Spanish Vampire Films

Abstract

This chapter constitutes the first comprehensive study of vampires during the golden age of Spanish horror cinema. It begins by considering the introduction of vampires to Spain through imported, foreign literary models and moves on to the specific contextual and industrial coordinates that determined the contents and intrinsic qualities of vampire films. Although filmic production was broad and varied, two main cinematic vampire strands typical of popular Spanish cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s are identified: erotic horror and comedy. The chapter demonstrates that, in spite of Spanish horror cinema’s emulative nature, it is possible to read specific subversive national meanings into the country’s vampire films due to their emergence during a period of increasing opening up to Europe – “desarrollismo” and late Francoism – nevertheless marked by censorship and conservative social values. The chapter also includes the most thorough list of Spanish vampire films released between 1964 and 1985 to date, including details about co-producing countries, main English-language titles, and the genres to which they belong.

Introduction: Vampires in Spain

As was the case in other European countries, Spain was first introduced to vampires through folklore and demonology studies like Augustin Calmet’s Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits… (Dissertations upon the Apparitions of Angels, Daemons, and Ghosts… 1746). Although not available in Spanish, the treatise was nevertheless accessed by eighteenth-century intellectuals like the Benedictine monk Benito Jerónimo Feijóo, who wrote about it at some length in the fourth volume of his Cartas eruditas y curiosas (Intellectual and Curious Letters, 1774 [1753], 266–93). This is to say that, as it did elsewhere, “vampiromania” infected the theological and medical spheres before it entered literature in the early nineteenth century (Groom 2018, 23–93). Recent scholarship into Spanish vampire fiction has suggested that the first vampire short story to appear in Spanish may have been “La opulencia. Sueño” (“L’Opulence. Songe”), in French author Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s collection Mon Bonnet de nuit (1784), published without a credited author in 1795 as Mi gorro de dormir (López Aroca 2021, 83). Despite it being little-known today, this story is speculated to have influenced painter Francisco Goya’s renowned series Los caprichos (The Caprices, 1797–1798), especially his famous etching El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters) (Vega 2019, 134–8). The aristocratic vampire entered Spain through John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), published in Spanish in 1824 and attributed to Lord Byron, and especially as a play. Le Vampire, a stage adaptation by Charles Nodier, premiered as the three-act melodrama El vampiro in November of 1821, and a much looser eponymous one-act comedy penned by Eugène Scribe and translated by Antonio García Gutiérrez premiered in October of 1834. Although a thorough study of nineteenth-century fiction is yet to be undertaken, a few texts have been identified as potential forerunners for first Spanish vampire stories. Both the fantastic tale “El aparecido” (“The Apparition”), published anonymously in La mariposa in December of 1839, and Manuel Fernández y González’s novel Historia de los siete murciélagos (1863) include characters that we could characterize as “vampiric,” even if neither uses that word. Ramón García Sánchez’s “El vampiro. Cuento fantástico” (1875), Celso Gomis’s “El vampiro. Fábula” (1880), and Emilia Pardo Bazán’s short story “Vampiro” (1901) may well be the country’s first self-proclaimed literary vampires, even if their depictions are by no means cohesive.¹

Vampire literature starts coming of age in the early twentieth century, albeit primarily in the form of short fiction, through the work of Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, and Carmen de Burgos.² The development of this type of fantastic or Gothic literature was uneven, especially following the Civil War (1936–1939) and the imposition of cultural censorship by Francisco Franco’s military dictatorship, and longer works in prose would take much longer to materialize. Novels such as Adelaida García Morales’s La lógica del vampiro (The Logic of the Vampire, 1990), Salvador Sainz’s Estruch (1991), Mercedes Abad’s Sangre (Blood, 2000), Javier García Sánchez’s Ella, Drácula: Erzsébet Báthory (Her, Dracula: Erzsébet Báthory, 2005), Clara Tahoces’s Gothika (2008), José de la Rosa’s Vampiro (Vampire, 2010), Emilio Bueso’s Diástole (Diastole, 2011), and Carlos Molinero’s Verano de miedo (Summer of Fear, 2014) emerged as late as the 1990s and only settled into a steady stream by the twenty-first century. Yet even these sustained narrative attempts to create autochthonous vampires have remained minor and marginal, of interest only to a small minority of horror readers and Gothic scholars. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1871–1872) , generally credited as the inspiration for many twentieth-century vampires, also arrived quite late. Although these foundational texts may have been accessed in other languages, Dracula was first translated into Spanish in 1935, in the pulp action-adventure collection La Novela Aventura, and would only see a flurry of standard editions in the 1960s and 1970s, following the impact of Hammer’s vampire films in Europe and the US (González Peláez 2018). As for “Carmilla,” it was first imported as a 1000-copy limited edition of the bimonthly Argentinian magazine Narraciones terroríficas (Horror Stories) in 1941 but would not benefit from wide circulation in Spanish collections until the 1960s and 1970s (Lázaro Lafuente 2010, 83–9). The tardiness and irregularity of Spain’s literary response to, and importation of, foreign vampires should not be read as a suggestion that vampires were necessarily peripheral, rather that they were more readily associated with the audio-visual medium.

