Vampire Flicks: The Vampire (1957)

Unlike our first film of the month yesterday, I did first learn of this one from The History of Sci-Fi and Horror. Despite the title, it was actually featured in their section on "dehumanization," where they talked about werewolves and the various adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among other things. The reason for this was because, as Butch Patrick said, the title character was more of a take on Jekyll and Hyde than an actual undead bloodsucker, and the clip they showed, a close-up of the character's face as he turned into the vampire (the final form of which I thought looked ridiculous) via the old Wolf Man lap dissolve technique, seemed to reinforce that notion. But, while the Jekyll and Hyde aspect is certainly true, this does indeed qualify as a type of vampire film, as we'll get into. In any case, I didn't see it until I was in my 20's, when I picked up the MGM Midnight Movies Double Feature DVD, where it comes paired with The Return of Dracula (another film I learned about through the documentary, and which we'll look at in a couple of days), at McKay's. And I have to say, despite how laughable the vampire makeup does come off, this film is actually more than above average. It's akin to some other horror movies around that time, like The Werewolf, I Was A Teenage Werewolf, and Blood of Dracula (which we'll look at tomorrow), where a traditionally supernatural creature is created through scientific means. It also reminds me a bit of the 1958 Universal movie, Monster on the Campus, as it takes place in a similarly small neighborhood, and is about a respected doctor/scientist unknowingly becoming a monster. What's more, the movie has strong allusions to drug addiction, something you really didn't see at the time, and is also an early example of this kind of story, usually a Gothic, period piece, being done in a relatable, contemporary setting. Plus, it features some pretty decent performances for this kind of film, particularly from the lead actor, and a couple of recognizable faces in the cast. There are also some subtle but inspired instances of direction, nice moments of atmosphere, a memorable music score, and it even manages to be surprisingly horrific at times.

One morning, in a California suburb, a pet store delivery-boy named Tommy arrives at the home of Dr. Matt Campbell, only to find him seriously ill at his desk in his laboratory. Campbell asks him to fetch the local physician, Dr. Paul Beecher, and Tommy rides his bike to Paul's office/home. When his nurse, Carol Butler, then tells him of Campbell's condition, Paul rushes over to his house. There, as he examines him, Campbell says he's finally found "the answer" after years of experimenting, and hands Paul a bottle of pills before he expires. Later that day, Paul gives Buck Donnelly, a detective with the police department, the report on Campbell's death, and Buck tells him that he contacted the university at Bigelow, whom Campbell was employed by. Dr. Will Beaumont, an old college friend of Paul's, is being sent down with another person who's to take over Campbell's work. When he returns to his office that evening, Paul has one of his frequent migraines and asks his daughter, Betsy, to give him one of his pills, which he keeps in a bottle in his coat pocket. However, she unknowingly gives him one of the pills that Campbell gave him. After he takes it, he starts to feel especially ill while talking with a patient, Marion Wilkins, and asks her to return the next day, while he lies down for a nap. The following morning, Buck comes over to his office and tells him there was a report of a prowler the night before, around 11:00, but Paul says he didn't hear anything, as he was asleep by that time. He then gets a call that Marion has taken a turn for the worse and pays her a house-call. While examining her, she becomes terrified at the sight of him and suddenly dies while trying to get away from him. After she does, he then notices a pair of small puncture wounds on her neck. Upset by this, he gets another headache and goes to take a pill, then realizes that Betsy may have given him the wrong ones the night before. Concerned about this, he goes over to Campbell's home, where he asks Will Beaumont and another researcher, Henry Winston, about the nature of his work. He learns that Campbell was researching whether it was possible to revert the mind to a primitive state, then reverse the process in order to advance human intellect. The pills he created induce this state, but are also addictive, prompting the test subjects to crave them every 24 hours. Also, all the test animals in the lab have died from capillary disintegration, save for a cage of bats, which it's later revealed the pills were derived from. As Paul continues to periodically black out around 11:00 each night, and someone dies in a similar manner to Marion each time, he soon has to face the possibility that the pills have turned him into a monstrous creature that feeds on human blood.

Like The Vampire's Ghost director Lesley Selander, the director of The Vampire, Paul Landres, may not have been an auteur but he was a dependable craftsman who had a career spanning several decades. He started out as an editor in the late 30's, and would continue working in that same capacity alongside his directing career. Speaking of which, he made his feature directorial debut in 1948, with the western, The Return of Wildfire, though this was a case where Landres had to shoot additional material when the actual director became unavailable. As a result, he didn't receive credit on the final film. The following year, he had his first solo directing job with another western, Grand Canyon, and, also like Selander, westerns and adventure movies would go on to make up the bulk of his career. But, while The Vampire was a departure for Landres, it wouldn't be his only foray into the horror genre, nor his only vampire movie, as we'll see soon.

