issues, I've continued the show with a number of guest co-hosts," Roeper said. "It's never been the same without Roger, but I'm proud of the work we've done and I'm grateful to all the co-hosts who stepped in — and to the viewers that stayed loyal to the show."

From MSNBC.com:

(Ed. Note: If you've ever seen the DVD of Uncle Goddamn, in which drunk hillbillies in a North Carolina trailer park wrap their uncle's face in duct tape, spray paint his face with Rustoleum, make him drink urine from a tallboy can & set his crotch on fire with lighter fluid, I think you may see a lawsuit brewing in the following story...)

 



Men sentenced for setting friend's crotch ablaze
The victim suffered second-degree burns on his testicles

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. - Two practical jokers are behind bars for setting their passed-out drinking buddy's crotch ablaze while boozing in Grover Beach. Matthew Craig Pillers and Jack Brent Nicholas Keiffer pleaded no contest to a felony great bodily injury charge.

Prosecutors say the 22-year-old Pillers, a parolee, was sentenced to two years in prison and the 19-year-old Keiffer got 45 days in San Luis Obispo County jail.

Elliot Tuleja was passed out when the men poured cologne on the man's groin and set him on fire on Jan. 18. Tuleja had second-degree burns on his testicles.

From The Telegraph.co.uk:

Weinsteins' Hollywood star begins to fade

Death Defying Acts, a new $20m biopic of the magician Harry Houdini starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Guy Pearce, had a less than magical release in the US last weekend, writes Tom Teodorczuk in New York

Released by Third Rail, a distribution label of the Weinstein Company run by film mogul brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the film debuted with minimal fanfare and no premiere, in just two cinemas nationwide, grossing a paltry $5,000.

It was a far cry from five years ago. Then, Zeta-Jones won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Chicago, the film adaptation of the hit musical, produced and released by Miramax, the film company founded by the Weinsteins in 1979.

Under their leadership, Miramax was the leviathan of the independent film scene, taking home Best Film Oscars for Shakespeare In Love and The English Patient, in addition to Chicago.

In November 2005, when the Weinstein brothers acrimoniously split from Disney, their former corporate owner, to go it alone, the smart money was on their company swiftly becoming the most successful independent movie company in Hollywood.

Goldman Sachs raised $1.2bn for the Weinstein Company on Wall Street, no doubt envisioning that the Miramax Midas touch, which fused critical acclaim with commercial success in producing and distributing the likes of Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting, would extend to the new entity.

But somehow things have not quite followed the script. The bombastic Harvey, 56, and his bashful younger brother Bob, 53, appear to be up against it.

Increasingly loud critics argue that not only has the Weinstein Company conspicuously failed to deliver an arthouse blockbuster since its inception but the brothers' moves to branch out into new media, fashion and cable television has had limited success.

The Weinstein Company is a private entity and refuses to disclose its cash flow or debt situation. Equally the Weinstein Company and the brothers refused to comment this weekend despite repeated attempts to reach them.

But the company has been subjected to scrutiny recently and questions continue to be asked about the high levels of debt at the studio, how long before Goldman Sachs loses patience and whether the private investors, who own 49 per cent of the company, will at some point demand repayment.

One of their investors is Sir Martin Sorrell's global advertising giant, WPP, which has a 2.7 per cent stake and invested $25m in the company. In return WPP received a "first look" at branded entertainment opportunities in the studio's films and TV shows.

Prior to the forming of the Weinstein Company, WPP brokered a range of brand partnership deals for its clients when the brothers ran Miramax, including American Express for Martin Scorsese's The Aviator and Campbell's Soup for the cooking show "Semi-Homemade."

Insiders have poured doubt on whether the company is on course to meet its stated goal of being profitable in 2008. In a drive to find production financing partners to share the capital-intensive nature of filmmaking, the Weinstein Company announced on Tuesday a seven-year deal to supply its films to the Showtime cable network owned by CBS.

The transaction raised eyebrows in film circles. It was widely reported in film press that Weinstein Company made an unusual advance bonus payment to Showtime of as much as $100m which has been interpreted as a deposit in case the Weinsteins fail to deliver on their output. If all goes well, the deal could be worth up to a billion dollars, according to the reports.

Right now that is a very big if. The Weinstein brothers built their reputation on making and buying films on the cheap and extracting maximum return from them at the box office.

But recently for the Weinstein Company, the reverse has happened. They bought Iraq movie Grace Is Gone, starring John Cusack, at last year's Sundance Festival for $4m. Upon release last Christmas it made just $50,000 in the US.

Likewise Grindhouse, last year's double bill of B-movies directed by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, which had a budget of $53m, ended up amassing $25m.

To widespread bemusement, the Weinstein Company chose to open the two blood-soaked exploitation movies in America over the family-friendly Easter weekend.

There have been a few hits such as animated movie Hoodwinked and the Stephen King adaptation 1408 which was released through Dimension, the label specialising in horror, run by Bob Weinstein.

But the litany of lame ducks, which early on in the company's history included School for Scoundrels featuring Billy Bob Thornton and Factory Girl with Sienna Miller, has extended into 2008. Woody Allen London-set drama Cassandra's Dream and My Blueberry Nights, starring Jude Law and Rachel Weisz, are among their films which have underperformed this year.

The Weinsteins' allies point out that the brothers are notoriously shrewd dealmakers and that some of the duds will eventually wind up profitable thanks to the DVD market and pre-sold international rights.

