Empire Down: Dracula: Prince of Darkness (Patreon)

The formula of young people coming to a haunted house with varying degrees of enthusiasm is a standard trope of horror, often associated with The Haunting, slasher films, or, god help us, The Cabin in the Woods. But it's not the sort of thing you expect to see in Hammer films, which, for all their garishness, are essentially genteel movies about the struggle of preserving the Tory Christian way of life against the sway of luscious gothic temptation. In practice, Hammer reveals a lot of those vices, but at this point in their career, they're less prone to modern narrative formulae like the "lecherous teenagers go to a haunted house" than they might be in something like Dracula A.D. 1972.

The protagonists of Dracula: Prince of Darkness are not teenagers, and Castle Dracula is not a haunted house. But the rhythm and cadences of Prince of Darkness are absolutely that kind of movie; the characters are lured into Castle Dracula — by the bourgeois excesses and comforts they're used to — and seduced to the dark side. Shit, this even has the slasher staple of monstrous sexuality.

On top of that, there's a fun engagement with cults. Everyone in the Carpathians has fallen into the cult of Dracula; in the vacuum following Dracula's death, everyone lives their lives around him. They stake the corpse of young women to prevent them from becoming vampires. Dracula's butler Klove prepares for his master's return. Castle Dracula operates as usual, serving guests who don't question the fact that their host is dead. It's a fun little dive into cultural programming, with some brilliant lighting (when Klove enters Prince of Darkness, the movie slowly turns red and gothic) and one of Christopher Lee's finest (and mutest) performances as Dracula. One of the better Hammer sequels.