For the 30th anniversary edition of Eric McNaughton’s excellent We Belong Dead magazine, contributors were asked to write about their favourite horror films. Mine was an easy choice: Dracula, the 1958 Hammer production starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
The studio was to make several outstanding films over the ensuing couple of decades, but rarely did all the elements combine in such perfect balance as they did here, arguably the pinnacle of Hammer’s achievement in the realm of the Gothic. As a child, I succumbed easily to the film’s charms; Hammer had me in its grasp, and neither it nor Dracula has let me go since.
If you want to read the c2,000 words before it, or any of dozens of lavishly illustrated articles on horror films ranging from Häxan, Halloween and Psycho to The Wolf Man, The Wicker Man and The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, buy a copy directly from the We Belong Dead website.
Look out for my article on the 1956 film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in the upcoming ‘Euro Horror’ edition, too.