However Genius Products, the Weinstein brothers' DVD distribution arm, has lost over $50 million since the Weinstein Company exchanged film rights for a 70 per cent stake in Genius in 2006. The Weinstein Company is now delaying taking some film-distribution payments to redress Genius's short-term losses.

New York, where the brothers hail from and where they are based, operates by the power principle perhaps more than any other city. The notion that Harvey Weinstein is heading for a fall has Big Apple entertainment executives in a frenzied state.

A rival film company source, speaking on condition of anonymity said, "I saw Harvey at Sun Valley last week [at the annual media conference hosted by Microsoft founder Paul Allen]. He was subdued. I never thought I would ever say that about Harvey Weinstein.

"What's even more bizarre about their plight is the Weinstein brothers are past masters at what they are currently failing to do," he added.

"Take Control [the movie they distributed last autumn, a biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis]. That movie was one of the best-reviewed films of 2007 and should have got Oscars. It's not like they've never won any of those before.

"But Harvey's speech at the New York premiere of Control consisted of a story about how Bono had advised him in Cannes to buy the film. That's a dinner-party anecdote, not an effective Oscar-winning strategy," said the source.

Weinstein's woes encompass Gordon Brown. Weinstein Books, founded in 2007, bought the Prime Minister's book Courage for an undisclosed six-figure sum last summer clearly hoping the American public would consider the work a worthy successor to President Kennedy's 1956 Pulitzer-Prize winning tome Profiles In Courage.

But since its publication two months ago the book has not exactly flown off American store bookshelves - it currently ranks 547,223 on Amazon's US sales chart. Rob Weisbach, president and CEO of Weinstein Books, resigned last April.

The Brown deal is symptomatic of another problem facing Harvey Weinstein in addition to the box office slump.

While his brother is thought to prefer sticking to the film business, Harvey has branched out in pursuit of his dreams of founding a multi-media powerhouse. Investments have included fashion house Halston, arts cable TV network Ovation and social networking website asmallworld.net.

Harvey Weinstein bought Halston in March 2007 in a partnership with Hilco Consumer Capital, a private equity firm, from Neema Clothing for an undisclosed sum.

Tamara Mellon, the president of the Jimmy Choo shoe label, was brought on board as creative director but insider say that so far the fortunes of Halston, an American fashion giant during the 1970s, have been slow to revive.

Creative Director Marco Zanini was replaced on Tuesday, reputedly for not making their range sexy enough.

Weinstein has himself even become something of a fashionista in recent years, reputedly due to the influence of the clothes designer Georgina Chapman who became his second wife in December 2007. Weinstein helped provide capital and support to Chapman's clothing company Marchesa.

The company received a lift-off when Harvey's friend and frequent collaborator actress Renée Zellwegger wore a Marchesa outfit to the premiere of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in 2004 and has never looked back since, recently designing Colleen Rooney's wedding dress.

The Weinstein brothers built up Miramax on the back of distributing British movies such as Scandal, My Left Foot and The Crying Game, Neil Jordan's 1992 IRA drama, which they turned around from being a flop in the UK to an Oscar-winning sensation on the back of cleverly marketing its notorious twist.

Disney bought the company in 1993 but the relationship was turbulent, with Harvey Weinstein frequently having personality clashes with former Disney chief executive Michael Eisner. Their separation from Disney had been a long time in coming.

Miramax thrived under the brothers' tenureship owing to the long-lasting relationships they built with actors and directors including Gwyneth Paltrow, Leonardo DiCaprio, Quentin Tarantino and the late Anthony Minghella.

But even by Hollywood standards, Weinstein is a polarising figure. His penchant for heavily editing Miramax's films himself and his pugnacious manner alienated many in the film community. The Last Emperor director Bernardo Bertolucci once described Harvey Weinstein as "a little Saddam Hussein of cinema."

Harvey once threatened the urbane Daily Mail diary editor Richard Kay with meeting a nasty end in the Hudson River over an item he published concerning his relationship with Georgina Chapman. Friends of Harvey insisted this was a joke.

Indeed a legal dispute is currently overshadowing the Weinstein Company's most successful venture to date. The fashion reality TV show "Project Runway," hosted by German supermodel Heidi Klum, is produced by the Weinstein Company.

In March they signed a five-year deal with the Lifetime Channel to broadcast the show believed to reap them more than $1m an episode on top of the lucrative product placement deals in the show.

But the move led to a lawsuit filed by NBC Universal against the Weinstein Company which claimed that in transferring "Project Runway" to Lifetime from NBC's Bravo channel, the Weinstein Company had committed a breach of contract in not giving NBC the chance to match the offer.

Harvey was on typically blustering form when the public hearing began in a New York State Supreme Court on Thursday, saying: "I'd rather cut off my arm than give them [Bravo] a right of first refusal."

Jeffrey Wells, editor of the respected website Hollywood Elsewhere, said the Weinstein's problems were both cyclical and of their own making.

"The Weinsteins have suffered from the same pressures affecting the indie film sector that everyone else faces. There is a glut of product owing to hedge fund firms now investing in films," he said.

"Harvey really cares about movies. But, fairly or unfairly, there are people who will not do business with the Weinstein."

But others argue that this is too pessimistic and critics are failing to make allowances for the Weinstein magic.

Some observers predict this time next year the outlook will be brighter for the Weinstein Brothers.

