When a creature is so vile, so evil, so much an affront to the nature of the world and of God himself as is the vampire Count Dracula, there is no easy way to destroy him and keep him down. So it is that in every episode of man’s struggle against this infernal prince of darkness, we mortals seem to succeed in wholly destroying this spawn of Satan only to see him find some way to cheat death yet again, as he has for so many centuries now, so that he may once again rise up and cast his long shadow of terror and bloodshed across the countryside. It seems this notorious bloodsucker has any number of ways he can reverse the effects of his apparent destruction, but the most powerful one by far is making certain that his movie provides bushel baskets full of money for the producers.

With the power to produce so much green, it was a given that Hammer Studio’s Dracula would find a way to resurrect himself after being trapped under the ice at the end of Dracula, Prince of Darkness. Death by running water seemed a more easily circumvented fate than actor Christopher Lee’s emphatic statements regarding his unwillingness to portray the caped one again. Lee made a big name for himself with his turn as the undead ghoul in Hammer’s ground-breaking Horror of Dracula, but he was determined that the name he made wouldn’t be Dracula. So he bowed out of the sequel, Brides of Dracula, and didn’t return to the role until he was comfortable that he’d established himself as something more than the vampire count. But 1967’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness proved that audiences were still bloodthirsty not just for Dracula, but for Christopher Lee as Dracula. That people were so quick to revert to identifying him solely with Dracula made Lee squeamish about reprising the role yet again, though the outstanding success of Prince of Darkness meant that Hammer could hardly pass on making another film.

So would begin a long and sometimes irritating cycle of Christopher Lee making a Dracula movie for Hammer, complaining about what crap the film was and how he would absolutely never, ever do it again, then appearing in Hammer’s next Dracula film a year later. Although Lee did have his viable points for being dissatisfied with the role — chief among them that it grew increasingly unlike anything portrayed in the original Bram Stoker novel — in the end his continuous complaining coupled with the fact that he’d always show up to do another one “under protest” kind of makes you want to tell Christopher Lee to shut the hell up. Hey, I like me the Christopher Lee, but it’s not like the man built for himself some legacy of impeccable artistic integrity. He did show up in Chuck Norris films and other things far worse than even the least of his Hammer Dracula films. But that’s Christopher Lee for you. Sometimes he’s just a bit of a blowhard, but that doesn’t make his turn in these films any less enjoyable.

So obviously, despite Lee’s public bellyaching, Hammer managed to sign him on for a sequel to Prince of Darkness. There was really no reason to tinker with a winning formula, and so they figured they might as well bring back Terence Fisher to direct and Jimmy Sangster to do the screenplay. Things didn’t quite work out that way though, and when Fisher was injured in an auto accident, Hammer turned to Freddie Francis to fulfill the directorial duties. Additionally, Anthony Hinds ended up writing the screenplay (under his frequent pseudonym of John Elder). As good as the Sangster-Fisher team was, there was nothing to mourn in having Francis and Hinds working on the picture. Both were solid company men with a lot of good work to their credit. In fact, Freddie Francis’ tendency to experiment more with dreamlike, experimental set-ups would be a nice change from Fisher’s meticulous concentration on realism and detail.

The film lets you know right away that it isn’t going to mess around, although this warning turns out to be a bit of a fib since the movie does end up messing around a bit. But we begin with one of the finest opening sequences Hammer would devise for a Dracula movie, as a young boy goes to fulfill his duty as the local church’s bell ringer only to find the corpse of a young woman, drained completely of blood, dangling inside the bell. It’s a fantastic image in a film whose main strength is going to be in its imagery. This all occurs, we are led to understand, sometime during the events depicted in Prince of Darkness. The film then picks up some months after that one ends, with the local priest a hopeless drunk and the church abandoned. When a loudmouth, obnoxious monsignor rides into town, he berates everyone for still being afraid of Dracula even though the fiend was indisputably destroyed by that rifle-toting monk in Prince of Darkness.

To prove his point, the Monsignor insists on dragging the parish priest up to Dracula’s now-vacant castle to exorcise the grounds and scatter assorted religious iconography about the place. Unfortunately, while he’s doing this, the drunken depressed priest takes a tumble off a ledge and cracks open his head right on top of the ice beneath which lies the perfectly preserved corpse of Dracula. As blood from the priest’s head trickles through cracks in the ice, it touches Dracula’s lips and, well, there you go. Instant vampire resurrection. This process of reviving the count seems a little, you know, unimaginative. Last time, someone had to be strung above his ashes and completely gutted before Dracula was revived, but this time it just takes a couple drops of blood and a convenient ignoring of the fact that, blood of a disillusioned priest or not, Dracula was still trapped beneath running water and should have just died again instead of being able to burst forth from his icy tomb to wreak terrible vengeance upon the world.

This method of bringing Dracula back would, however, look positively inspired by the time the series got to Scars of Dracula, where the count is brought back to un-life when a random rubber bat flies into his crypt and drools some blood on him without any sort of build-up at all.

The first thing one notices about this whole opening, which is really one of the best procession of images in any Dracula film, is the pervasiveness of religious imagery. Well, I guess the first thing you might notice is how the drunk priest’s head is gushing blood in one shot and is entirely healed mere seconds later in another shot. But the religious imagery is strong too, and indeed Risen from the Grave will emerge as one of the most potently religious of the films, continuing the progression of the series from the relatively secular adventures of Van Helsing (he pays lip service to God, but his primary faith is in science and reason, and he sees vampirism in terms of being a disease) to the “I’m religious but I’ll trust my gun to do the Lord’s work” view of Father Sandor in Prince of Darkness, and now into the realm of Dracula not as a plague, but as a supernatural force that exists apart from and in defiance of the laws of a rational universe.

