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Incense for the Damned

1971 Directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, Julian More

A group of friends search for a young English Oxford student who has disappeared whilst researching in Greece. They are shocked to find that, wherever he has been, certain unsolved murders have taken place. Not believing that their friend could be the perpetrator of such acts, they press on with their search, finding him under the spell of a beautiful Vampire, whose blood-sucking methods include the use of sado-masochism. Believing they have killed her, the group return home, unaware that their friend is now a Vampire.

Patrick Macnee Edward Woodward Alexander Davion Peter Cushing Johnny Sekka Madeleine Hinde William Mervyn Patrick Mower David Lodge Imogen Hassall Valerie Van Ost Françoise Pascal Marianne Stone

Alternative Titles

Bloodsuckers, Blodsugarna, Blood Suckers, Doctors Wear Scarlet, Freedom Seekers, Incense of the Damned, Suceurs de sang, Vampire Sacrifice, Vampiros, 新潮吸血小妖精

Genre

Horror

Themes

Horror, the undead and monster classics Bloody vampire horror Gothic and eerie haunting horror Show All…

Theatrical

14 May 1971

USAR

USA

14 May 1971

TheatricalR

87 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by The Horror of Marna Larsen ★★★★★ 5

I think the main thing that was confusing me about this or at least making it mildly unwatchable after the kaleidoscope of boobs which always seems to proceed a lot of these psychedelia! Horrors...complete with nude sacrifice scene...there was a joke I was going to ... combining kaleidoscope and nude? That doesn't even work. Never mind.
Anyway that's just exactly it. I got the book version (titled Doctors Wear Scarlet) for my movie/book horror themed thing I've been trying to do on ig and it was written in 1960 which would have worked out fine because Cushing would have played the clever police officer who goes to the friend of the guy in Greece because the Greek police are like…
Review by FakeVoorhees ★★ 3

Dull, meandering British vampire movie with very little vampire activity. Far too talky and judgemental in its characters' views on sex. Features the most 1960s orgy scene ever with more weed than sex and trippy kaleidoscope editing that oddly includes a circle of touching feet. Not even a brief late film appearance by Peter Cushing was enough to save this.
Review by Bloodspiller🩸 ★★★

I pretended this was The Devil Rides Out II and that helped a little. Aside from a mind-warping orgy scene, this is confusing and dull. Cushing plays man-at-desk and has about 3 minutes of onscreen time. Bold of them to put it in the Cushing Curiosities boxset. There is a little vampire action, with a name like Bloodsuckers, once again, a bold move.
Review by Girth Brooks ★½

Robert Hartford-Davis' (who later abandoned the project and nabbed a directorial credit under the pseudonym of Michael Burrowes) British vampire flick "Incense for the Damned" is a tonally confused mess of a film that barely feels like a vampire joint. It does feature a really psychedelic orgy sequence in the first act that utilizes kaleidoscopic imagery to display a bevy of nude bodies in near-pornographic fashion. The vampiric thirst for the flesh and blood of a chosen virgin suitor is a plot point that should drive the stake home, as it’s done for decades by this point and while the more experimental depiction of the drug-fueled orgy starts off with a bang, the film quickly cuts loose any interesting plotting…
Review by Paul D ★

If you take a gander at some of the many alternative titles for Incense for the Damned (Vampire Sacrifice, Bloodsucker, Doctors Wear Scarlet, Freedom Seekers), you'll probably learn more about the movie than the film itself imparts to its viewers, for the most part. And certainly more than that nonsensical title which it goes under here.
The story essentially is of an Oxford academic who travels to Greece and gets embroiled in some kind of cult, with a group of friends following him on a kind of rescue mission.
Right from the start there are clear signs that the film has fallen victim to some pretty brutal hacking and slashing in the editing room. Within the first couple of minutes…
Review by Ipsissimus⛧Mocata ★★★

