GER26 Blood for Dracula
GER26 Blood for Dracula
SPECIAL EVENTS
Paul Morrissey’s Blood for Dracula starring the great Udo Kier as Count Dracula has become a cult classic known for its outrageousness and gross humor. But there is more to this film than meets the funnybone. Not a film for the squeamish!
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Presented in tribute to Udo Kier, 1974’s Blood for Dracula remains one of the great delirious artefacts of cult cinema: obscene, elegant, perverse and unexpectedly fragile. Directed by Paul Morrissey and originally released in some markets as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, the film casts Kier as an aristocratic, visibly wasting Count who travels to Italy in search of virginal blood, only to find a world already rotten beneath its Catholic surfaces. Opposite Joe Dallesandro’s earthy peasant and a household of daughters poised between innocence and performance, Kier turns Dracula into something both monstrous and pitiful: a creature of appetite, exhaustion and aristocratic decay.
What makes the film unforgettable is not simply its gore or satire, but Kier’s singular control of tone. His Dracula is camp and tragic at once, absurdly theatrical yet genuinely doomed. Shot in Italy soon after Flesh for Frankenstein, the film fuses Grand Guignol horror, sexual farce and political provocation into a wickedly stylised attack on class, purity and repression. Few performers could make such sickness feel so exact, strange and sublime, or so piercingly funny in collapse itself.
“Conveying at once a great menace and vulnerability, Kier was born for this moment, and he leans into Drac’s juicy fervor with glee.” - Washington City Paper
What makes the film unforgettable is not simply its gore or satire, but Kier’s singular control of tone. His Dracula is camp and tragic at once, absurdly theatrical yet genuinely doomed. Shot in Italy soon after Flesh for Frankenstein, the film fuses Grand Guignol horror, sexual farce and political provocation into a wickedly stylised attack on class, purity and repression. Few performers could make such sickness feel so exact, strange and sublime, or so piercingly funny in collapse itself.
“Conveying at once a great menace and vulnerability, Kier was born for this moment, and he leans into Drac’s juicy fervor with glee.” - Washington City Paper
Rating:
R18
Runtime:
106 mins
Session Times
Prospect Cinemas
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