Much like the leads in The Werewolf, I Was A Teenage Werewolf, Blood of Dracula, and the like, the protagonist of The Vampire, Dr. Paul Beecher, is someone whom we're meant to sympathize with, and John Beal's performance helps that immensely. Paul is depicted as a kindly small-town doctor, and loving, single father to his young daughter, Betsy, who ends up becoming the title monster through pure, tragic circumstance. At the beginning of the movie, he rushes over to Matt Campbell's home upon hearing he's ill, believing he's suffered the latest in a series of heart attacks. There, Campbell babbles about having success after years of research and gives Paul a bottle of pills, saying they're "the answer," but dies before he can clarify. Paul then goes about his day, business as usual, making various house-calls, as well as giving Buck Donnelly at the police department a report on Campbell's death, but doesn't tell anyone about the pills. Thus, when he suffers one of his frequent migraines that evening and asks Betsy to fetch his headache pills from his coat pocket, she gives him Campbell's pills by mistake. This leads to him becoming all the more ill while having a consultation with a patient named Marion Wilkins, and he asks her to come back the next day, while he lies down in his office for a while. The next day, Paul is seemingly better, when Buck comes by to follow up on reports of a prowler the previous night. Paul says he didn't hear anything, as he believes he was dead asleep at that time, and then gets called over to Marion's house, having learned that she's now significantly worse than she was before. Much to his shock, when Marion sees him while he examines her, she becomes extremely frightened and dies from the stress of trying to escape from him. This greatly upsets Paul, who blames himself, feeling he should've treated her the night before. Getting another headache, he goes for one of his pills, and when he takes both bottles out of his coat pockets, realizes he might've taken the wrong ones. He asks Betsy about it, and she admits that she doesn't remember which pills she gave him. Not wanting to worry her, he tells her that the other pills are just aspirin.

Concerned about their nature, Paul goes back to Campbell's house, where he finds that all of the test animals in the lab are dead, save for a cage full of bats. He then meets up with his old college friend, Dr. Will Beaumont, and Campbell's replacement, the eccentric researcher, Henry Winston. He asks them what Campbell was working on, mentioning that he tried to tell him something before he died, and learns of his research into trying to make the mind regress to a primitive state through a chemical process.

Will also tells him that Campbell said the pills were able to achieve this by temporarily draining blood from the brain, and that they're very addictive, with the user needing them every 24 hours or else, they go completely crazy. That latter bit of information especially concerns Paul, and he stays over at the house until well into the evening, helping Will look through Campbell's notes. While he doesn't find the notes helpful, Henry tells them that the animals didn't die from the effects of the pills but, rather, from

capillary disintegration, caused by some sort of virus. Paul then rushes back to his home, clearly beginning to feel unwell again, as he loses his temper with Betsy when she tries to show him something as soon as he walks through the door. Though compelled to take the pills again, he tries to fight the urge and lies down on his bed. However, by 11:00 that night, he's disappeared from his office, and the next morning, Henry is found dead in Campbell's lab. Paul arrives and examines the body, noting that there are two puncture wounds on the throat, akin to those he saw 

on Marion's. He also notices that the bats in the cage are gone, and Will tells him what Henry told him the night before, that the serum within the pills was extracted from the bats... which also happened to be vampire bats. When he walks back home afterward, Paul is clearly considering that he may have something to do with what's happening. He momentarily stops in front of the police station and seems to contemplate going in, but ultimately opts not to. That night, not wanting to be alone, he asks his nurse, Carol Butler, to go out to dinner with him, and 

to keep the pills with her so he won't take them. He also tries to tell Buck what's going on when he mentions that the coroner ruled that Henry died of capillary disintegration and that he's going to exhume Marion's body to see if there's a connection, but can't bring himself to get the words out.

That night, while out with Carol, he tries to tell her the truth, but is interrupted when he's told he has a phone call. Much to his dismay, he's called away to the county hospital to perform an emergency operation. Before he leaves, he manages to get the bottle of pills out of Carol's purse by pretending to knock it to the floor while going for her cigarette lighter, and takes them with him. The operation, though successful, takes longer than he expected, and as it goes on, it gets to the point where he's just 

barely holding it together. It's almost 11:00 by the time it's finished, and he then quickly rushes out of the operating room. He calls the restaurant, as he asked Carol to wait for him, but when he does, he learns that she just left. Again, he's compelled to take the pills but tries to stop himself. However, he obviously broke at some point, as he becomes the vampire again, and chases and very nearly catches Carol while she's on her way home. When she evades him, he instead attacks and kills Carrie Dietz, an 