While enjoyable, this one is a bit of a mess. Filmed in 1969, but not released until a few years later, it starts strong with a psychedelic occult murder orgy (fuzz-rock! optical effects! nudity! human sacrifice! the whole “this belongs in a fan-made Electric Wizard music video” shebang!) in the first act that had me hopeful that I may have found a new addition to my personal canon, but it then immediately drops that sort of decadent excess and never quite manages to approach anything nearly as engaging, with the possible exception of the very final frame which I probably should have seen coming in retrospect, but it came as a pleasant little surprise that ended things on a stronger…
Review by Cate ★½

Sometimes you just want to sort your watchlist by average rating lowest first for fun.
This is pretty awful, but the kaleidoscopic satanic orgy scene absolutely rips, ditto the dialogue about bdsm as a domain for 'frigid females, impotent men, homosexualists, voyeurs, transvestites, narcissists, and masochistic vampires'.
Review by Demdike ★★½ 3

Over the past couple of years i've re-bought one or two films i'd previously got rid of mainly because i thought they were quite poor - Schizo, The Devil's Men and Incense for the Damned - to name but three. Why re-buy them i hear no one inquire? I've made it my intent to collect as many films as possible from the FAB Press book 10 Years of Terror which discusses the British genre films of the 70's at great length and these three, no matter how good or bad are from that classic era.
So what of Incense For the Damned, known also and released on dvd as Blood Suckers, it's US title?
In truth, it's a total mess,…
Review by Mark Tinta ★

If Peter Cushing thought 1968's THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR was the worst movie he ever made, then he obviously never got around to seeing this one, on Severin's "Cushing Curiosities" box set under its better-known title, BLOODSUCKERS. Cushing has a small supporting role, confined to the beginning and the end, and the project reunited him with his CORRUPTION director Robert Hartford-Davis. But it was an extremely troubled shoot that began in 1969, the money ran out, the production shut down, new scenes were added--including an explicit and ludicrously long orgy sequence early on that was obviously not directed by Hartford-Davis, who took his name off the film (no director is credited), which was eventually released in 1971.
The end result…
Review by Michael_Elliott ★½

BLOOD SUCKERS is known under several different titles including INCENSE OF THE DAMNED and the weird FREEDOM SEEKERS but no matter what you call it, the end result is rather disappointing when you consider the cast. The film sat unreleased for a few years and it's easy to see why as it's nearly impossible to "sell" it but Severin has come along and given us the longer version available.
The big difference in this uncut version is the unedited orgy sequence, which was actually the highlight of the film. The camerawork and editing are quite good and the psychedelic feel actually works quite nicely. You're also given a lot of nudity, which is never a bad thing but having said…
Review by Michael Shawn ★★★

Incense for the Damned, aka Bloodsuckers dispenses with the traditional trappings of the vampire film for a more grounded and realistic approach, and also an academic one, exploring the origins of vampirism and other mythologies. But it also takes a very measured approach which may irk less patient viewers. It has a slow-moving narrative that isn't always riveting. I still found it to be a reasonably interesting picture, really much more of a mystery-adventure than a horror film. It involves an academic who goes missing in Greece, the prisoner of a vampire sect that entrances him and forces him to partake in their drug-fueled sexual rituals. A group of his closest friends and associates tracks him down in order to…
Review by Eric Merchant

Are you trying to tell me that a girl sucking blood from a man's neck can induce... orgasm?!
Wild movie with some big ideas that don't quite land.
The "Heart of Darkness" setup: golden boy on an academic research trip to Greece has been seduced into a licentious lifestyle by seductive natives. We get a front row seat to the psychedelic debauchery, culminating in human sacrifice and vampirism, I guess?
I hope to someday see a folk horror/vampire rooted in Ancient Greek mythology. The tantalizing clues we have to the actual practices of, say, the Oracle of Delphi or the Minoan Cult are fertile ground for a story like this. The added Freudian dimension of Tony's impotence, and the racial…

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Incense for the Damned

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14 May 1971

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14 May 1971

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