by Stephen Vagg
Can a film be jinxed? A crew member died on set making AIP’s Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966); the studio covered up the blood stain and moved on, and within a few months several key cast members had prematurely deceased. The Esperanto-dialogued Incubus (1966) saw several cast members die young including one from a murder-suicide. A large number of cast and crew died of cancer after making The Conqueror (1956), shot near a nuclear testing site, though a more probable cause was smoking.
Hammer Films’ Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb also has a reputation as a cursed movie because its production was rife with accidents and several people associated with it died. Oh, and the story involved mummies, which have a long tradition of curses.
It’s also really entertaining!
Blood was one of the last Hammer horrors, made and released in 1971. The studio was bursting with productivity at the time although in hindsight it was in decline, with many key producers recently departing – Tony Hinds, Anthony Nelson Keys, Michael Carreras (these names will mean nothing to non-Hammer fans, but all are significant). American Eliot Hyman and his company Seven Arts, so crucial to the expansion of Hammer in the 1950s, had recently pulled out of film production (Seven Arts became so big that it took over Warner Bros., but then sold out to the Kinney Corporation). The company had released a series of high-profile disappointments such as Moon Zero Two and The Lost Continent, and had begun to look artistically tired, compared to its competitors such as Tigon and Amicus.
Still, Hammer was still Hammer, and it had money to make movies, which was/is not nothing, especially in the British filmmaking environment of the time, grasping for air after Hollywood money pulled out in the late 1960s.
Few studios had a cannier head of production than Sir James Carreras, the charming war hero whose flair and salesmanship had helped turn Hammer into one of the most dynamic companies in British film history. When Hammer’s traditional arrangements with American companies dried up, Carreras swiftly arranged for the studio to do deals with the British companies EMI and Rank; Blood was made and released in association with EMI Films (more on EMI in depth here).
Carreras was approached by Howard Brandy, a publicity man and aspiring producer, who had the screen rights to Bram Stoker’s 1903 novel, The Jewel of the Seven Stars – about an archaeologist’s daughter who turns out to be the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess who was turned into a mummy. Hammer had made several mummy movies – The Mummy, The Curse of the Mummy, The Mummy’s Shroud – which hadn’t enjoyed the success of its Dracula and Frankenstein pictures, but Carreras could instantly grasp its cinematic possibilities: there was a monster, a part for a pretty girl and inhouse star Peter Cushing, plus a clear marketing angle in that it was based on a book from the author of Dracula.
The job of writing the script was given to Christopher Wicking, an avid horror enthusiast who had earned a number of screen credits for AIP (The Oblong Box, Scream and Scream Again). Wicking later said, “what appealed to me was doing a mummy movie without someone stumbling about in sheets and bandages”, although he admits that the picture “became more and more like a mummy film as it went along.”
Apparently, Gordon Hessler and Peter Duffield were originally considered to direct, before Wicking suggested Seth Holt [left], a one-time actor who became a top editor at Ealing Studios in the 1940s; he was the brother-in-law of Robert Hamer, the brilliant Ealing director who drank himself to death.
At Ealing, Holt was promoted to producer then director, making his debut with Nowhere to Go (1958), which turned out to be Ealing’s penultimate film (the last one was made in Australia, incidentally: The Siege of Pinchgut). Holt went on to direct two spectacularly gripping psychological thrillers for Hammer, both written by Jimmy Sangster – Taste of Fear (1962) and The Nanny (1965) – as well as the intriguing Station Six Sahara (1963), made for British Lion.
Holt was clearly dripping with talent, but he seemed to struggle outside a strong studio like Ealing or Hammer; two films that he worked on were halted during filming, Danger Diabolik and Monsieur Lecoq (the former was eventually made with a new director and cast but not the latter); he developed if… (1967) but gave it over to Linsday Anderson; he fell ill making Danger Route (1967; he lost a lot of his own money producing a documentary about whaling, Barbed Water (1969). He may have even gone bankrupt (a “Seth Holt” appeared in the High Court of Justice in Bankruptcy in October 1970.)
Holt hadn’t directed anything in two years because, he admitted from the set of Blood, “I haven’t been offered anything to direct.”
Chris Wicking clashed with Howard Brandy during preproduction – Wicking claimed Brandy wanted to fire Holt while Brandy says Wicking’s work was unsuitable and had to be rewritten by Holt. Brandy fired Wicking but the latter said he continued to meet with Holt during pre-production.
As mentioned, the male lead in Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb was given to Hammer’s inhouse star, Peter Cushing. Holt and Brandy wanted the part of Cushing’s daughter (the real lead) given to Amy Grant, a theatre actor who’d worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but Sir James Carreras insisted on Valerie Leon [left], a buxom model who had appeared in some Carry On films. Critics and colleagues sometimes sniggered at Carreras and his taste for pretty girls, but his instincts would be proved spectacularly correct in the case of Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb; Leon had an enigmatic larger than life quality that proved so essential to the move’s appeal (even if her voice was completely re-voiced in post-production by another actor). (Sidebar: we’ve been unable to find out anything about Amy Grant. Maybe she worked under a different name.)