elderly patient of his, while she's walking her dog. He's driven away when the sound of the attack attracts the attention of just about everyone in the neighborhood, and wakes up in his own bed the next morning, back to normal. Muttering Carol's name as he wakes up, he calls her and learns that, while she's okay, Carrie was killed. Distraught over this news, and more sure than ever that he's the killer, he smashes a mirror in his office on anguish. When Betsy comes in upon hearing the sound, he tells her 

that he's going to arrange for her to go live with her aunt for a while. Once she's left, Paul goes back to the Campbell house and meets up with Will. He tells him that he believes he's responsible for the murders and that it's because of the pills. He's unable to convince Will of this, despite a log he's been keeping of the times he's blacked out, which corresponds with the times of the murders. In order to prove to Paul that the whole thing is just a delusion, Will opts to stay with him until 11:00. Later, when Paul begins to 

feel the urge for the pills, he asks Will to sedate him, but he decides to save it for later. He also takes all the pills, both those in the cabinet and those Paul has on him, and locks them in a desk drawer. When 11:00 passes, Paul becomes desperate for the pills, and then begs Will to sedate him. But, just as Will finally fills the syringe with the sedative, Paul turns into the vampire again, attacks and kills Will, and burns his body in the furnace. The next day, now knowing for sure that he's the killer, Paul makes up his last will and testament, then proceeds to prepare to commit

suicide by injecting himself with poison. However, Carol comes in to work, and though Paul desperately tells her to go away, she's horrified when she realizes what he's about to do. She tries to stop him, leading to a struggle, as Paul realizes he's becoming the vampire again. He knocks Carol out so he can kill himself, but then completely transforms, leading him to chase her into the nearby woods when she regains consciousness.

As you can see, Paul's monster form is unlike any vampire you've ever seen. I think he's meant to come off as horribly diseased, with flesh that has a rough, bumpy texture to it, and very gnarled hands, but those big, bushy eyebrows and that hairdo make him look rather silly. Regardless, not only is he akin to Jekyll and Hyde, as Butch Patrick said, but he's also similar to a werewolf, given how he changes against his will (through the traditional process of lap dissolves, no less), does nothing but snarl and growl in this form,

and has no memory of what he did when he turns back to normal. However, he does says that he has dream-like visions of his past victims or intended ones each time he wakes up. He's also not completely mindless, as each time, he seems to deliberately seek out a person he interacted with shortly before changing. In addition, he runs from the onlookers when he kills Carrie, disposes of Will's body by putting it in the lab's furnace, which he remembers

how to operate, and hides from and ambushes Buck during the climactic chase. Like a traditional vampire, he does bite into his victims' necks in order to feed on their blood, but he also passes on a nasty virus that he received from the pills due to their being derived from vampire bats. While he himself is immune to it, it causes capillary disintegration in his victims, leading to their corpses becoming little more than skeletons, as all of the tissue is destroyed. You see a gruesome example of this when Buck has Marion's corpse exhumed. And while he's certainly not undead or supernatural like your traditional vampire, he does prove to be stronger than average, and it takes several bullets to finally put him down. 

This could be just a me problem, but for a while, as I was writing this, I was confused as to what exactly was causing Paul to change. The first time is clearly due to his accidentally taking the pills but, each time afterward, following his learning that they become so addictive that the user feels the necessity to take them every 24 hours, he tries to fight the urge. I thought that was what was causing him to change, as Will Beaumont says that Dr. Campbell noted how, if the pills aren't ingested every 24 hours, the subject "goes

wild." I assumed this was manifested by Paul becoming the vampire, and that his feeding on blood replenished that which the process drained from his brain. But when he talks with Will again during the third act, he says he's taken the pills each time there's been a murder. Now, the movie doesn't actually show him take the pills again after that first time, but when you see his mess of an office after he's changed the second time, you can see them scattered across his desk, indicating that he did break and took them 

offscreen. You can also assume the same thing happened when he was fighting the urge after performing the surgery. But what confused me is how, twice during the third act, he changes without taking them, and the last time occurs much sooner than 24 hours before the previous one, as per the pattern. However, when I thought about it some more, I figured it was probably how, in the various adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde eventually gains enough of a hold on Jekyll that he's able to come through without Jekyll having to drink the serum.

