Dracula Has Risen from the Grave

Her first appearances were uncredited ones in Casino Royale and the Morecambe and Wise vehicle The Magnificent Two.

But her big break came when James Carreras saw a photo shoot of her in the Daily Mirror and immediately asked Aida Young and Freddie Francis to audition her for Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.

Convinced she'd flunked it, she actually ran out of a post-audition lunch with Young and Francis, wanting to save them the embarrassment of telling her that she hadn't got the role.

She arrived home hours later, where her mother told her the studio had been trying to get hold of her on the phone all afternoon.

Now, if you're a hammerhound of any calibre, you recognise some of those names.

Barbara Ewing from Future Weirdy, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, John Carson from previous weirdies The Plague Of The Zombies, Taste The Blood Of Dracula, and Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter.

And Rosalind Landor, who played Little Peggy in the greatest film ever made, The Devil Rides Out.

And, to top it all, Don Sharp, the director of previous weirdy Kiss of the Vampire.

And, [laughs] um, they were kind of lumbered with that really.

Anthony Hinds had come up with the idea for The Scars of Dracula as a direct sequel to Dracula Has Risen From the Grave.

Oh, right.

But when Christopher Lee was making noises about, "I don't wanna come back to it, I've done enough," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, he had to rethink the whole thing, write a Dracula script that didn't have Dracula in it, hence Taste the Blood of Dracula.

Right

...

Scars of Dracula and Taste the Blood of Dracula and Dracula has Risen from the Grave, et cetera, which one those all were.

And what I experienced when I was watching Scars of Dracula was very similar to what I used to experience with a Hammer film.