Cuadecuc, vampir (1971) User Reviews

Surreal, unsettling, avant garde

[Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki · 6/10 · 13 August 2013]

une production HAMMER FILMS (sic !)

mise en scene par Jesus Franco

A sort of behind the scenes, non-linear look at the making of Jess Franco's Nachts, wenn Dracula erwacht (Count Dracula, 1970) but with a more avant garde twist. At times, this documentary is more eerie than its source film.

Filmed in harsh, high contrast black-and-white film, soft focus, at times even out of focus, some scenes are so blown out in white that they are difficult to watch - but curiously, that seems to help the film's atmosphere. Like a lot of work by Jean Rollin, this has a strangely hypnotic, beautifully abstract, look and feel to it, as lightning flashes in rain and fog, as people stumble about in candlelit buildings. The fact that we only see the flashes of lightning, but do not hear the crack of thunder at all, is only even more disorienting.

The title scene is so blown out that is looks like it is an x-ray.

No proper music score, only lower ambient sounds, sometimes as harsh as the cinematography. The unusual tones keep the footage interesting, if we heard what was being spoken, it would appear as any other "Behind the Scenes/ Making of... " feature. It gives the footage a more surreal, dreamlike, haunting quality.

The purpose of this documentary is to disassemble the scenes and effects of Jess Franco's Dracula, with little editing, no music score, and without its proper audio track, so we see what happened during the filming of the scene, as opposed to what ended up on-screen in the final cut of the film. (Such as Christopher Lee smiling and joking with the crew, as he casually gets into his coffin, preparing to film the next scene; and several times when the actors walk off the edge of the set, upon completion of the scene; and most amusingly, how the effect of the vampire bat fluttering away was achieved)

Occasional light flares in camera are striking, so are the scenes of castles and countryside.

The only spoken words in this film occur beginning at 65 minutes into the film, when Christopher Lee is shown getting out of costume, and commenting on the Bram Stoker novel, Dracula.

Not for everyone, and most certainly bizarre, but rewarding for those with an abstract/ avant garde mindset.

Uncle Jess goes Avant-Garde!

[morrison-dylan-fan · 8/10 · 18 July 2012]

Whilst recently reading down a list of rare,"left field" films,the first title which instantly caught my attention was an Avant-Garde documentary based around the making of Jess Franco's 1970 Count Dracula movie. Despite having never seen a single Jess Franco film before,and only knowing the basic outline to the Dracula novel,the mix of a behind the scenes doc and Avant-Garde film making sounded like an exciting,unique experience.

View on the documentary:

Replacing all of the wails and screaming with a low humming,abrasive proto-Post-Rock soundtrack scattered with the fading,natural sounds of drowning voices,director Pere Portabella, (who a few years later would help in writing the constitution of Spain) turns Franco's Horror into a fading dream. Portabella cleverly uses a number of different exposure styles to create multiple,rough surfaces of the documentary.

Along with turning the "Scream Queens" in Franco's movie into beautiful Femme Fatale's, Portabella also bravely decides to turn the documentary into a political film, by using the soundtrack to "silence" the voices of the cast and crew,and also focusing on the poorly done special effects to show that Jess's Francisco Franco like- monster image of being powerful and frightening is in reality something fake which can be destroyed with a steak through the heart.

good seeing Christopher Lee

[christopher-underwood · 8/10 · 10 March 2024]

An extremely interesting documentary although not usually quite like this. It relates to a film being made by Jess Franco of Count Dracula (1970) during General Franco's regime, by Pere Portabella which is a mix of footage and other angles, also of his own bits along the way. He often uses surrealist like solarised images by overexposure shots. Especially in the woods with the horse and coaches most affective, also with the dry ice used for the mist and plays around with it. The sound, but no dialogue, is rather clever although rather annoying near the end as if the sound has been stuck. It is really good seeing Christopher Lee here in black & white and silent with a lot of age added. It was also good to see Herbert Lom here but of course it is really great to see Soledad Miranda, and the odd smile for us, and then killed in a crash weeks away.

surreal behind the scenes glimpse of a horror movie set

[tednewsom · 15 December 2002]

Noted Catalonia surrealist Pedro Portobella shot this short subject on the set of Jess Franco's EL CONDE DRACULA.

I think there are a lot of things going for it: non-linear approach, uncomfortably dissassociative sound track, surreal juxtaposition of unexpected images, etc. Anyone expecting a linear documentary will be disappointed, even angry. This is a stand-alone work of cinema art, not a monster movie.

I think it's far more interesting and unsettling than, let's say, the 4 minute behind-the-scenes promo shot for DRACULA 72 AD, though it has a lot in common with it superficially. Both the promotional short and the Portobella film are shot silent; the only sync dialogue is a bit of Christopher Lee speaking about Dracula. Both show the practicalities of film making, the crew and cast in an "unreal" setting with lights and cameras; both place the Victorian central character in an uncomfortable contemporary location. The major difference is intent. The promotional short, "Prince of Darkness," is intended to hype a movie. Portabella's film is a ghostly work of art.