Both George Melford’s Spanish-language Drácula (1931) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors, 1922) were first screened in Madrid in the winter of 1931 (López Aroca 2021, 680), and even though Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958) was initially banned by censors (Gil 2009, 181), Spain’s first televisual vampire episode aired in 1967 (see Aldana Reyes 2017) and, by 1970, Spanish director Jesús Franco had filmed part of El Conde Drácula (Count Dracula) in Santa Bárbara Castle, in Alicante. Eduardo García Maroto’s Una de miedo (A Horror Film, 1935), a 20-minute parody of the genre, featured a vampire bat referred to as “el gran vampiro,” and a main antagonist whose attire (a black cape) and death (vanishing when exposed to the sun) clearly cited the conventions of vampire cinema.³ In fact, Spain’s brief but intense period of horror filmmaking in the late 1960s and 1970s, developed largely imported models of Gothic cinema that relied on canonical monsters like the werewolf and the vampire.⁴ Due to its international reach, wealth of primary texts but relative dearth of critical material, the rest of this chapter centers on this horror cycle in order to determine the specific coordinates of Spanish vampires.⁵ An important concern is whether a figure that was largely imported can be said to retain any markers of national specificity when adapted to a new country. Abigail Lee Six captures this dilemma succinctly when she wonders, “how does a given culture conjugate the input from its own specific sociocultural history and present state with transnational elements , whether these are films, novels, other cultural production originating from beyond its borders, or international current affairs or issues?” (2019, 2–3). This is an even more pertinent question to ask of texts that were initially made with an international market in mind and were presented as foreign.

Spain’s Cinematic Vampires: Main Trends

Vampires tend to crop up most consistently in two types of cinematic subgenres: erotic horror and parodic comedies . By the early 1960s, Spanish cinema did not have much in the way of an established tradition in either erotic cinema or horror, which might explain the near-total absence of vampires. Even the broader fantastic genre had remained rather exceptional, the preserve of Segundo de Chomón’s visual experiments in the French “cinema of attractions” of the 1900s and 1910s or else empathetic scaffolding for religious or deeply moralistic films like Daniel Mangrané’s Parsifal (The Evil Forest, 1952) and Ladislao Vadja’s Marcelino pan y vino (Miracle of Marcelino, 1955) and Un angel pasó por Brooklyn (The Man Who Wagged His Tail, 1957). Some films from the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, such as La torre de los siete jorobados (The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks, 1944), El destino se disculpa (Destiny Apologises, 1945), El duende de Jerez (The Sprite of Jerez, 1954), Faustina (1957), Un marido de ida y vuelta (The Dead Husband Returns, 1957), S.O.S. abuelita (Help, Granny, 1958), El diablo en vacaciones (The Devil on Holiday, 1963), and La barca sin pescador (The Boat without a Fisherman, 1965), centered around Gothic monsters like ghosts, doppelgängers, bargaining imps, and Faustian devils, but fantastic happenings were not put to the service of eliciting fear, laughter through subcultural recognition or sexual titillation. These monsters, when not disavowed as old wives’ tales or hoaxes, were inevitably benevolent and received overwhelmingly “light” treatments due to their nature as narrative props in stories that endorsed Catholic ideals like the importance of appreciating loved ones, helping the poor, defending justice, and believing in the ultimate goodness and redemption of love and faith in God. It is not necessarily that the parameters of horror were unfamiliar, as is demonstrated by the existence of the aforementioned Una de miedo, old dark house spoofs like Rafael Gil’s Viaje sin destino (Journey to Nowhere, 1942) and Gonzalo Delgrás’s Los habitantes de la casa deshabitada (The Residents of the Abandoned House, 1946) or loose Female Gothics like Gil’s Eloísa está debajo de un almendro (Eloisa Is Under an Almond Tree, 1943) and Antonio Román’s La casa de la lluvia (The House of Rain, 1943), but rather that there was little room in the direct Spanish post-war context for the disruptive, overblown, and transgressive tricks of the genre – or indeed of the vampire, usually a figure of darkness, superstition, and lascivious desire.

