Four English tourists: Charles Kent (played by Francis Matthews), his wife Diana (played by Suzan Farmer), his brother Alan (played by Charles Tingwell) and his wife Helen (played by Barbara Shelley) arrive in the Carpathians for a climbing holiday. Despite warnings from the superstitious locals they spend the night at Castle Dracula. Here, Dracula's sinister manservant, Klove (played by Philip Latham), uses the blood of one of them as a life force to resurrect his master...
Dracula Prince Of Darkness was the official sequel to Hammer's Dracula (1958). Hammer had made two follow-ups to their box-office hit with The Brides Of Dracula (1960) and Kiss Of The Vampire (1964), but neither featured Christopher Lee. Some say that Lee refused to repeat his role through fear of becoming typecast, while others say that Hammer dropped him because he wasn't a big enough star. He got billed fourth in the first film. Whatever the reason, Lee finally returned to his original role after seven years and Dracula Prince Of Darkness made it into the top twenty money-spinners of 1966. You will notice in this film that Christopher Lee has no lines, he has always maintained that the lines he was given were so bad that he wouldn't speak them. On the other hand screenwriter Jimmy Sangster (who penned the screenplay under the pseudonym John Samson) swears that he didn't write any.
Dracula Prince Of Darkness stands as one of the best sequels to Hammer's 1958 film, which is regarded by many as a classic. While Christopher Lee has no dialog, he still manages to create a feeling of lurking evil which lasts long after the movie's over. Whereas in later films he was little more than a supporting character with very little to do. The supporting cast which includes Francis Matthews, Andrew Kier and Barbara Shelley is excellent and Thorley Walters does a fine job of portraying the fly-eating Renfield, an original character from Bram Stoker's novel who is renamed here as Ludwig. Philip Latham is also noteworthy as the creepy retainer, Klove. Director Terence Fisher does a fine job of staging the build-up to the Count's resurrection. This first half of the film is genuinely atmospheric, gothic stuff with the camera tracking around the darkened corridors of the castle to suggest that although Dracula himself is dead, his malevolent spirit is present all the time.
