22 October: Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter

 

Slow burn horror is fine and dandy, but sometimes you just want your horror movie to feature a fanfare of trumpets on the soundtrack and a lot punch-ups on the screen. Today’s movie challenge for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween is “Action Horror,” and I’m all about Hammer Studios’ 1974 swashbuckling classic Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter.

Captain Kronos is a straightforward tale of derring-do. The good Captain (Horst Janson) is called by an old army buddy of his, Dr. Marcus (John Carson), to help investigate a lot of strange deaths happening in his village. The victims have been found prematurely aged before popping off this mortal coil. Kronos and his road buddy, the hunchback Professor Hieronymus Grost (John Cater), suspect vampires are afoot (as you do), and they begin the process of snuffing them out. Along the way, Kronos and Grost free a young gypsy woman from the stocks. Her crime: dancing on the Sabbath! Carla (Caroline Munro) joins the duo in helping to rid the land of its bloodsuckers infestation.

Captain Kronos is a romp, a hoot, and a real humdinger all rolled into one. There’s swordfighting, bodices, and creepy old age make-up. Horst Janson is a pleasant hero who can swing a sword and toss off a bon mot with a flourish. Caroline Munro is, as always, beautiful and feisty as the gypsy girl Carla. Director Brian Clemens keeps everything moving at a quick clip. (Sadly, this would be his only film as director.) The look of the picture screams “Hammer!” with its muted colors (except for the red stuff, if you know what I mean), outdoor forest scenes, and 18th century British village sets.

Captain Kronos was to have been the first in a series, but unfortunately that never happened. Hammer was falling on tough times, and soon closed up shop. There’s been a novelization and some comic book adaptations that furthered the tale, but we never got more of Kronos, Grost, and Carla on the big screen, to which I say “Boo!”

It is 16 October. There are 15 days until Halloween.

One of the things I most love about genre is the way that it never stands still, never stays one thing for very long. It’s like a piece of chewing gum that falls on the floor. Before you can say “five-second rule,” that wad of gum has picked up a lot of stuff – hair, dirt, dust, fuzz, maybe a toenail clipping.

Genre is the same way. Start of with a horror movie, and over time, as it passes from filmmaker to filmmaker, from generation to generation, you get horror-comedies, sci-fi horror, romantic horror, action-horror, horror westerns. There as many permutations as you can imagine – and more.

Well some mash-ups can go too far...

Today’s movie is an example of this evolution. In the 1950s and 1960s, England’s Hammer Studios was a veritable horror movie factory. Movies like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Horror of Dracula (1958), and The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) starring actors like Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Oliver Reed were bringing the classic Universal Studios monsters to a new generation of audiences. As the years passed, these movies, like our wad of gum, began to pick up bits of other movies. Before you knew it, Peter Cushing was in Hong Kong fighting kung-fu vampires, and Christopher Lee’s Dracula was being pulled into the Swinging London of the 70s by a bunch of hippies.

Another genre mash-up that Hammer developed was the swashbuckling horror adventure yarn. Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter is a horrific slice of derring-do – and I mean that in a good way!

Horst Janson as Kronos is a pleasant enough hero, though his cheekbones do a lot of the heavy lifting. Caroline Munro, a veteran of the sword & sandal fantasy genre, is a wonderful co-star and sidekick. Everything has that “Huzzah!” feeling that you expect from a swashbuckling picture. On top of that, you get a pretty novel spin on the vampire myth. This was supposed to be the first in a series of movies, but Hammer closed soon thereafter due to financial problems.

Another level to the proceedings, and one that I was not aware of before, is that Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, is sometimes considered to be a fourth entry to the Karnstein Trilogy. Fans of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella, "Carmilla,” will recognize the name. The saga of the Karnsteins, a family of vampires, is (very) loosely traced over three movies, The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), and Twins of Evil (1971). If we consider Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter to be a fourth installment, then it would seem that one of the Countess Karnsteins descendants made it out of Central Europe and into England. It’d be fun to see another of these bodice-rippers set on the shores of the New World.

Imagine: The Karnsteins in America! A colonial 'Salem's Lot!