Not known for its contribution to horror history, Spain nevertheless managed to quickly grow a substantial industry that operated successfully across national and international markets in the space of only 5 years (1968–1974) and that continued to be commercially viable until the early 1980s, after which changes to state subventions reshaped the filmic landscape once more. The success of Enrique López Eguiluz’s La marca del hombre lobo (The Mark of the Wolfman, 1968), and especially of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s La residencia (The House That Screamed, 1969) and León Klimovsky’s La noche de Walpurgis (The Werewolf versus the Vampire Woman, 1971), is credited as Spanish horror’s much-awaited breakthrough (Aguilar 1999, 23–6; de Cuenca 2000, 18–22; Sala 2010a, 71–87), although a trail of worthy predecessors had been testing the waters, with various levels of success, since the early 1960s. The year 1962 was a key year, as it saw the release of three Spanish-made films: Jesús Franco’s Gritos en la noche (The Awful Dr. Orlof) and Isidoro M. Ferry’s La cara del terror (Face of Terror) , skin-grafting horrors that bear the hallmark of Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face, 1960) , and Hipnosis (Hypnosis/Dummy of Death) , a parapsychological haunted dummy thriller.⁶ Javier Setó’s atmospheric ghost story La llamada (The Sweet Sound of Death) premiered in 1965, Franco’s Frankenstein-flavored Miss Muerte (The Diabolical Dr. Z) in 1966, and José Antonio Nieves Conde’s sci-fi horror El sonido de la muerte (Sound of Horror), Mel Welles’s co-production La isla de la muerte (Island of the Doomed/Maneater of Hydra), and Pedro Lazaga’s Gothic-tinged whodunnit El rostro del asesino (Hand of the Assassin) all saw the light of day in 1967. Although all of them were largely ignored by contemporary audiences and critics, they starred pre-fame Spanish horror regulars like Soledad Miranda and Dyanik Zurakowska and have since been re-appreciated as cult classics. Even the most cursory of viewings reveals the obvious influence of subgenres that had been globally popular, especially gialli and Gothic monster films. This is the case because external models provided tried-and-tested, recognizable formulas that Spanish horror, frequently in co-production (as the appendix to this chapter evinces), could develop into fashionable productions of its own. As Antonio Lázaro-Reboll notes, directors themselves acknowledged this debt; Jesús Franco, for example, claimed he had used Terence Fisher’s The Brides of Dracula (1960) to persuade his producers, Sergio Newman and Marius Lesouer, that the horror genre was worth backing (2012, 56). From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, then, what had previously remained supernatural garnish for a scattering of farces and melodramas changed dramatically in tone and intention. Monsters started to populate films aiming to frighten and titillate, and horror steadily grew into a main exploitation strand – others being the Western and erotic cinema (see Matellano 2011) – and a force to be reckoned with in its capacity to command healthy audiences and practically guaranteed return on investment.

Spanish horror was fueled by, and cannot be understood without, several contextual coordinates that encouraged its development in the first place: the rise of independent cinema, the instatement of co-production subventions, the gradual loosening of restrictions on cinematic representations of sex, nudity, and violence, and an expanding distribution market that meant films that could not be passed or exhibited in Spain could still do good business abroad. As happened in other countries, noticeably in Italy, in order to make the exportation of homemade horrors as seamless as possible, filmmakers would not just borrow narrative patterns and characters that would be familiar to target markets but also masquerade their own nationality. The booming co-production system also motivated multinational casting. Actors could perform lines in their own languages, a time-saving system, because dialogue would be dubbed for all available versions. This explains why Spanish actors like Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina) adopted outlandish pseudonyms or anglicized their names. The exotic, sometimes even deliberately unplaceable and vague, settings where films take place – historically and geographically inaccurate projections of Britain and Central Europe not unlike the conglomerate facades of Universal Studios’ “Little Europe” – were a result of the varied, transnational nature of European horror, but also indirectly paid lip service to Francoism’s mission to protect the integrity of Spain’s image.⁷ The consequent homogenization and intentional disguise of Spanish horror makes it challenging to identify national markers and therefore to read the genre as subversive or revolutionary in its underlying messages.⁸ This compromise – the need to look non-native to be able to compete for international audiences – still plagues contemporary Spanish horror. As Rubén Higueras puts it, the drive to make national productions marketable may have in fact further defanged Spanish horror, making it “un cine menos comprometido políticamente que el que podemos encontrar en otros géneros cinematográficos internacionales” (less politically committed than other international film genres) (2016, 10).