Their future co-productions include Quentin Tarantino's new film World War II epic Inglorious Bastards and a movie based on the musical Nine starring Daniel Day Lewis, Nicole Kidman and Dame Judi Dench which begins filming at Shepperton Studios in October.

Death Defying Acts might be destined for obscurity but Harvey could study it and take lessons from Houdini, the ultimate escapologist, in the art of defying those who are craving the corporate death of the Weinstein Company.

From The Guardian:

Up Above the World So High 

The age of gods and princes on the silver screen has passed, as we turn instead to fleeting celebrity and digital thrills.

Phil Hoad tells of how we conspired to kill the stars:

After he assailed Oprah Winfrey's couch in May 2005, you have to hope Tom Cruise mused on the meaning of change. When he imagined his outbreak of zaniness, maybe it played in his head like a bar scene from Cocktail; but the derision with which the public greeted it was a tiny hint that the mood toward movie stars had darkened since Cruise's jubilant 80s and 90s. Hollywood's reigning king of kings was sacked by Paramount 14 months later, and though he was later made head of the revitalised United Artists, he's not in the clear yet: the knives are already out for his much-delayed Hitler assassination pic, Valkyrie.

Dark clouds have gathered over the whole of Hollywood's top tier. "Star power is definitely waning," says one producer at a major Hollywood production company. "There's no mystique any more. The power of celebrity has been commodified, and that weakens people's willingness to go and see stars. I can see Tom Cruise on Perez Hilton; why should I go to the cinema?"

The showbiz colossi that straddled the industry in top-heavy, high-concept blockbusters are fading: Arnold gone to politics; Mel gone off the rails; Bruce, Sly and Harrison all making their last throw of the dice with the recent returns of their superannuated franchises. Other stars have followed in their wake, of course, but few with the power to carry a movie. Will Smith is the only actor widely regarded as a sure thing at the box office, transcending race, class and even, as this month's Hancock showed, duff reviews.

You can't exactly say the stars got small, but somewhere along the line, in the 90s, it was the pictures that got big. The huge franchises that now dominate the release schedules, rolled out like military operations, often employ ensemble casts and invariably splurge on the CGI, decentralising the importance of the star actor. The Sparta epic 300 was typical of new-millennium thinking: jacked up to the helmet plumes on comic-book attitude and blue-screen aesthetics, but not a big-name actor in sight.

In this climate, the studios are beginning to seriously question whether the A-list are worth the going rate. Going or gone are the deals that were routine a few years ago, whereby a star would receive a fixed fee plus a percentage of the eventual box-office haul (Keanu Reeves tops the earning charts, having bagged $30m plus 15% to make an eventual $256m from the Matrix sequels). With the DVD profits that made these deals possible shrinking, and the world economy on the turn, Hollywood is looking to tighten its belt.

And in an industry awash with projects, it's harder to locate meaningful roles that reflect our inner desires - the roles that are the genesis of stardom. "There's just more product," says the producer, "and that didn't used to be the case. It's got to be harder for agents and managers to build [star careers] - you've got to get through the clutter." Everyone feels the change coming. The rumour in Hollywood is that the studios will use the ongoing negotiations with the actors' unions to clamp down on deals that indulged star muscle. It's no coincidence that a lot of big hitters have been shifting between the talent agencies this year (next big thing Ellen Page, of Juno, was one of the most recent defections). The stars are nervous.

But it was the stars themselves who set the ball rolling six decades ago. Olivia de Havilland was the groundbreaker: unhappy with the roles she was offered, she contested her contract with Warner Bros. It was a break for freedom that would help bring down the studios, and start to sever the rope that binds the audience and the admired. Prior to this, Hollywood moguls had totally controlled their stables of actors, paying them a fixed weekly wage and road-testing them in a variety of roles until they found a "type" that chimed with the public. In what's been called "the industrialisation of the ineffable", Hollywood became a streamlined machine for nosing out the qualities that made certain actors strike a chord with the public.

But the stars, for all the exaltation, often felt trapped by these creations. De Havilland successfully freed herself in 1945; the rest of the thoroughbred performers found themselves unshackled when the studio system collapsed completely in 1948. People such as Tyrone Power Jr, chained to his stipulated pretty-boy designation for years, suddenly found themselves able to explore roles not permitted by the studio machine - something Brad Pitt, a modern counterpart fond of wandering into indie roles, takes for granted. The elite were suddenly in charge of their own image and destiny. The modern star system was born.

You could call Clint Eastwood the paradigm of postwar stardom. A 40-year phenomenon, he used his liberated status to become a massively successful actor-producer-director who blazed the trail for roving renaissance men such as George Clooney. And the role that made him a star, in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, was vital. A lone gun out for the pickings, he was a perfect fit for Hollywood's new freelance stars. But even more, he was the incarnation of an audience for whom certainties and values had been eroded by the second world war and, in America, the gathering storm of Vietnam.

Deference is no longer in the picture in terms of how people consume films, either. Bill Quigley, chairman of the Quigley Publishing Company, which publishes an annual survey of the top 10 money-making stars, says: "What's fascinating to me is that box office is a spectator sport now - people are totally obsessed with films' performance, at least in the States." Increasingly, the puppet-masters - directors - became stars in their own right, especially after the rush of auteur worship in Hollywood in the 70s.

