The television flickers to life. Scenes unfold before you, complete with lonely castles, stalwart heroes, buxom women, and, of course, luridly red blood splattered across a stone tomb — in Technicolor! This is the stuff on which thousands of late-night horror viewings have been built. And tonight’s movie is the ultimate classic of the genre. On to the sophomore entry in our Terrible Vampire Movies column — Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula!

Now, to be perfectly fair, I do not consider Horror of Dracula to be a terrible movie. In fact, if it counts as a terrible vampire movie, I am going to say that there has never been a good vampire movie.¹ But, it still gets a place in this column for its borderline camp, and for being the origin point of the majority of the imagery that we associate with those films. It is a mock-Gothic marvel, and, if you haven’t seen it yet, you are in for a real treat.