Spain’s cinematic vampires, at least those that emerged from horror films, are thoroughly defined by the circumstances and factors I have highlighted. Dr. Janos Mikhelov in La marca del hombre lobo and Count Walbrooke in Amando de Ossorio’s Malenka, la sobrina del vampiro (Fangs of the Living Dead, 1969), both played by Julián Ugarte, as well as Count Janos de Mialhoff (Manuel de Blas) in Tulio Demicheli’s Los monstruos del terror (Assignment Terror, 1970), Baron Carl von Rysselbert in José María Elorrieta’s La llamada del vampiro (Curse of the Vampire, 1972), Hannah (Teresa Gimpera) in Julio Salvador’s La tumba de la isla maldita (Crypt of the Living Dead, 1973), and Count Rudolph von Winberg (Carlos Ballesteros) in León Klimovsky’s El extraño amor de los vampiros (Night of the Walking Dead, 1975) all respond to vampiric parameters long established in cinematic history, especially by Universal and Hammer. Their costumes (long, black capes for men and diaphanous gowns for women), pointy incisors or canines, common modus operandi (neck bites that leave two distinct, bloody marks) and occasional capacity to transform into animals, among other attributes, all align them with their celluloid ancestors, whom they consciously emulate. The reliance of Spanish vampires on formulas that had proved solvent and exportable is also evident in the number of films that feature canonical figures. Dracula leads the pack, appearing in the titles of ten different films, one of them a direct adaptation of Stoker’s novel, and aesthetically influencing most male vampires in this period. Even those that exhibited unusual behaviours, like Count Oblensky (Wal Davis) and his predilection for strangling victims in José Luis Madrid’s El vampiro de la autopista (The Horrible Sexy Vampire, 1971), still looked the part.⁹ Derivations of Carmilla appeared in Camillo Mastrocinque’s La maldición de los Karnstein (Crypt of Horror, 1964), where roles were reversed and Laura (Adriana Ambesi, as Audry Amber) was the vampire, and in Vicente Aranda’s La novia ensangrentada (The Blood Spattered Bride, 1972), under the name Mircala Karstein [sic] (Alexandra Bastedo). The real Countess Elizabeth Báthory, due to her association in legends with rejuvenating blood baths, became a vampiric character that turned up in different guises.¹⁰ Patty Sheppard played the elaborately named Wandesa Dárvula de Nadasdy, a medieval murdering countess accidentally revived when her tomb is desecrated, and Julia Saly played Bathory as master vampire in El retorno del hombre lobo (Night of the Werewolf, 1981). Although this was refuted by him, it appears likely that scriptwriter Jacinto Molina, who conceived both films, would have been at least partially inspired by Peter Sasdy’s Countess Dracula (1971) and especially Ingrid Pitt’s performance as the similarly named Countess Elizabeth Nadasdy. As this catalog of examples shows, iconic vampires were in vogue due to their cultural ascriptions and currency in international horror filmmaking.

Like the British and Italian Gothic films that stimulated national productions, but perhaps more openly and dramatically than them, Spanish vampire films relied heavily on substantial and increasing dashes of blood and flashes of nudity. Since such displays were largely forbidden in Spain, crude content and sex scenes were primarily reserved for the international cuts of films until the late 1970s.¹¹ Still, as the list in this chapter’s appendix shows, it is possible to trace an upward trajectory in the frequency and thoroughness with which actresses in Spanish horror were disrobed. The amount of full-frontal nudity in Spanish horror of the 1970s and 1980s will be especially remarkable to a contemporary viewer, given that the genre has largely decoupled itself from the softcore leanings of sexploitation that incentivized the merging of the supernatural and evil with the prurient and forbidden. Titles that sexualized vampirism, especially in their English releases, are another obvious giveaway of the powerful libidinal charge these films intended to channel: The Horrible Sexy Vampire, Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (1971), Klimovsky’s La orgía nocturna de los vampiros (The Vampires Night Orgy, 1973), and Juan Luis Buñuel’s Leonor (Leonor, the Devil’s Mistress, 1975) are good examples, though this trend was not limited to vampire films and was applied to zombie films as well. Non-mimetic genres, horror being the prevalent one, could get away with risqué propositions like lesbianism, the implicit and explicit presence of which also increases throughout the 1970s. “Horrotica” (horror and erotica hybrids) would start petering out once pornography became legal and the “S” certificate came into use, rendering dissonant hotchpotches like Carlos Puerto’s Eskalofrío (Satan’s Blood, 1978) and José Ramón Larraz’s Los ritos sexuales del diablo (Black Candles, 1982) expendable. Yet the feverish erotic mania that followed the gradual loosening of regulations in the 1970s definitely left its mark on vampire films of the period. Javier Aguirre’s El gran amor del conde Drácula (Count Dracula’s Great Love, 1972) and José Ramón Larraz’s Las hijas de Drácula (Vampyres , 1974), to name but two examples, reveal their sexploitative nature at the very level of their episodic narratives, woven around carnal encounters between vampires and humans.