The closest thing the movie has to a female lead is Paul's nurse, Carol Butler (Coleen Gray), but even then, her role in the story is, for the most part, pretty minimal. She's a new nurse who just started working for him, and proves to be someone who's always there for both him and his patients. When he returns to his office that first evening with a bad headache, Carol has Marion Wilkins wait a little bit before seeing him, and she later helps him lie down in his office when he really starts to feel bad after taking one of the pills. After Marion dies during his house-call the next day, Carol tries to console him, and even suggests he take some time off, though Paul brushes it off. But it's not until around the middle of the movie that she becomes fairly significant. When Paul begins to really suspect he may be the killer, and that it's tied in with the pills, he asks Carol to stay with him and keep him from taking them. Moreover, the two of them go out to dinner together, and he has her keep the pills in her purse so he can't get to them. While at the restaurant, he tries to tell her what's going on, but is called away to perform the surgery at the county hospital before he can. He asks her to wait for him, which she promises to do, but unbeknownst to her, he managed to get a hold of the pills before he left. And since he's gone so long, she ultimately does decide to head for home. By this point, he's turned into the vampire again, finds Carol while she's walking home, and chases her to her house, very nearly getting her. That's when he kills Carrie Dietz instead, and the next day, when he calls Carol, she tearfully tells him what happened, all but confirming for him that he is the killer. When she comes in to work the next day, she interrupts Paul's attempt to kill himself. He desperately asks her to leave, having to raise his voice, leaving her confused and angry with his behavior. But just as she's about to head out the door, she notices the syringe he's holding, and then learns that he's about to poison himself. She tries to intervene, only to get knocked out by him so he can attempt to kill himself, only for him to change one last time. When she regains consciousness, she sees what Paul has become, leading to the climax where he chases her out of the house and into the woods in back of it. 

Paul's young daughter, Betsy (Lydia Reed), is a really sweet young girl, constantly practicing both her dance moves and the piano, and is always cheerful and smiling whenever somebody comes through the door. Even though her dad doesn't have enough free time in order to be with her, you can tell that she adores him, always running to him when he arrives back home. Heck, she even cooks for the both of them! However, she also unknowingly causes the beginning of his downfall when he asks her to get him his migraine pills from his coat pocket and accidentally gives him the pills that Campbell gave him. When Paul asks her about it the next day, Betsy initially insists she did give him the migraine pills, but can't hold the lie for long and quickly admits that she's not sure which ones she gave him. But since he told her that the other bottle simply contained aspirin, she's not worried. That night, though, when her dad comes home, he's in the throes of craving the pills, and becomes short-tempered with her when she tries to make him watch a new dance step she's learned. She's really hurt by this, and that night, at 11:00, she wakes up and goes to his office door, attempting to apologize for whatever she did to make him mad. Unbeknownst to her, he's broken out of the office, and gone back to the Campbell house, where he kills Henry Winston. After he kills Carrie Dietz, Paul decides to send Betsy to live with her aunt in Bigelow in order to keep her safe. Betsy, not understanding why her father wants this, asks if he's mad at her. He assures her that he isn't (it's clearly tearing him up inside), and that he simply wants what's best for her, but she begins to cry about it. Though he tries to quell her anguish, she does, in the end, go with her aunt. She also has to say goodbye to him long before her aunt comes, as he leaves that afternoon to meet Will Beaumont at the Campbell house. It's genuinely touching, as they hug, say they love each other, and the last time you see Betsy, she watches her dad walk out the front door and softly tells him, "Goodbye." Finally, while it's never confirmed, near the end, when Paul is sitting at his desk, preparing to write his will, and ignores the ringing phone, it's possible that it could be Betsy, as he'd promised to call her the night before after she went to her aunt's home.

After playing an Air Force captain, an Army general, and a Navy commander, I guess the only kind of authority figure that Kenneth Tobey hadn't yet played in a horror or sci-fi flick was a police detective. He does so here with Buck Donnelly of the police department, and while his role is a fairly thankless one, he brings the same charisma that he always did. He's friends with Paul, and when he inquires about his new nurse, Paul pulls his leg by telling her that she's not his type: "Fat, bifocals, buck teeth, but she's a good, hard-worker." Buck comments, "Doc, I'll remember not to get sick." But when he comes by Paul's office and home the next morning, he meets Carol, and quickly realizes Paul was messing with him, much to his annoyance. After he leaves to go check on Marion Wilkins, Buck asks Carol if she knows a good eye doctor. She asks, "Why? Do you need glasses?", and he answers, "No, but I think Doc does." Though he isn't too concerned when Campbell and then Marion die, seemingly of heart attacks, after the death of Henry Winston, Buck suspects that it was a homicide. Will Beaumont assures him that Henry had no enemies, and when Paul examines the body, he says he's unable to determine the cause of death. He does mention that Henry has the same kind of marks on his neck that Marion did, which gets Buck's attention. And when the coroner says Henry died of capillary disintegration, he decides to have Marion's body exhumed to see if she died of the same thing, breaking off a date with Carol to do so. 