In fact, the power in the movies now lies not with studios or stars, but with consumers. Stars may have greater freedom to choose their projects, flitting between Hollywood and the independents, but they've lost the solid, eager constituencies of their studio forebears. The public is more fickle in a marketplace heaving with alternatives, and it's harder for stars to connect with those who watch them. What is apparent is not just the weakening echo of familiar names, but the lack of conviction in new faces. There seems to be a particular problem finding new male stars: Colin Farrell and Jude Law, whose six-movie push at the end of 2004 went nowhere, are two high-profile misfires. Johnny Depp's promotion from Tim Burton kooksville to major actor has been the most notable recent rise, but doubts remain about his bankability outside the Pirates franchise; it remains to be seen if the similarly leftfield Robert Downey Jr can thrive as a marquee name away from Iron Man.

Although female stars arguably retain more star-power than the men, one of them also exemplifies the pressures on the notion of the movie star. Angelina Jolie is a household name - if not yet trusted to open a movie - but less for her films than for her tattoos, her children, her love life and the air of chaos that has often attended her. Seeing how Jolie - and other actors - are treated by public and press alike must lead many young actors to wonder, "Is that level of fame worth the cost?"

The internet has accelerated the process of turning actors into so much meat for the celebrity mincer, intensifying the volume of gossip to the point where the gentlemanly consensual fantasy that underpinned studio stardom - that the persona an actor showed on screen was somehow "the truth" - has been yanked inside out. The real-life gonzo narratives created by the media often seem more important: "Lindsay Lohan" rings out far louder from the web than any of her films. Mark Borkowski, the PR veteran and author of The Fame Formula, compares it to another mass-communication revolution: the advent of radio in the 20s, when the sudden ability to hear people talking for themselves shattered the air of privilege surrounding the silent stars. That change entailed the creation of dedicated publicity departments by the studios, and a similar adjustment may be overdue in today's digital world. "It's nowhere near any sense of maturity at all," Borkowski says.

In the digitised world, the distance between stars and audience is shrinking faster than ever, and the foundations of fame are undergoing a tectonic shift. People want the personalised treatment: entertainment that is "one to one", not the traditional "one to many" model of cinema, ultimately pushing to be the stars of their own narratives. They are enshrining their lives on Facebook and MySpace, creating avatars on World of Warcraft and Second Life, and are back in cinemas, leaning forward into the frame with the return of 3D. It is time for Me.plc, as Borkowski puts it; ultimately, it is us conspiring to kill the stars.

A sense of unease is building within the film industry. "It ain't like we ain't trying," says the Hollywood producer. "We're trying to create aspirational heroes, ass-kickers. The Gladiator moments. People still want that, and we have to deliver, but they're becoming more empowered to create something for themselves." Borkowski says the stars can adjust to this seismic shift, if they take up the weapons of the new age - blogging, astroturfing (a PR campaign seeking to fake grassroots enthusiasm), communicating their persona at eye level. Such an effort could, he believes, be liberating: "You're not dependent on whether your agent likes you or not. But without them, you have to have compelling content. You have to have a point of view."

In order to survive, the stars have to grasp this demotic drive, otherwise they may only exist in diminished form. But are they truly interested? Rock luminaries instinctively understand the power of intimacy - Kanye West is one who has caught the eye with his blogging - but there is something fundamentally aloof about Hollywood. Borkowski commends only a shrewd few who are adapting well: JJ Abrams and his canny faux-YouTube marketing ("I'm not sure he succeeds, but he gets the atmosphere right"); Juno director Jason Reitman for his sassy attitude, as demonstrated on his MySpace page ("He'll suck the dick of the studio, but he's not party to it"); Leonardo DiCaprio, for his political stance; and Bourne star Matt Damon, who according to Forbes is Hollywood's best-value performer in terms of profit against his fees. Borkowski mentions Damon's lobbying to get Paul Greengrass on board the Bourne franchise, a key decision in dragging the films towards the jittery aesthetics that later infiltrated the new-look Bond. But two of the subjects of Borkowski's praise are not actors, and the other two were established names already.

No matter what reality TV tells us, we can't all be stars; the stars' job is to recapture the high ground and remind us of the meaning of exceptional. They may have plenty of time to ponder this - until Hollywood restores compelling human narrative alongside spectacle in its priority list, in fact. Meanwhile, maybe Damon truly is the icon for the times: nondescript, utilitarian, fit for purpose. Perfect for a decade that has been defined by living under threat. The A-list might have to accept being harried, frowning, unshaven, out of focus for a while - at least until we start dreaming about the possibility of a better world, and of glamorous beings, again. Where we go, the stars must follow; that's the secret Hollywood's golden ones have been keeping all these years.

From Senses of Cinema:

What I Owe to Hammer Horror. By John Potts.

I learnt about Europe from watching Hammer horror films.

This claim may seem merely ironic, even farcical, but I intend neither irony nor farce when I state: my early and lasting impressions of Europe were gleaned from viewing Hammer vampire films in the early 1970s.

I was 10 in 1970; over the next two or three years, I watched, along with my boyhood friends, as many of the Hammer films as were screened at the local cinema. We saw other films, of course, but none made an impact on me approaching that of the vampire films.

The lurid technicolour; the unnatural red of the blood; the lushness of the forest; the atmosphere of the village inn; the mystery of the castle on top of the mountain; the wolves and bats; the mist; churches and buildings made of stone; the villagers’ fear; the thrilling power of the Count; his lure of the village women; his fangs sinking into their throats; the climb up the mountain to confront him; the grim-faced man of God battling the arrogant Count; the ritual elements deployed in battle: garlic, holy water, fire, wooden stakes, ice, crucifixes; the superstition, the dread; the social order; the ancient customs of the village; the fearsome majesty of the castle; the thick woods at night.