In focusing on vampires in horror cinema, I have thus far overlooked those that appeared in comedies, even though the first thoroughly Spanish cinematic vampire, as happened in Italy with Tempi duri per i vampiri (Uncle Was a Vampire, 1959), surfaced precisely in that genre. As is to be expected, Pedro Lazaga’s Un vampiro para dos (A Vampire for Two, 1965), in which a Madrilenian couple move to Germany in search of competitive and compatible jobs only to fall prey to the Baron of Rosenthal (Fernando Fernán Gómez), conforms to romantic comedy patterns of the 1960s and responds to its economic zeitgeist. “Desarrollismo,” a period of economic development best remembered for its burgeoning tourism, Spain’s opening up to Europe (including migration) and the growth of urban centers, led to a type of comedy in which city-dwelling became a thematic concern and elements from Hollywood and European cinemas would be appropriated (Triana-Toribio 2003, 70). Like many of the vampire comedies that followed, such as Carlos Benpar’s El jovencito Drácula (Young Dracula, 1976), Jorge Darnell’s Tiempos duros para Drácula (Hard Times for Dracula, 1976), and Juan Fortuny’s El pobrecito Draculín (Draculin, 1977), humor is built around encounters between the archaic (the vampire, whose embodiment of anachronistic thinking is sometimes emphasized by their waking up from decades-long hibernation) and the modern (a disorienting, liberated human present in which they feel out of place). In Un vampiro para dos, gags rely on cultural difference, on the contrast between the loud, overfamiliar Spaniards and the Baron, a Teutonic, reclusive Dracula-style vampire. To illustrate, in one of the most memorable scenes, the Baron gets drunk on sangria and passes out after a graphic recounting of what goes on during a typical Spanish bullfight. Inevitably, these comedies played out like parodies of their horror materials, poking fun at Gothic motifs and tropes that felt tired and worn out by the 1970s. This sardonic attitude is especially noticeable in horror comedies intended as vehicles for real-life actors and singers. In Manuel Esteba’s Horror Story (1972), the Calatrava brothers fight all manner of inept classical monsters (played by thugs in disguise) and accidentally expose a criminal plot, and in Antonio Mercero’s Buenas noches, señor monstruo (Good Night, Mr. Monster, 1982) the various members of children’s band Regaliz fight a similarly incompetent cast of monsters that includes Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man and Quasimodo. As can be gleaned from this chapter’s appendix, it is actually possible to trace a shift in the tone of horror, which moves from highly imitative Gothic variations in the early 1970s to a distinct profusion of comedies by the end of that decade.

Some of those comedies, like José Ramón Larraz’s La momia nacional (The National Mummy, 1981) and to a lesser extent Julio Pérez Tabernero’s tamer Las alegres vampiras de Vögel (Vampires of Vogel, 1975), combine humor with erotic horror, thus further hybridizing into even more uniquely Spanish products that cannot be separated from contemporary industrial fads and developments like “landismo” (erotic comedies named after recurring actor Alfredo Landa) and the “cine del destape” (Spain’s “nudies,” a response to the loosening of censorship following the death of Franco). In fact, La momia nacional belongs to a slew of erotic comedies with horror elements that briefly flourished at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Mariano Ozores’s El liguero mágico (The Magic Garter Belt, 1980) and Brujas mágicas (Magical Witches, 1981) or Larraz’s Polvos mágicos (Fairy Dust, 1980), all of them produced by José Frade and marred by a profusion of political jokes that have aged as badly as the scripts’ bashful objectification of women’s bodies. Where they rear their pale heads, vampires are virtually indistinguishable in role from the other monsters (werewolves, witches, and dark cults) that populate them. By the 1980s, cinematic vampires had reached a representational nadir from which they would find it difficult to come back. Even a later film like Álvaro Sáenz de Heredia’s Brácula. Condemor II (1997), a spoof of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) starring celebrity stand-up comedian Chiquito de la Calzada, exhibited the two proclivities I have underscored: the exploitation of eroticism and the lampooning of a genre that always remained somewhat imported and alien to the nation’s popular imaginary. The enactment of the Miró decree in 1983, which funneled subventions into fewer “quality” and heritage films, would be the last nail on the coffin of the type of independent horror cinema that had motivated the emergence of vampire films.

The Cultural Work of Spanish Vampire Films

Spanish vampire films can be read as national responses to external motivators, especially to individual films that worked well in European and US markets. There are spikes of vampire filmmaking, and even blatant copycats, following the successes of Hammer’s Dracula and other vampire films, especially Roger Vadim’s …Et mourir de plaisir (Blood and Roses, 1960), Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970), and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974) – not a vampire film but an influence on El jovencito Drácula and likely on Tiempos duros para Drácula and El pobrecito Draculín. Acknowledging the nature of Spanish cinematic vampires as imported and derivational figures is not the same as suggesting that they did not play an important role for audiences and filmmakers. Because of the masquerading principle of Spanish horror, one must be careful not to ascribe excessive subversion to imitative films intended primarily for commercial gain, but it is hard to refute that vampires have a metaphorical power, which, in the Spanish context, made them an ideal “símbolo de la injusticia social, el abuso de poder e incluso el cacequismo” (symbol of social injustice, abuse of power and even despotism) (Palacios 2012, 71). Javier Pulido, writing about the Blind Dead, proposes that the bloody specters in Amando de Ossorio’s films can be read as a commentary on the “fuerzas represivas de la España de mediados de los 70: la Iglesia y el estamento militar” (repressive forces of mid-1970s Spain: the church and the military), and notes the parallels between Gilles de Lancré (Paul Naschy) in El mariscal del infierno (Devil’s Possessed, 1974) and Francisco Franco (2012, 128, 147). In a similar vein, patriarchal anachronisms like Count Dracula (Narciso Ibáñez Menta) in Klimovsky’s La saga de los Drácula (The Dracula Saga, 1973), desperately looking to revive and embolden his dying vampiric lineage, offer relatively straightforward comparisons with a regime by then in decay and a “Caudillo” that was visibly unwell.¹² Jesús Franco, director of El Conde Drácula, also referred to the dictator in vampiric terms, as “el enemigo común, que estaba en su castillo de el Pardo, Drácula sorbedor de sangre de todo un país” (the common enemy, who lived in his Pardo castle, a Dracula who sucked the blood of an entire country) (2005, 259, italics in original). In short, Spanish vampires can be retrospectively understood as covert, even unconscious, mediators of social and political repression due to their natural attributes. They can be read as stalwarts of an old, outmoded order under threat of supersession or erasure by an encroaching modern present.