When they open up the coffin in the cemetery that night, Buck and everyone else is horrified to see that Marion has been reduced to a skeleton, despite having only been dead for a day. Buck is so aghast that he thinks they dug up the wrong grave, but soon finds that they didn't. After the coroner examines the corpse, Buck is told that the killer is passing a deadly virus to his victims when he bites their throats. Figuring the killer will strike again that night, as he has every night so far, Buck has his officers on his 

high alert. As Paul was with Will at the Campbell house and changed there, nothing seems to happen. But the next day, Buck gets a call from the university that employed Campbell and learns that he was working on a controlled serum that caused similar results to the virus. Thinking Will may have been experimenting on humans, he and another officer, Ryan, go to the Campbell house. There, they find a tape recorder that Will was using, which recorded the moment when Paul became the vampire and attacked

him. Hearing him repeatedly yell Paul's name, they head over to his office, arriving after he's become the vampire again and has menaced Carol, chasing her into the woods. Buck runs after them, trying to save Carol, but is ambushed and nearly killed by Paul himself, only surviving when Ryan comes to the rescue.

Another familiar face is Dabs Greer as Dr. Will Beaumont, Paul's old college chum who's now the head of the psychology department at Bigelow University. Like Kenneth Tobey, Greer manages to do a good amount with what would normally not be much of a role. He makes Will come off as bright and cheerful, but also a tad eccentric, always applying psychology wherever he feels he can. In his first scene, where he introduces Paul to the extremely odd Henry Winston, Will is constantly trying to explain his behavior in such terms, saying, "That's Henry for you: phlegmatic, but seething inside. Brilliant mind! Brilliant!", and, "You know, Henry complains a lot but, deep inside, he's a frightened child seeking approval." Moreover, after Henry is found dead, Will not only tells Buck it's not possible that he would have any enemies who would want him dead, as he had neither enemies nor friends, but comments that Henry himself would be more likely to kill someone! And when he and Paul are going over Campbell's notes, he says, "Brilliant mind. Brilliant but, unfortunately, it's rather untidy." Not surprisingly, when Paul tries to confess to Will about what the pills have been doing to him, he doesn't believe what he's hearing. It's partly because he doesn't know what to make of Campbell's research, but also because he believes Paul is suffering from a delusion caused by his high strung mindset, and that the pills are, "A strong, suggestive influence." Not wanting him to destroy his reputation over this, Will offers to stay with Paul until 11:00 and also keeps the pills away from him. But, because he's not really taking it seriously, he hesitates to give Paul a sedative when he asks for it, saying he'll need it later. He also locks all the pills in the desk drawer, which Paul tries to break into when his need for them becomes impossible to ignore. Will then goes to give him the sedative, but by that point, he's turned into the vampire. He not only attacks and kills Will, but also destroys his body in the laboratory's furnace.

Henry Winston (James Griffith) is a truly bizarre character. His personality is rather taciturn and aloof, and he's always wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, even though he's indoors, only briefly taking them off when the electricity goes out in the Campbell lab. According to Will, his eyes are sensitive to light due to a childhood trauma: "His mother was burned to death when a gas heater exploded." Whether that's true or not is anyone's guess but, regardless, the whole time that Paul and Will are talking in the lab, Henry is just going about his business, often giving short, nearly monosyllabic answers and responses whenever spoken to. When he's first introduced to Paul, he greets him with a simple, "Hello," and when Will notes that all the animals in the lab are dead, he answers, "Yes, I know." Sometimes, his responses are random and strange. When he's dissecting one of the dead animals, and Will asks him how it's going, he answers, "Dull knife. I cannot work with a dull knife." Moreover, it's revealed that evening that he's long since uncovered that the animals died of capillary disintegration but didn't bother telling the others. Paul then asks him what caused it and Henry, with a big smile on his face, answers, "A disease. Maybe a virus... I'll find it. It won't get away from me." He keeps working there well into the night, barely registering when Will talks to him while he's leaving to go back to the hotel. That night, he finds that the pills were derived from the bats in the one cage, and is quite proud of himself, deciding to keep at it for a while longer. But shortly after he tells Will this over the phone, he's attacked and killed by Paul.

Among the other noteworthy characters is Marion Wilkins (Ann Staunton), one of Paul's patients, who has a heart murmur and comes to see him because she's been feeling on edge. When Paul starts to feel ill while trying to talk with her, he sends her away, asking her to come back the next day. However, she becomes his first victim, as he attacks and feeds on her blood during the night, and when he pays her a house-call the next day, the sight of him frightens her to the point where she literally drops dead. Another

patient, Carrie Dietz (Hallene Hill), is an old woman who's extremely hard of hearing. She appears briefly at the beginning, where she proves she doesn't have a lot of sympathy for Campbell when she hears about his attack, noting, "Him sitting up in that big house all day, doing the Lord only knows what to those poor animals." She appears again later, when Carol runs into her while on her way home from the restaurant, as she's out walking her dog. Unfortunately, that makes her an easy target for the vampire when he

fails to get a hold of Carol. Officer George Ryan (Herb Vigran) doesn't have a big role overall, but he proves to be vital during the third act, as he's with Buck when they learn what's going on and is the one who kills Paul at the end, saving Buck in the process. And then, there's Willie (Paul Brinegar), the local undertaker, who says in his first appearance that he can't complain too much about how good business has been lately, and is later aghast at Buck's idea to exhume Marion's body, saying his problem is that he never wants to believe what he's told.

