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The Vampire Lovers came at a time of change for Hammer films. Due to a marketplace more saturated with violence and sex, not to mention a horror stage increasingly shared by classics, like Rosemary’S Baby and Night Of The Living Dead, Hammer was struggling financially. To combat it, Hammer, along with American International, adapted J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872), into the Karnstein Trilogy, of which The Vampire Lovers is the first entry. The film took the boobs and blood formula to new heights, by infusing the film with some of the most tawdry lesbian scenes that had ever taken place on celluloid (which, while fairly tame under today’s standards, is no less erotic).

The film looks beautiful, and the booming Hammer score is there, replete with ear splitting screams (watch out with volume control). But you’re here for one thing: The Extras; and for the most part,...

As one YouTube user so eloquently puts it: “Ingrid Pitt, you can bite my neck with pleasure.” The Polish actress and star of films like The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, died on 23 November, just two days after celebrating her 73rd birthday. Sadly, it turns out that all the fake blood she imbibed over the years didn’t make her immortal. Fortunately, her screen image was so indelible that she’ll live on in the hearts and minds of horror fans.

Fittingly, Pitt who was born Ingoushka Petrov, made her screen debut in the obscure 1964 Spanish film El sonido de la muerte, which was known in the Us as Sound of Horror. From the brief clip I’ve seen, it would appear that the budget only stretched as far as providing some very unconvincing dinosaur sound effects. Still, even horror queens have to start somewhere.

After uncredited appearances in Doctor Zhivago...