Even skeptical scholars who might find such interpretations excessively generous when applied to circumstantial psychotronic cinema that has received little credit outside specialist circles would have to concede the inherent transgressive nature of the horror genre at this point in time. Twenty-first-century viewers may well and reasonably balk at the erotic and visceral spectacles of productions that sometimes went as far as to revel in sexual(ized) violence, and which emanate a prurient excess completely interpolated by the structuring dynamics and objectifying reductions of a literalized male gaze.¹³ To a contemporary audience, however, horror offered a gateway to until then unexplored and illicit worlds of pleasure, as well as escapist fantasies of a projected, freer Europe where the unimaginable was possible. As Nicholas G. Schlegel has argued, it might even be productive to think of Spanish horror as emblematic of the country’s transition to democracy, as a form of catharsis that was perceived as dangerous by Francoism because of its unrestrained ethos and apparent call for complete freedom (2015, 20–9). And when taken as part of a broader horror industry context, it is possible to see the provocations of vampires as disruptive even beyond the fabric of cinema exhibition or the limits of public taste and censors. Spanish vampire films relied on scenarios and motifs that directly inverted and therefore challenged the values of the reigning military-political regime. Francoist ideology centered around basic conservative Catholic principles like the preservation of the nuclear heterosexual family, the primacy of the Church, and the ineluctable power of the state. All of these assumptions were overturned by films where vampirism thinly cloaked, if not predicated, free love and sex (including then illegal practices like lesbianism), superstition was proven right and brute force useless.

Unsurprisingly, given their historical psychosexual links, vampires also negotiated more concrete gender anxieties. Speculating about the possible “Italian-Spanishness” of some horror co-productions, Rui M. Trindade Oliveira identifies common worries as “the focus on the representation of the Catholic family unit and its dynamics […], the reflection upon women’s role and female emancipation in these highly conservative societies, and the social anxieties arising from the historical relevance and repressive power of Roman Catholicism and its institutions” (2022, 13). These anxieties play out in a film like La novia ensangrentada, where Susan (Maribel Martí), a nubile newlywed, resists her husband’s multiple sexual advances and appears to psychically summon a vampire who killed her own husband for trying to impose “prácticas insoportables” (unbearable acts). Unable to discipline or subdue either woman, Susan’s husband is forced to destroy them in a denouement that may well reassert the status quo but ultimately renders him a tyrannical, patriarchal killer. Other films, especially Vampyres and Vampyros Lesbos indulged in erotic fantasies where men are the victims and women establish meaningful connections and enjoy sexual congress. The stern, controlling, and potent vampires in films like La tumba de la isla maldita, La orgía nocturna de los vampiros, and Ceremonia sangrienta mediated male fears about women’s slow but steady path toward social independence and anticipated future debates about their new social roles in Spain’s budding democracy. In a similar fashion, the preference for older, ineffective men throughout the 1970s, can be retrospectively seen as a response to gains made by second-wave feminism and the expanding social life of Spanish women after the abolition of “permiso marital” in 1975 and of laws against adultery in 1978, and the legalisation of divorce in 1981.¹⁴ Conceiving of Spanish vampire texts as not just the product of profit-oriented enterprises but as reflections of a society in flux allows for a wider picture of their diverse appeals and underlying messages.

Appendices

Appendix: A Filmography of Spanish Vampire Films, 1964–1985

A subsidiary aim of this chapter is to provide the most thorough list of Spanish vampire films from the golden age of Spanish horror to date. Inspired by Michael Guarneri’s own forensic analysis of Italian vampire cinema (2020, 8–11) and born out of many hours of horror viewing, the table below is presented as a first step toward an exhaustive filmography on this significant but still underresearched topic, and an invitation to future scholars to continue combing Spanish films for this creature’s appearances. Any synthesis of a topic demands a number of guiding parameters, and any process of selection involves necessary exclusion. What follows are a few notes that clarify my methodology.