The world created in these films was so foreign to my experience in small-town Australia, so strange, so old, so … European, that it became imprinted on my mind as a vision of Europe. And when, many years later, I travelled to Europe and spent time living there, that imprint remained.

The Terrain

I grew up in a NSW country town founded on coal-mining. The best word to describe the physical aspect of the town is: flat. There are no hills. There is one main street with shops; wide streets spread out across a flat terrain. The houses are weatherboard, mostly three bedrooms. Each has a veranda at the front, and a back yard within a quarter-acre block. The houses are all one storey. There is no elevation in the town, apart from the two or three steps up to the verandas. On a rare visit to Sydney, a friend of my mother’s once fell down the stairs at Central Station: she had never been confronted by so many steps. I didn’t experience a two-storey dwelling until my late teens, during a visit to student friends in a Sydney terrace house. I climbed repeatedly up and down the interior staircase, fascinated by this novelty.

In my hometown, the houses always face the road, their front windows like big eyes watching the cars drive past. The culture is: cars, television, beer, rugby league in winter, cricket in summer, pubs. There is a wedding most Saturday nights at the one reception hall, a large barn-like building. Prawn cocktail first course; beef for the men, chicken for the ladies; a keg of beer for the men, Moselle for the ladies. There are dances at the wedding receptions, always the same dances. There is a Saturday-night speedway a few miles out of town.

My grandmother told me of the town’s cultural life during the 1920s and 30s, even through the Depression. There were four local and regional circuses; three different town dances; five cinemas. By 1970, this array had dwindled down to one cinema - the Empire - in the main street. It was in decline, frequented mainly by the town’s teenagers. Its décor was faded and musty; the owners didn’t bother with renovations. The Empire closed for good some time in the mid-1970s, the building demolished. Like the Royal Cinema in Peter Bogdanovitch’s The Last Picture Show (1971), based on Larry McMurtry’s reminiscences of his home town in Texas, the Empire Cinema lingered fitfully for a time, then finally succumbed, the last cinema in a town culture now ruled by television viewing.

But before it closed for the last time, the Empire was where I saw the Hammer horror vampire movies.

The Hammer Canon

Hammer Films made a total of sixteen vampire films between 1958 and 1974. The first, Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula, Terence Fisher, 1958), introduced Christopher Lee as Count Dracula and Peter Cushing as his nemesis, Doctor Van Helsing; it was probably the best, and certainly most influential, Hammer vampire film. From that æsthetic height, Hammer frequently dipped into prurient depths in search of commercial success. A small English company competing with the far greater resources of Hollywood, Hammer exploited the popular relish for salacious horror movies throughout the ’60s and early ’70s. Its peak vampire production year was 1970, when three different vampire films were released. The decline was swift in the ’70s, however, as the Hammer brand of Gothic horror lost commercial favour; this decline was hastened by misguided ventures such as The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (Roy Ward Baker, 1974). That was the last Hammer vampire picture; Hammer Films went into receivership and ceased production altogether in 1979.

The seven films featuring Christopher Lee as Dracula, culminating in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (Alan Gibson, 1973), constitute a cycle at the heart of Hammer’s successful period. Lee redefined Dracula as suave, aristocratic, sensual; his Dracula is the face of Hammer horror. These were the films I saw at the Saturday matinees in the early ’70s. The more explicitly sexual vampire films – such as The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970) and Lust for a Vampire (Jimmy Sangster, 1971) – would have been barred as improper material for young boys. I didn’t see, either, the first film in the Dracula cycle: presumably a film from 1958 was too old to re-screen when there were so many other more recent horror movies. So, I must have seen roughly six of the cycle, beginning with the second film, Dracula, Prince of Darkness (Terence Fisher, 1966).

My strongest memory, derived from one or more of these movies, is a scene, or rather two scenes. A man enters a village inn, somewhere in Middle Europe/Eastern Europe (probably Transylvania). The inn has atmosphere; the locals are chatting, drinking large glasses of beer. Everything is going well until the newcomer asks about the castle up on the mountain: instantly, the inn goes silent, all atmosphere deserts the place. The locals are stricken with fear, the innkeeper glowers disapproval. He instructs the newcomer never to mention the castle and, most of all, never to go there. In the second scene, the newcomer disobeys this instruction and climbs the mountain to the castle. He may have companions: perhaps an intrepid priest, or villagers who have sufficiently overcome their terror to join the mission, which is to destroy Dracula in his castle. They leave early in the morning, as it’s a long climb and they must reach the top of the mountain before night falls. But they run out of time: when they finally reach the castle, the sun is going down, night is descending, bats are swirling …

35 years later, I buy DVDs of the seven Hammer Dracula movies via amazon.com. I want to compare my memories of these films – the impressions of a 10-year old boy – with an adult’s perspective; I want to see them all again.

The Level

In my hometown, everyone is at the same level. No one is expected – or permitted – to be better than the rest, except at sport. This is the one activity where excellence is not only encouraged but wished for. The town’s dream is for one of its boys to one day play rugby league for Australia. At school, the boys’ subjects are metalwork, woodwork, maths and science. The girls’ subjects are ‘home science’, English and history. Languages are cancelled as a study option after I have completed two years of French. The culture is anti-intellectual, but not to a malevolent degree.