Finally, the character of Dr. Matt Campbell (Wood Romoff) has only a scant few minutes of screentime at the very beginning, despite being such a significant character, and dies from his heart condition before he can tell Paul what he's been doing and what the pills are. Before he dies, he's desperate that others know what he's done, though whether it's due to the possible negative consequences of its misuse or because he merely wants everybody to know about his accomplishment and its potential, is up for debate.

Like a number of the directors who worked on B-movies like this during this era, Paul Landres, if nothing else, did know how to efficiently shoot and construct whatever he worked on. In fact, his direction of The Vampire, while not flashy, is more inspired than you may think. He seems particularly fond of shots where somebody is framed on one side of the screen in the foreground, with someone else in the background, such as in the pivotal moment when Paul first takes the pills, when he's lamenting Marion Wilkins' death to Carol, when he and Will are looking

over Campbell's notes in his lab, and in the moment where Harry Winston gloats about finding the source of the virus. Also, when Paul examines Marion the morning after she was attacked offscreen, Landres cuts back and forth between big close-ups of them as she becomes frightened of him and tries to get away, while he's perplexed by her reaction. The first glimpses we get of Paul as the vampire are shot in an eerie, obscuring manner, like when he spies on Henry in the Campbell lab, peering through a door's 

window, before sneaking in and watching him from behind one of the empty cages, and then finally attacking, and when Carol sees him stalking her from down the street as she walks home. In fact, that latter scene is among the movie's most atmospheric in terms of cinematography, with lots of really dark shadows, and the vampire looks really creepy when he's sneaking around in that shot of the street, backlit by one of the streetlights. The other is the scene in the cemetery right before that, where Buck has Marion's

body exhumed, only to make a gruesome discovery when he does. That scene just has a classically spooky look and feel to it due to the set, the shadowy cinematography, and the eerie silence, save for the chirping crickets. And finally, when Paul changes and attacks Will in the lab, the attack happens offscreen, visualized through their shadows on the wall, creating a nice, Expressionistic feel.

Another poverty row production, The Vampire was shot in just a week, with a very small budget of $115,000, and that's definitely obvious when you look at the sets, done at the Hal Roach Studios, which are all very simple. They include the mundane interiors of Paul's home and practice, like the waiting room, his office/bedroom, and Betsy's bedroom; the police station; the funeral parlor; Marion Wilkins' bedroom; the restaurant where Paul takes Carol out for dinner; and the operating and locker room at the county hospital where he performs the emergency surgery 

he's called away for. Even the most notable set, Campbell's lab, is nothing that elaborate: just a fairly big room filled with caged animals, shelves filled with chemicals, a desk and medicine cabinet off on its right side, and a large furnace on the left wall. Also, even though Campbell lived in a fairly big, old house, the lab is literally all we ever see of its interiors. Speaking of which, there was also a fair amount of location shooting, like the house exteriors (which, as you can see, was actually rather spooky-looking, 

even when shot day-for-night), the overall neighborhood where the film takes place (a combination of Palms, Los Angeles, and the city itself), and a sparse, wooded area as the setting for the climax. But for me, the best setting is. again, the cemetery, which was likely just a set done in the studio, but, as I said up above, is nicely spooky in how it looks, and has that classic, Gothic charm about it.

While drug addiction was obviously a thing during this period, it wasn't something you saw movies deal with, nor was it something that was even discussed that much publicly. Thus, even though the context is pure science fiction, The Vampire is rather progressive not only in its depiction of addiction but also in how shockingly accurate it is. In those scenes where Paul is finding it impossible to resist the urge to take the pills, he looks like someone who's going through withdrawals, with his sweating, lethargic facial expressions, his pacing and groaning, and finally, in

his full-blown desperation to have them. That really comes to a head in the scene in the lab between him and Will, when the latter asks him to give him the pills that he has with him, and Paul says, "I don't know that I can give them up. You don't know what it's like." Then, when Will locks all the pills away in that desk drawer, Paul is horrified, saying he has to be able to get to them, and later tries to rip it open when it becomes too much to bear. When he becomes the vampire in that moment, it could represent both the full extent of the withdrawal and his desperation, as

he then kills Will in order to satiate himself. In addition, his telling Carol to hold onto the pills for him, only to devise the way he gets them out of her pursue before leaving to perform the surgery, is very much something you can see an addict doing. It also shows how addiction hurts your loved ones, like in the scene where Paul comes home, Betsy tries to show him a new dance step, and he snaps at her, "I'm not watching anything, and why aren't you in bed?!" And when she tries to drag him into the next room, he

growls, "No. And turn off that stupid record... Did you hear me?! Turn it off!" The scene later, where she knocks on his door, unaware that he's not in there, is akin to what you might see if he really was an addict and was passed out from his fix inside. Finally, him sending Betsy away for her own safety is something that someone with a serious problem might do when they realize they may become a danger to their children.