The titles of horror films during this period, especially those of Euro Horror, were unstable and prone to dramatic and salacious renamings. I have kept original Spanish titles, or where initially released in a different language, their most common Spanish title. I have included only the most popular of the English titles, which were often the ones through which given films circulated in the US and the UK. If no English title was ever released, a direct translation is provided in brackets. I have included films like La maldición de los Karnstein and La notte dei diavoli (Night of the Devils, 1972) because they had some Spanish involvement, but I want to acknowledge that these are predominantly Italian films and are rightfully treated as such by critics like Roberto Curti (2015, 128–35; 2017, 74–7). Similarly, Vampyres , although directed by the Spanish director José Ramón Larraz, has also been considered a British film (Fenton and Flint 2001, 222–4), and La hija de Drácula (Dracula’s Daughter, 1972), as typical of Jesús Franco’s career, is an international co-production, in this case between France and Portugal. I have included all these films but pointed out their national origins, as well as, to the best of my knowledge, where they first premiered.

All studies of “vampiric” representations must wrestle with the capaciousness of this flexible category. I have included the blood-drinking plant in La isla de la muerte because it operates as, and is called, a “vampire,” as well as El secreto de la momia egipcia (Lips of Blood/Love Brides of the Blood Mummy, 1973), since its mummy is to all extents and purposes a vampire (it can hypnotize others, drinks blood, and leaves neck marks). Despite not fitting most of the contextual coordinates of other vampire films of the time, I have added Iván Zulueta’s Arrebato (Rapture, 1979) because it utilizes vampiric tropes to build its complex allegories of cinema and addiction. I have been rather conservative in other respects. I have not included Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead (they are more clearly reanimated skeletons and usually described as zombies) or Alaric de Marnac/Gilles de Lancré (he is a revenant). Neither have I included Mario Bava’s Italian-Spanish co-production Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires, 1965), Carlos Aured’s El retorno de Walpurgis (Curse of the Devil, 1973), Miguel Iglesias’s La maldición de la bestia (The Werewolf and the Yeti/Night of the Howling Beast, 1975), José Ramón Larraz’s Polvos magicos or Jacinto Molina’s La bestia y la espada mágica (The Beast and the Magic Sword, 1983). Despite its international title, Terrore nello spazio (literally, “Terror in Space”) does not actually feature any vampires; the film is a science-fiction horror film about alien body snatchers. El retorno de Walpurgis is set in motion by a curse placed on the Daninsky dynasty by Countess Elizabeth Báthory, but blood is only used in the black magic rites, rather than consumed. Sulfurina (Carmen Villani), in Polvos mógicos, may need sacrificial human blood to stay young forever, but is a Satanic witch. Both La maldición de la bestia and La noche de los brujos feature actors wearing vampire fangs, but their monsters are not vampires: the women in the former are described as “demonios” (demons) and, given that they eat raw human flesh and their bite infects Waldemar Daninsky with lycanthropy, might best be understood as werewolves; those in the latter are voodooesque leopard women. Lastly, the prologue of La bestia y la espada mágica calls the Hungarian enemy “vampires,” but these do not display any supernatural or vampiric traits. Vampire bats appear minimally in films like Sebastián d’Arbó’s Viaje al mas allá (Journey to the Beyond, 1980) and Ignacio F. Iquino’s Secta siniestra (Bloody Sect, 1982) but not as supernatural beings.

NB. To save space, the columns “Premiere” and “Country” in the table use a number of abbreviations. These are: “A” (Argentina), “F” (France), “I” (Italy), “L” (Liechtenstein), “P” (Portugal), “S” (Spain), “UK” (United Kingdom), “US” (United States) and “WG” (West Germany).