I am unaware of any social hierarchy. Everyone I know lives in the same kind of weatherboard house, some with an outdoor toilet. The only exception in my experience is a schoolmate’s grandfather who owns the local bus company. This grandfather lives in a brick house – bricks signifying affluence – in a large yard enclosing a swimming-pool. There must be other such residences, inhabited by owners of business or mining company executives, but they are not part of my consciousness. Authority is mocked from below; any pretension is ridiculed. It’s best for any boss to minimise the gap between himself and his workers; the pub, in this regard, is the great leveller.

There is a firm sense of community, bound by numerous factors: local knowledge of families and their histories; gossip; support for the local football team; pub camaraderie. There are fêtes hosted by the church and the school; every family has a backyard barbecue. There is a co-op store, to which all families in the town belong. There is only one public school, which further binds families together. The culture is fiercely Protestant, mingling Anglican with smaller denominations supporting the immigrant roots of mining families: Presbyterian (Scottish) and Congregational (Northern English). I am dimly aware of an alternative to this culture. Called Catholic, it has weird rites and strange practices, and their families have too many children. But I know none of them, as they attend their own school, removed from everyone else, possibly located in the hills outside the town.

These mysterious Catholics apart, the town is resolutely uniform. The miners have a solidarity drawing on decades of union strength, even militancy. Their wives uphold values of God, Queen and England, as formalised in the Country Women’s Association. There is a town show every February, part of the agricultural show network that culminates in the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. I am unaware of any serious crime; no one locks the door at night.

There are virtually no foreigners in the town, and that is how the town likes it. There is zero interest in non-British culture. Very few people even have a passport. I heard of one woman who secured a passport in the hope of travelling overseas, only to have it burnt by her alarmed husband. Bringing non-British immigrants into Australia is considered a big mistake. Foreigners import vice into the big cities; this is one reason those cities are un-Australian. Asians are viewed with great suspicion: if allowed, they will steal Australian jobs and then take over the country itself through rapid breeding.

Blood on the Stone

I open the box of Hammer DVDs sent from Amazon, and start at the beginning: Dracula, directed by Terence Fisher, released in 1958. This film set the template for all succeeding Hammer vampire movies; the opening title sequence establishes the mood and many of the tropes of the entire Dracula cycle. The titles are blood red in a Gothic font; the score is ominous - slightly discordant brass and clashing cymbals; the first image is a fearsome bird-of-prey statue, presumably a family emblem, adorning a stone castle. As the cymbals and brass reach a crescendo, the camera prowls within the castle to find a stone crypt bearing the name DRACULA. Here the music recedes and the camera is stilled, as blood drips silently onto the nameplate. This opening sequence mobilises the full effect of Technicolor, one of Hammer’s assets in distinguishing its Dracula from the black-and-white Universal Dracula (Tod Browning) of 1931. The blood decorating the stone is so lurid red as to be almost orange, an over-saturated version of colour that presides over the distinctive Hammer vampire style.

Hammer based the script of its first Dracula film on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, with some notable amendments. Here, Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) is not a hapless real-estate agent from England, but a scholar and vampire hunter, posing as a librarian so he can get close enough to Dracula to kill him. But this plan fails miserably. Harker is seduced and bitten by a female vampire  – the first of a long line of busty Hammer vampires in négligées – then dispatched by Dracula within the first 25 minutes. Harker functions in this narrative as a precursor to his colleague Van Helsing, a more resourceful scholar and vampire-hunter who follows him to the castle.

Another significant modification of Stoker concerns the location. Stoker set Dracula’s castle in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania; Dracula then travels to England where he pursues Harker’s fiancée, Lucy Holmwood (Carol Marsh), while feeding on her sister-in-law, Mina Holmwood (Melissa Stirling). Hammer radically simplifies the action by inventing a location that is neither Transylvania nor England, but a distinctly German environs. Dracula’s castle is near the village of Klausenburgh (named in Stoker), while the town of Karlstat, where Lucy and her family live, is riding distance from the castle. While preying on Lucy and then Mina, Dracula takes up residence in Friedrich Strasse, Karlstat, in the premises of  “Jack Marx, Undertaker”.

Most probably for budgetary reasons, Hammer has subsumed both Transylvania and Victorian England into a Germanic milieu. Harker’s voice-over diary entry sets the date at 1885; bizarrely, Stoker’s Victorian English characters, such as the Holmwoods, somehow live quite normally in their German environment. This Germanic setting is maintained in all the Hammer vampire films except those later efforts explicitly set in England. Perhaps the Hammer team considered a vaguely German location middle-Europe enough; perhaps a Transylvanian setting would have been too exotic, and too difficult to stage, in 1958. Or, perhaps a German location created a version of Middle Europe – Anglo-Saxon, beer-drinking – recognisable for British viewers. Whatever the reasons, the shortcomings of the Hammer treatment of Transylvania escaped me at age 10. The culture evoked in these films seemed old enough (even if set around 1900) and strange enough (even if only a Victorian setting with German names) to transport me into its mysterious world.

Dracula introduced the staples of the Hammer vampire films: sex and class. Dracula’s victims, Lucy and Mina, eagerly await his arrival in their bed-chambers; Dracula engages in erotic foreplay before moving on to their throats. Again, much of this behaviour in the Hammer films probably eluded me at the ages of 10 and 11, although it may account for a life-long fascination with Eastern European women.