While certainly not a gorefest, The Vampire does have some surprisingly gruesome moments for the time. The most horrific, by far, is when they open up Marion's coffin and find that, as a result of the capillary disintegration, her corpse has been reduced to a virtual skeleton, albeit with eyeballs still in the sockets and hair attached to the skull! That image shocked me when I first saw it, as you don't expect to see something that nasty in a 50's movie. And when you remember that it's due to the vampire's attacks on his victims, it makes you cringe, knowing that Henry

Winston's body likely disintegrated that way, and the same will happen to poor old Carrie Dietz after she gets attacked. Similarly, when Paul and Will note that, save for the bats, all of the animals in Campbell's lab have died, Will picks up the stiff corpse of a guinea pig and its front, right leg falls off! I'm sure that was just a goof with that prop but, still, in context of the movie, it's skin-crawling. And, after Paul kills Will, he disposes of his body by dragging him over to the lab's furnace, shoving him halfway in, throwing the

lever that operates it, and then pushing him all the way in, while you see the bright light glowing from within and hear the roaring flames. Even if Will was already dead, again, the idea itself is still horrifying, and brings to mind some of the appalling things they did during the Holocaust. He also leaves the oven on all through the night, as when Buck and Officer Ryan investigate the next day, they note how hot it is in the lab (can you imagine how it must've smelled?).

There are several instances in the movie, mainly during the latter part of the third act, where you see Paul transform into the vampire onscreen. The first couple of times, it focuses on his hand, but there's one instance, right before the start of the climax, where you see his face change. As I've said, it's done through lap dissolves, but this is where the low budget becomes pretty obvious, as you can tell that the image freezes temporarily as it transitions from one stage of makeup on John Beal to the next, whereas in the classic Wolf Man movies, they

managed to make the transition come off much smoother. Also, you can see that they kind of rock the footage back and forth a bit during the first part of the change. While the first stage of makeup during this sequence doesn't look too bad, the following one and the final look, again, aren't that great. And at the end, after Paul has been shot, you see him slowly turn back to normal as he lies there dead, which works better for this cheaper type of lap dissolve. In any case, despite the qualms I have about the vampire makeup, the other instances of this kind of work, like the bites on the victims' throats, the dead guinea pig that Will picks up, and Marion's grisly corpse, all look quite good, especially the latter.

The vampire's attacks on his victims start out fairly tame, with the first, on Marion, happening completely offscreen, but grow increasingly violent and more intense as the movie goes along. We do get an effective prelude to them in how frightened Marion is of Paul when he comes to her house the following day, so much so that it causes her weak heart to give out on her. When he changes the second time, the actual transformation is only alluded to, with a shot of his office in disarray, the pills scattered all over his desk, and the window wide open, before it transitions

back to Campbell's lab. Right after Henry Winston tells Will what he's learned about the pills over the phone, you see Paul sneak into the lab, then come up behind Henry and grab him. However, the camera focuses on the Bunsen burner Henry was using in his research, and you can see just a little bit of Paul attacking him on the floor over to the right. But the attack on Carrie Dietz out in the middle of the residential area is rather intense, with a truly suspenseful buildup in the scene beforehand, as Paul is clearly coming dangerously close to breaking 

during the surgery he's been tasked with performing (that scene makes me think of the moment in David Cronenberg's Rabid, something of a vampire movie in and of itself, when Dr. Keloid goes nuts while performing an operation). He manages to hold on long enough to complete the operation, but then has to rush out . After he learns that Carol has left the restaurant where they were having dinner, and we see him again struggle with the urge to take the pills, it cuts to Carol as she walks home. She meets and 

briefly talks with Carrie while she's out walking her dog, then heads on home. In a moment reminiscent of the famous scene in Cat People where Alice walks to the bus stop in the dark, Carol realizes she's being followed, as she hears footsteps behind in rhythm with her own. But, unlike Alice, Carol sees what's stalking her. The second time she looks behind her, she sees Paul quickly duck behind a tree and immediately runs for her front door. She fumbles the key while trying to unlock it, as Paul rushes towards her, and she gets inside in the nick of time, only for him to turn the handle and try to force his way in. 