Spanish title	English-language title/s	Director/s	Premiere	Country	Genre	Nudity
La maldición de los Karnstein	Crypt of Horror/Terror in the Crypt	Camillo Mastrocinque	1964 (I)	I, S	Horror	None
Un vampiro para dos	A Vampire for Two	Pedro Lazaga	1965 (S)	S	Comedy	None
La isla de la muerte	Island of the Doomed/Maneater of Hydra	Ernst Ritter von Theumer	1967 (S)	WG, S, US	Horror	None
La marca del hombre lobo	Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror/Hell’s Creatures	Enrique López Eguiluz	1968 (S)	S, WG	Horror (Monster mash)	None
Malenka, la sobrina del vampiro	Fangs of the Living Dead	Amando de Ossorio	1969 (I)	S, I	Horror	None
El Conde Drácula	Count Dracula	Jesús Franco	1970 (WG)	S, WG, I, L, UK	Horror	None
El vampiro de la autopista	The Horrible Sexy Vampire	José Luis Madrid	1970 (WG)	S	Horror	Partial
Los monstruos del terror	Assignment Terror/Dracula vs. Frankenstein	Tulio Demicheli	1970 (F)	S, WG, I	Horror (Monster mash), Sci-fi	None
La noche de Walpurgis	The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman/Werewolf Shadow	León Klimovsky	1971 (S)	S	Horror (Monster mash)	Partial
Cuadecuc Vampir	Vampir-Cuadecuc	Pere Portabella	1971 (F)	S	Documentary, Arthouse	None
Las vampiras	Vampyros Lesbos/Lesbian Vampires	Jesús Franco	1971 (WG)	WG, S	Horror, Erotica	Full frontal
Pastel de sangre, “Terror entre cristianos” segment	Cake of Blood/Blood Pie, “Terror among Christians” segment	Francesc Bellmunt	1971 (S)	S	(Anthology) Horror, Historical drama	Partial
La noche de los diablos	Night of the Devils	Giorgio Ferroni	1972 (I)	I, S	Horror	Full frontal
La mansión de la niebla	The Murder Mansion/Maniac Mansion	Francisco Lara Polop	1972 (I)	S, I	Horror	None
La novia ensangrentada	The Blood Spattered Bride	Vicente Aranda	1972 (S)	S	Horror	Full frontal
Drácula contra Frankenstein	Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein	Jesús Franco	1972 (S)	S, F, L, P	Horror	None
La hija de Drácula	Daughter of Dracula/Dracula’s Daughter	Jesús Franco	1972 (F)	F, P	Horror, Erotica	Full frontal
La llamada del vampiro	Horrortrip/(The) Curse of the Vampire	José María Elorrieta	1972 (S)	S	Horror, Erotica	Full frontal
Horror Story	Horror Story	Manuel Esteba	1972 (S)	S	Comedy	None
La tumba de la isla maldita	Crypt of the Living Dead/Hannah, Queen of the Vampires	Julio Salvador, Ray Danton	1973 (US)	S, US	Horror	None
El gran amor del conde Drácula	Count Dracula’s Great Love	Javier Aguirre	1973 (F)	S	Horror, Erotica	Partial
El secreto de la momia egipcia	Lips of Blood/Love Brides of the Blood Mummy	Alejandro Martí	1973 (F)	S, F	Horror, Erotica	Full frontal
La orgía nocturna de los vampiros	The Vampires Night Orgy	León Klimovsky	1973 (S)	S	Horror	Full frontal
Ceremonia sangrienta	The Legend of Blood Castle	Jorge Grau	1973 (I)	S, P	Horror, Historical drama	Full frontal
La saga de los Drácula	The Dracula Saga	León Klimovsky	1973 (S)	S	Horror, Erotica	Partial
Las hijas de Drácula	Vampyres/Daughters of Darkness	José Ramón Larraz	1974 (UK)	UK, S	Horror, Erotica	Full frontal
Las alegres vampiras de Vögel	Vampires of Vogel	Julio Pérez Tabernero	1975 (S)	S	Horror, Comedy	Nonea
El ataque de las vampiras/La mujer vampiro	La Comtesse noire/Female Vampire/Erotikill	Jesús Franco	1975 (F) [shot 1973]	B, F	Horror, Erotica	Full frontal
Leonor	Leonor, the Devil’s Mistress	Juan Luis Buñuel	1975 (S)	S, F, I	Horror, Historical drama	None
El extraño amor de los vampiros	Night of the Walking Dead/Strange Love of the Vampires	León Klimovsky	1975 (S)	S	Horror	Full frontal
El jovencito Drácula	Young Dracula	Carlos Benpar	1976 (S)	S	Comedy	Partial
Tiempos duros para Drácula	Hard Times for Dracula	Jorge Darnell	1976 (S)	S, A	Comedy	Partial
El pobrecito Draculín	Draculin	Juan Fortuny	1977 (S)	S	Comedy	Partial
Arrebato	Rapture	Iván Zulueta	1979 (S)	S	Horror, Melodrama	Full frontal
El retorno del hombre lobo	Night of the Werewolf	Paul Naschy	1981 (S)	S	Horror (Monster mash)	Full frontal
La momia nacional	The National Mummy	José Ramón Larraz	1981 (S)	S	Comedy	Full frontal
Buenas noches, señor monstruo	Good Night, Mr. Monster	Antonio Mercero	1982 (S)	S	Comedy, Musical	None
El hundimiento de la casa Usher	Revenge in the House of Usher	Jesús Franco	1983 (S)	S, F	Horror	None
El retorno de los vampiros/El misterio de Cynthia Baird	The Return of the Vampires	José María Zabalza	1985 (S) [shot 1972]b	S	Horror	None
Vampiros en La Habana	Vampires in Havana	Juan Padrón	1985 (C)	C, S	Animation	Full fontal

Cross-References

• Mexican Vampires

• Russia

• The Euro-Vampire