Incense for the Damned (1970)

Simon Raven's 1960 novel Doctors Wear Scarlet was, for a long time, a pet project of Terence Fisher's, but it ended up being directed by Robert Hartford-Davies, who substituted the pseudonym 'Michael Burrowes' after 'production problems'. Though it's the kind of film where the top-billed star gets killed off and forgotten at the half-way mark, Peter Cushing's hair changes from dyed black to greyish brown between interiors and exteriors and way too much exposition is provided by illustrated voice-overs, Incense for the Damned has a lot of good ideas (mostly from the novel) and deserves credit for being different from any other British horror movie. It may well be a shame that someone as ploddingly literal as Hartford-Davies wound up shooting the film, which has sections you'd swear were edited in from either a psychedelic porno flick or an ITC two-fisted action TV show, but - in all fairness - little in Fisher's work suggests he could have done all that much better by this unique subject.

Our hero/narrator, though he often seems crowded out of the film, is Tony Seymour (Alex Davion). He is in Greece to track down Richard Fountain (Patrick Mower), 'son of the Foreign Secretary and a brilliant Oxford don', who has disappeared 'while researching material for a book on Minoan rites' and apparently got mixed up with a crowd of high-living Mediterranean perverts. Tony - accompanied by Richard's weedy fiancée Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), his best friend Bob Kirby (Johnny Sekka) and pukka British official Major Derek Longbow (Patrick MacNee) - follows Richard's trail around the islands. Travelogue-style zooms and ouzo musak establish the locations, while Tony learns through an interview with an unlikely Greek Colonel (David Lodge) and a left-behind diary of the extensive orgiastic parties Richard has taken part in. It seems that Richard, who is impotent, has formed a liaison with Chriseis Constandinidi (Imogen Hassall), 'inheritress of an obscene and ancient practice', who has been a party to the nasty mass slashing death of a local girl. When the group finally locate Richard, he is swooned in the arms of Chriseis, who is drinking blood from his neck. Longbow and Chriseis both get killed in falls, and everyone else goes home.

Bob laments to Tony that they should have performed a rite to finish off Chriseis, but Richard slips back into his normal routine - lecturing, playing cricket, being engaged. Tony consults Holmstrom, an expert who tells him that 'vampirism is a sexual perversion', while a certain muddy psycho-analysis leads him to believe that Richard's sex problems are all to do with feeling trapped in 'Lancaster College' under the domination of Penelope's gently tyrannical father, the provost Walter Goodrich (Peter Cushing). It all ends in tears at the 'Quincentenary Dinner', where Richard delivers an attack on the Establishment, as represented by 'smooth deceivers in scarlet gowns, planning as soon as they leave their tables to leech onto you'. He then runs off and fatally bites Penelope before being chased onto the college roof and falling to his death - which allows for knowing reuse of Hammer Film images as the caped fiend chews the blonde's neck and is pursued across ancient rooftops (cf: Dracula Has Risen From the Grave). Since he is empowered to preside over the inquests into any deaths on college grounds, Dr Goodrich gets to cover it up and rule that Penelope and Richard died in a suicide pact. This time, Bob gets his way and before the corpse is buried, a stake is produced to be driven through Richard's heart.

Along with Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, Raven's novel was one of the first sustained attempts to free the vampire legend from the trappings of Bram Stoker. While Matheson took a science-fictional approach by linking vampirism to a blood disease, Raven's two-pronged assault at once rationalises the ancient legend as a modern psychological kink ('Are you trying to tell me that a girl sucking blood from a man's neck can produce an orgasm?' 'Yes, of course.') and a metaphor for the stifling, hide-bound world of Oxford and the Establishment. The casting of Patrick Mower, which echoes his role in The Devil Rides Out, as an impotent academic might seem to be a stretch for the actor, but he delivers a creditable reading of the role, which makes it a shame that the film puts so many narrative devices and extraneous characters between his agony and the audience. Though we see Richard in the narrated flashbacks, he doesn't enter the action until fairly late in the day and only becomes central to the story in his final speech (which is a wonderful piece of Raven's invective). There are parallels, perhaps, with Abel Ferrara's The Addiction, which seems stronger for making its academic-turned-vampire the focus of the plot and following her character development. Nevertheless, hacked-about as it is, Incense for the Damned holds the interest.

How many other British horror films of the period have relatively unstereotyped black (Johnny Sekka) or gay (William Mervyn as a don) characters? Or contain fairly erudite debate about classical mythology (Hercules and the Hydra are written in, as well as a superstition about eagles) and psychology ('sado-masochistic perversions are more likely to appeal to frigid females and impotent males'), not to mention arcane details about the legal quirks of Oxford Colleges? The distinguished cast give bits and pieces of good performances, though there's a sense that much is missing which could usefully have been included if some of the picturesque running-about and repetitive kaleidoscopic gropings were to be trimmed. The original title refers to dress etiquette at academic functions, but Mervyn adds a layer of meaning when he mentions an incontinent colleague's gown streaming 'like Count Dracula's cloak'; it's a shame the substitute title - if it means anything, it's not explained in the film - should have wound up on the screen, but the opening titles, written in pale yellow over a blue sky, are almost impossible to read anyway.

First Published In: Ten Years of Terror.

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