He quickly gives up and instead goes after Carrie, farther up the street. Her dog, Priscilla, senses that something's wrong, as she twice stops, then looks back down the street and barks. Carrie tries to get her to come on, admonishing her for making noise, when Paul rushes at and pins her to the ground. Poor Priscilla runs for it and hides behind a large section of pipe on the side of a house, while the sound of the attack awakens those inside. Seeing the lights come on through the windows, Paul runs off, as the residents of that house and various others come out

and see Carrie lying there. As they rush to her aid, there's a poignant moment where Priscilla comes back over to Carrie's side, whining sadly. None of them see Paul watching from around the corner of a nearby house, and he runs off before they do. As I said before, when Paul changes next, this time in the Campbell lab while Will is there, his attack on his old college friend is depicted through the shadows on the wall, after which he uses the laboratory's furnace to dispose of the body. Then, finally, the climax starts

when Carol learns Paul is preparing to commit suicide and tries to intervene, unaware that he's becoming the vampire at that very moment. He decks her in the face, knocking her to the floor, but then fully changes before he can inject himself. When Carol comes to, she sees what Paul has become and he chases her out into the waiting room. Outside, Buck Donnelly and Officer Ryan arrive, and hear her scream as they walk to the front door. Paul is momentarily distracted when he hears Buck calling for Carol, and the sound of the 

two of them trying to break the door down, giving Carol the opportunity to escape out back. When he sees that she's gone, he follows her trail and chases her out into a sparsely wooded area. In the house, Buck and Ryan manage to break inside, and while the latter checks the interiors, Buck checks the outside.

He takes the same path into the woods, where up ahead, Paul chases and catches Carol around a small ravine. When he grabs her, Buck shows up and yells at him, then fires his gun up into the air to get his attention. Paul drops Carol to the ground and Buck promptly shoots him. However, he barely flinches from this and runs off deeper into the woods. Buck, after checking on Carol, chases after him, while Ryan trails behind them after having checked the house's interiors. Up ahead, Paul ducks down behind some bushes, and when Buck, conveniently, stops in front 

of him, he ambushes him. He grabs his leg, jerking him down to the ground, and quickly crawls on top of him. The two of them tumble down into a drain ditch, with Paul overpowering and pinning Buck to the ground, then throwing him to the other side of the ditch. Even when Buck manages to grab a hunk of wood and hit him, it only momentarily knocks him off, as he quickly pins him again, with Buck having to use the wood to, just barely, keep him at bay. Ryan and Carol show up and, seeing that Buck can't hold 

Paul off forever, Ryan points his gun and shoots.He hits Paul in the left shoulder, but like before, he just shrugs off the bullet and tries to get up there at them. It takes another two shots to finally put him down, as he collapses in front of the drain, and Buck, after confirming that he's dead, joins them up on the ridge. When they look back down, they see Paul go back to normal, before the movie ends with them heading off.

The music score was composed by Gerald Fried, who would later find fame scoring for television, doing the music for shows like Mission: Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Star Trek, and Gilligan's Island, as well as for the popular mini-series, Roots. While he did score a number of B- and exploitation movies during this period, he actually started out by scoring Stanley Kubrick's first handful of films, including his 1951 documentary, Day of the Fight. In any case, his score for The Vampire is quite memorable, mostly for its bombastic, threatening main theme, which you first hear during the opening credits and, like the Gill-Man's flutter-trumpet leitmotif, is heard quite a bit throughout the movie, often to accentuate the ferocity and horror of the vampire's attacks. It's a big part of why those scenes, particularly when he kills Carrie Dietz, are so effective. I also like how, in the scene where Marion Wilkins is frightened to death by the sight of Paul, rather than playing that main theme there, Fried instead plays a more low-key but still frantic string theme. And he really comes up with a shocking stinger for the moment where they open the coffin and see Marion's horrific corpse. The only thing the score never really does is create a sense of atmosphere in certain scenes, but it does everything else so well that it really doesn't matter.

For a movie you might not expect much from at first glimpse, The Vampire is surprisingly well done. It has a cast of memorable and likable characters, with a few recognizable names among the cast, and features an effectively sympathetic lead performance by John Beal; the story not only offers a unique take on vampires but also makes for a surprisingly allegory for drug addiction; the direction is above average; there are some good moments of atmosphere; it has some shockingly gruesome moments scattered throughout it; the music score is very thrilling and exciting; and the vampire attack scenes become increasingly fierce, with the last few and the climax coming as frantic and intense. The only problems are that the vampire makeup and the lap dissolves used for the transformations aren't that great, and the very low budget is quite apparent, especially in the sets. But, overall, if you're a fan of 50's B-movies, this is one that you might want to give a watch.