The Van Helsing-esque voice of the enlightened man of reason comes, somewhat more pathetically than with Van Helsing, from the character of Paul, a student and avowed atheist who is in love with the Monsignor’s niece, though the Monsignor is none too thrilled to have a Godless screwball courting a member of his family. The battle between the forces of secularism and religion is almost more prominent than the battle against Dracula, who eventually discovers that the Monsignor has stuck a big golden cross on the castle door and thus seeks ruthless revenge on the Christian defiler by enslaving the weak priest and moving into the basement of the inn where Paul works. If you’re thinking this is kind of a lame ultimate revenge against all mankind, then you’d pretty much be right. But Dracula also enslaves a buxom bar wench, so it’s not a total wash-out.

Dracula plans to eventually get around to making a vampire out of the monsignor’s niece, but he doesn’t seem to be in any big hurry, which means that while he gets to spend a lot of time hanging around in the cellar being illuminated by eerie green lights, we have to spend a lot of time watching him hang around the cellar being illuminated by eerie green lights. It does indeed make for some frighteningly effective imagery, which seems to be the entire point of this film, but a procession of eerie images doesn’t necessarily assemble into a completely enthralling or entirely coherent film. Things do drag a bit in the middle as we watch Dracula push around the wench and the priest while Paul and his love engage in late-night rendezvous on the rooftop. We know that eventually Dracula is going to kidnap her and there will be a scene of horses wildly pulling a carriage toward Castle Dracula. We just wish there wasn’t so much dead time before that happens.

This movie does contain one of the scenes that really set Christopher Lee off to ranting about how awful all the films are. Paul manages to drive a stake — and quite a large one at that — through Dracula’s heart, which Dracula proceeds to yank out and throw at Paul. Turns out you have to stake the vampire, yeah, but it’s meaningless unless you also pray while you are doing it. Paul, being an atheist or perhaps somewhat versed in vampiric lore, refuses to pray. Who’s heard of such a thing? You just slam the stake in, cut the head off, and then you’re done for the day. This particular scene drove Lee nuts. He still brings it up even today. Everyone knows that once you drive a stake into a vampire’s heart, he’s done for, prayer or no.

Gaffs like that aside, this is really rather a better entry in the series than Christopher Lee would have you believe. The story, though uneven, benefits from greater depth than usual, with the battle between secularism and Christianity adding some real meat to the non-Dracula bits. Of course, any attempt to extract some sort of final message from the film is bound to be confusing. It’s religion’s fault that Dracula gets resurrected. If the Monsignor had listened to the superstitious peasants, none of this would have happened. And it’s Paul the atheist who must come in and save the day when Christianity fails to get the job done. But Paul also winds up perhaps more open to belief in Christ by the end of the film, which is full of redemption and vampires getting impaled on big golden crucifixes. So I guess the overall religious message of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is, “don’t be an asshole.” Don’t be intolerant or a zealot, because then you just open the door for Christopher Lee to go stand on your roof while enveloped in purple mist. And while it may be cool to have Christopher Lee on your roof for a while, eventually he’s going to start asking about eating some of your chips and stuff like that.

Appearance-wise, Risen from the Grave is the best looking of all the Dracula films to date, and really one of the best looking films Hammer ever produced. The atmosphere in the film seems to be heavily influenced by the more phantasmagoric look of Mario Bava’s films, and the result is a Dracula film awash in otherworldly colors and swirling camera filters. It gives the movie a more dreamlike, hallucinogenic mood, which is perfectly fitting to mark the series’ move toward more supernatural, less “man of reason” fare. The next in the series, Taste the Blood of Dracula (it’s salty!), would contain even more overt references to Dracula not as some sort of social disease that can be explained with and combated by science, but as a creature straight from Hell imbued with the powers of Satan himself and able to be both resurrected and defeated through a series of religious or sacrilegious rituals.

Lee’s appearance, likewise, is even more ghoulish than previous incarnations. Each film sees him get more pallid and cadaverous, while his eyes get more bloodshot. He’s in snarling animal mode here, throwing people around wildly and smashing windows. He even gets a few lines this time around. It was watching this movie that I finally had my little epiphany about Dracula’s behavior. I’m slow, so you’ll have to forgive me if this was obvious to everyone else long ago. I was always a bit annoyed by the fact that although he is four or five times stronger than a regular man, Dracula’s answer to a fight is to turn tail and run. I mean, Paul isn’t exactly an imposing figure. Then it hit me, and well, all I can say is “duh.” Dracula is a vicious beast, but a beast never the less, and even the most vicious beast in nature is more likely to turn around and run away than fight. It’s a simple animal reaction to being challenged. Unless he’s really hungry, Dracula would rather take off. Not that I’d recommend combating all vampires by waving your arms in the air and yelling, “shoo!” but it seems to work sometimes. Dracula is only fierce-acting around people he already knows are weaker than him.

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is a nice Gothic horror despite some slow spots. It’s got a decent cast, though as always Peter Cushing is sorely missed. It has a tremendous look, smart direction, the usual great James Bernard score, and a script that shoots for more meaning than usual. Lee is less of a presence here than in the last film, and his shadow doesn’t seem to loom as powerfully over everything when he’s not present as it did in Prince of Darkness. But when he does show up, he looks exquisite. Although Lee himself runs down these later films in the series, this one is actually quite good, and the next one would be even better.