Carreras wanted the part of Leon’s boyfriend played by an Australian actor, Mark Edwards [below, right], who the studio chief thought might become a star; Edwards’ character was named Tod Browning, after the director of 1931’s Dracula, which was cute. The rest of the cast was dominated by the sort of classy British actors that you could get in horror films because they were shot in London: George Coulouris, James Villiers, Hugh Burden, etc.
James Carreras lured his son Michael back to the studio to work as Hammer’s Managing Director, so Carreras Jnr would oversee production. Filming started on 11 January 1971 at Elstree Studios, six weeks earlier than originally planned (another project had fallen over, meaning studio space was empty). The cast and crew noted that Holt had a tendency to hiccup, but no one thought too much of it. Holt was not in the best shape – he ate badly, and drank and smoked heavily (he’d failed the insurance test), but this was normal in 1971 Britain.
On the first day of filming, Peter Cushing was allowed to leave work early to check on his wife, Helen, who was seriously ill with emphysema. (Amicus had let Cushing do this regularly while making his previous film, I Monster). However, Helen took a turn for the worse: she wound up going into hospital and died on January 14. This devastated Cushing – the two had been married for nearly 27 years – and he quit Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. (He was eventually able to resume his career, living until 1994 despite trying to chain smoke himself to an early death.)
Needing a replacement, Michael Carreras put in an emergency call to Andrew Keir on Friday 15 January, asking him to start Monday. Keir, an accomplished actor, had a history of “coming off the bench” for Hammer – he took over the role of Quatermass in Quatermass and the Pit (1968), and Dracula’s persecutor in Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966). Keir was no Cushing or Lee, so the film would lack some star power, but he could be counted on to do a good job (and he did).
Filming continued on schedule, with Holt, from all accounts, doing a diligent job. Tom Hutchison did a profile on the director in The Guardian which appeared in January 1971 stating, “in an industry better organised and more aware of the capabilities within it, the Ealing-hatched talent of a man like Seth Holt would be constantly employed.”
The production was plagued with a series of crises. The marriage of production manager Christopher Neame broke up, Valerie Leon missed filming due to illness, and a person in the art department was killed in a motorbike accident. Seth Hol continued to hiccup, and his asthma was badly affected while filming a sandstorm sequence. According to Neame, Hammer called in a doctor several times to check on the director, but Holt insisted on continuing.
Five weeks in and there was only one week of filming to go. Holt and his wife Sally had some friends over for dinner; at the end of the meal, he turned to his wife and said, “I’m going, Sal” and toppled sideways from ta heart attack. He died on 14 February 1971, aged 47.
Michael Carreras arranged for the unit to film pick-up shots while he went over the footage that had been shot; Holt kept a lot of notes in his head, so the job was difficult. Someone had to finish directing the movie; Carreras Jnr offered the job to Australian Don Sharp who’d worked several times for Hammer (The Devil Ship Pirates, Rasputin, Kiss of the Vampire) but he was busy prepping other project so Carreras, who had directed, stepped in himself.
Filming resumed on 15 February, with Holt’s funeral held several days later – Leon was not allowed to go, needed for filming, which understandably upset her, but Hammer felt the show must go on. Although Carreras found the remaining footage confusing, he managed to get the film completed (reshooting some scenes as well) – Wayne Kinsey’s book Hammer Films: The Elstree Studio Years contains a comprehensive account of who shot what, with Leon wrapping on 24 February and shooting completed on 26 February. Finishing the film was a tribute to the professionalism of all involved – although Michael Carreras did fire Holt’s editor Oswald Hafenrichter (who died two years later).
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb was given a general release in November 1971, on a double bill with Hammer’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde. It was not a blockbuster – Hammer foolishly had this double bill competing against another of their double bills, Twins of Evil and Hands of the Ripper. All the Hammer horrors that year were overshadowed by the surprise commercial success of its big screen adaptation of On the Buses, which was a blockbuster, ushering in a spate of big screen adaptations of TV shows from Hammer.
We have no idea how much money Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb brought in, but it must have turned into a nice little long-term earner – after all, the film has never stopped playing and over time, a devoted cult has grown around it. This is partly due to the sexiness of Seth Holt’s death, but also the qualities of the film.
There is a magic about Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, at least to its fans. It’s not completely well realised, but there is so much to admire: the professionalism of Andrew Keir, the splendid villainy of James Villiers and James Cossins (who plays a sadistic nurse), the bewitching Valerie Leon (who genuinely seems like she stepped out of the Ancient past), Tristram Carey’s superbly eerie musical score, Scott MacGregor’s enjoyable production design. We can never follow the plot, but it’s not hard to get the gist – members of an expedition are killed off one by one, a woman is possessed.
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb did not reverse Hammer’s fortunes in the 1970s, but it remains easily one of the studio’s best efforts from that decade, along with The Vampire Circus, The Vampire Lovers, Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Captain Kronos and Twins of Evil. The studio’s decision never to star Valerie Leon in anything again when she so patently had abundant star quality only makes sense when you recall Hammer failed to properly re-use all its female horror stars, from Ingrid Pitt and Raquel Welch to Hazel Court and the Collinson twins.
Still, one semi-classic is better than nothing – and that’s what Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb is… a gold plated semi-classic.