Dracula is sensuous in a commanding, aristocratic manner; Lee plays him as a mournful, almost soulful figure, the last of a noble family line. He is tall, handsome and cultured; this vision of Dracula quickly supplanted in popular consciousness the more ghoulish (and short) model presented by Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film. He is a man of learning, with a collection of books large enough to need a librarian. Lee endows him with a dignified, elevated presence: “Above all,” the actor declared, “I have never forgotten that Count Dracula was a gentleman, a member of the upper aristocracy, and in his early life a great leader of men […]”.  But as a vampire, of course, he is also a great predator on men, and women. We see him stride down from his castle, returning later with blood dripping from his fangs. He literally preys on the villagers beneath him. This theme of the aristocratic vampire feeding on the lower classes is sustained through all the Hammer vampire movies, most notably in Countess Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1971), in which the Hungarian Countess (Ingrid Pitt) preserves her youth by bathing in the blood of virgin peasant girls. In Hammer films, the vampire is associated with an aristocracy displaying a compelling brand of villainy: the vampire aristocrat is simultaneously lofty, socially superior, pitiless and monstrous.

Dracula has various antagonists through the Hammer cycle, yet the first film provides the most famous: Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. Whereas this character in Stoker is an eccentric Dutchman with mystic tendencies, the Hammer version is a very British man of science, an arch-rationalist. Cushing’s Van Helsing is severe, gaunt, flinty. He is entirely lacking in humour or affectation. He is the model of Protestant rectitude: a believer in God (to combat the Devil) and upholder of moral (chaste) values. He is also a rigorous pursuer of empirical knowledge, which makes him the perfect representative of the middle class in its two-pronged battle: against both peasant superstition and the power of the aristocracy. Van Helsing records his accumulated knowledge of vampires into a Dictaphone, bamboozling the ignorant servants; he eventually deploys this knowledge to destroy Dracula. Several commentators have remarked on this class dynamic in Hammer: it is only through middle-class values and practices that a lingering, malignant aristocracy can be dispelled.

But it is never removed for long. Dracula is destroyed at the end of each film, only to be revived at the beginning of the next one. The second film of the Hammer cycle, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, did not appear until 1965, largely due to Lee’s reluctance to be typecast as Dracula. Having agreed to return, he was so disgusted by the poor quality of the script – which he considered too great a deviation from Stoker – that he refused to speak his lines. The result is a weak film, with the cultured Count reduced to a glaring, growling monster. Dracula is dispatched by a priest (Cushing did not re-appear as Van Helsing until 1972), who shoots a crack in ice, exposing the Count to deadly running water. This ludicrous dénouement – surely Dracula could simply jump over the crack – puts both the vampire and the film out of its misery; but I can’t remember seeing this movie at the Empire. I conclude that the films that made such an impression on me must have been the next three in the series, released in 1968 and 1971.

In Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (Freddie Francis, 1968), the Count’s antagonist is not a man of science like Van Helsing but a Catholic Monsignor (Rupert Davies), the senior church official for the province of Keinenburgh. The monsignor visits the village below the mountain where, a year earlier, Dracula was entombed in ice. He finds a terrified community, refusing to enter the church because it is touched by the castle’s shadow. The local priest is a coward, sheltering in the inn with the villagers but offering them no courage. The Monsignor declares that he will exorcise the castle, persuading the trembling priest to accompany him.

And here it is: a suspenseful climb up the misty mountain to confront evil. They leave at dawn, the Monsignor carrying a huge crucifix. Their journey takes the entire day; dusk is descending as they near the castle. The priest is afraid to go on; the Monsignor leaves him cowering on the mountain and performs the exorcism himself. But the priest slips on a rock, his blood dripping through the ice and reviving Dracula, who promptly enslaves him.

This film has more religion than science or sex. The object of Dracula’s attention is the Monsignor’s niece, who is protected first be her uncle, then by her student boyfriend. The monsignor opposes the boyfriend at first, worried he may be a Protestant, horrified to learn he is an atheist. But the boyfriend is soon enlisted in the fight; he rushes into the village inn, disrupting the jovial atmosphere with the announcement: “There’s a castle somewhere in the mountains here belonging to a Count Dracula.” Here is the scene as I remembered it: the inn is rough, homely, with thick wooden beams, stone walls and sturdy wood tables; the village men drink steins of beer, chatting and laughing – but mention of the castle stops the conversation dead; everyone glares at the newcomer. The craven villagers refuse to help him, but somehow he gets to the castle, acquires faith - and Dracula is impaled on a giant crucifix.

This film has all the elements that made an impression on me as a ten-year-old: the inn, the mountain climb, the lush woods. Dracula’s black horse-drawn carriage traverses the forest throughout the film; he preys on a village girl as she walks home through the woods at night; he leads the monsignor’s niece through the trees on the way to his castle. While the scenes in the town are stiff and Victorian, the village scenes are thick with atmosphere: the stone church, the old inn, the fear of the villagers, the strange customs and rituals - including exorcism. The Catholicism of the narrative - with its theme of faith, evil, strong and weak priests – must have enhanced the rustic old-world sensibility for me. In my memory, the film’s village scenario is near mediæval; yet now I notice, from a coffin inscription, that the story in set in 1905.

Much of this is re-iterated in the 1970 film Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker): the same village, the same inn. The innkeeper and villagers are even more afraid: surely, they are the most fearful people in the world. An outspoken barmaid from another village decries their cowardice – and she is punished for her lack of fear: she is picked off by Dracula as she walks through the woods. This time the climb up the mountain is undertaken early in the film, as the villagers – outraged to find another local girl dead in the forest – summon the courage to burn Dracula’s castle. But the Count is unharmed and exacts a terrible revenge: he sends vampire bats to kill the village women and children as they shelter in the church.

This is a shocking scene, which terrified me – I now recall – when I saw it around 1970. The narrative of faith versus evil deployed in these films normally reserves a role for the church as sanctuary, a place that evil cannot enter. But here the villagers find their wives and children gored and savaged by monstrous bats; the church is spattered with blood and contaminated by death. The priest (Michael Gwynn) declares that “The Devil has won”; the villagers are tipped into a state of abject fear and submission.

This film is a re-working of Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, which was a re-working of Dracula; but here all the familiar elements are given a sharper edge of fear – and violence. In The Vampire Film, Alain Silver and James Ursini note the stark differences between the later two films, scripted for Hammer by Anthony Hinds, and the original Terence Fisher Dracula. In Dracula Has Risen From the Grave and Scars of Dracula, Hinds discards the delicate Victorian sensibility established by Fisher and scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster – including the Protestant middle-class hero Van Helsing (Cushing) – installing in its place a more elemental scenario. There is no contest here of man of science with modern knowledge and technology versus suave and noble vampire; instead, a bloodthirsty Dracula is opposed by men of faith. Hinds constructs a hard dichotomy of simple good and monstrous evil, “like that of a Medieval morality play”, set within a brooding and violent environment.

In Scars of Dracula, when the stranger from the town comes asking about his missing brother (who had foolishly gone up to the castle), he is forcibly ejected from the village inn. Dracula is sadistic in this movie: he tortures his devoted servant, marshals his killer bats and displays an outright hostility to the villagers. He is described as the last remaining member of an ancient family; he is the old social order surviving – ferociously – into a modern age. The old-world ambience permeating the film – which I certainly imbibed in 1970 – is enhanced by the setting. Much of the action takes place inside the castle - with its candle light, stone walls and thick velvet drapes – and the village. There is one final climb to the castle: the young man sets off at dawn accompanied by the local priest; in the finale, Dracula is about to kill him when he is struck by lightning and destroyed – presumably divine assistance in the righteous fight against evil.

The Mountain and the Plain

I am now in a position to reflect on the enduring impression these films have made on me. Part of it can no doubt be attributed to the ritual of horror-movie viewing: I would be so scared every Saturday by the vampires, monsters and assorted ghouls that I would vow never to see another horror movie; of course, the terror always wore off by the following Friday, just in time for the next Saturday matinee. The Hammer vampire movies were my favourite of the horror genre, in part because their simple horror narratives of good versus evil were perfectly crafted to terrify – and captivate – a 10-year-old boy.

Yet, there is something more, suggested by my strongest recollections of these films, the memories that have persisted over 35 years: of rich colour, lush forests, old-world atmosphere. I can now attribute some of this to Hammer’s zealous use of Technicolor, generating a saturated palette replete with blood of unnatural red. Hammer also chose to emphasise the natural landscape – trees and greenery - in their vampire movies, unlike other film treatments such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), in which Transylvania is all rock and blood-red expressionism. In Hammer, the forest and woods – always dense, leafy, with varied trees, including the pale trunks of birch – were inviting and mysterious. They were dangerous, too - vampires lurked in the woods – but they were an essential part of the landscape, surrounding the village, separating the inn and the castle. It was exotic, European forest; it was quite different to the bush surrounding my hometown. The landscape I knew was dry, limited to gum and Casuarina trees, the ground hard and thirsty. Australian bush has a mythic aspect, a mystery; but in our imagination it is more forbidding than inviting. The national forest is a vast expanse where backpackers are murdered and buried by sadistic killers; we don’t generally venture there.

The Hammer films evoke a rustic, old-world ambience through their village setting; this ambience incudes local beliefs and superstitions – the villagers cowering in their inn. Most of all, there is the social dynamic, a class divide expressed in the bluntest symbolism: the Count descending from his mountain-top castle to feed on the peasants below. This was utterly alien to my experience: we had no visible class distinctions, we had no social strata, no mountain-top; we didn’t even have a hill. This was the wonder of the world displayed in the Hammer movies: people divided and weighed down by history, people adversarial in their unquestioned difference. These B-grade movies with their crude historical travesties were my first education on class, and on Europe.

When I travelled to Europe many years later, this education coloured my perception. I sought out forest and woods, castles, villages made from stone. When I found them, they provoked a thrill of recognition: the forest was lush, as I had been led to believe; the villages quaint and built from local stone. At times, I doubted my Hammer schooling, dismissing the travesty – but it always returned. In a small Yorkshire town in the late 1990s, I was talking to the owner of a pub, who told me proudly that the lord and lady were coming in on Saturday night. I didn’t understand at first, then was staggered to realise that a trace of feudalism remained: the local aristocrat still owned all the land, the village, the inn. He was paying a visit to the inn, and the villagers would offer their respects. As the publican told me this, I was invaded by imagery: of the Count sweeping down to the village, of peasants cowering or being bitten, of bats swarming into the stone church. The Technicolor show in my head subsided as I listened to the proud owner of this pub; but he was confirming what the movies had shown me. The aristocrat was coming; the subservient locals were gathering to greet him. I should never have doubted my Hammer Horror education.