Better than the Film it's about

[Cineanalyst · 7/10 · 6 December 2017]

Spoilers Warning Elaborated: This review contains spoilers for "Nachts, wenn Dracula erwacht" (1970), as well as for this film, "Cuadecuc vampir."

A documentary following the filming of Franco's cheap international "Dracula" adaptation "Nachts, wenn Dracula erwacht" (1970), "Cuadecuc vampir" one-ups its subject in both style and content selection. (And the documentarians, apparently, didn't even have enough respect for the other production to realize it wasn't a Hammer film, as the documentary's credits erroneously claim.) A silent film with a musical score until the end scene, "Cuadecuc vampir" reminds me of the simultaneous silent productions of early talking pictures made in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when some movie theatres had yet to transition to the equipment required to screen talkies. Similarly, other films were made into separate foreign-language versions with a different cast and crew. The 1931 "Dracula," for instance, was made into two different films, one in English and another in Spanish, and may've also been edited into a silent release. Sometimes, these secondary productions upstaged the primary film. That's kind of what happened here.

Rather than simply being behind-the-scenes footage or a making-of documentary, "Cuadecuc vampir" is a simultaneous filming of the same production as Franco's film. It replaces the latter's absurd abundance of zoom-ins with some superior framing of images behind foreground objects, in addition to the focus on light with the low- quality black-and-white photography. "Cuadecuc," of the title, translates as "cuvette," which is a tube used to hold samples for experiments. It's an apt analogy for this experimental film.

It also cuts out some of the worst parts of Franco's film and includes some interesting and humorous behind-the-scenes footage of the other crew filming the same scenes or the actors in between takes. Christopher Lee lurching at the camera before getting into his casket as Dracula, or Maria Rohm, the film's Mina, winking at the camera during a scene are some of the more enjoyable and playful moments. The silence removes the often-tired dialogue. There are no taxidermic animals attacking, as Franco ridiculously had in one scene. Klaus Kinski's Renfield is eliminated, and as it frequently turns out in movie adaptations of Bram Stoker's novel, the film's no worse without the character. We don't see the other film's weird Van Helsing stroke, either, nor its death-by-fire ending. Consequently, the pacing is better and is even quite rhythmic, as opposed to the slow, dull pacing in the Franco version.

The five minutes near the end where the musical score is stuck on one repeating note is an annoying exception to this film being an improvement. It sounds like a broken record or piece of malfunctioning equipment. The scene after this, however, is the best part and its only talking sequence. Rather than reshoot the ending of Franco's version, which is a bad alteration to Stoker's original take, this film shows Christopher Lee describing and reading Dracula's death scene from Stoker's novel. This scene also has the best mirror shots I've seen in any Dracula movie, as the camera whirls around Lee's reflection in two dressing-room mirrors and finally upon his image outside them. It's the documentary coming out of the mirror of the production of the fictional film, to the reality of Lee, out of makeup, reading the fiction's source. It's certainly better than the camera tricks to not show Lee's Dracula's reflection in the castle mirror shot in the Franco film.

"Cuadecuc vampire" may not be very interesting by itself, but viewing it after the disappointment of the 1970 "Dracula," it somewhat makes having viewed the other film worth it.

Extremely strange

[Red-Barracuda · 6/10 · 15 November 2021]

This has to qualify as one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. Made from behind the scenes footage and out-takes from Jess Franco's 1970 Count Dracula, director Pere Potrabella has created an experimental bizarre-athon. Shot in high-contrast black and white and silent except for minimalistic music and sound effects, and including scenes from the film mixed with actors relaxing behind the scenes, along with some shots of the film crew, this one is a total head scratcher from start to finish. I have no idea what the intention could possibly have been but it did have a strange effect which kept me watching. It was also nice to see rare footage of late enigmatic cult actress Soledad Miranda chilling on set. Basically, this one is not for the weak! Venture at your own peril!

A Film About a Film About...

[cstotlar-1 · 10/10 · 15 February 2013]

This is truly a film/experience. There is no dialog until the very last and this is in English followed by publicity for the original Franco film in German. To complicate things even more the film was shot in Spain and the title "Cuadecuc" is in Catalan! The sound track is pure genius with little formal music - a part of Wagner's "Ring Cycle" - with the other parts made by impressive sound effects and music derived from them. We see clapboards and behind-the-scenes props everywhere as well as the actors putting on make-up or relaxing after scenes. The audience is in the film, beside it AND outside it in a matter of seconds!

Curtis Stotlar

'The world seems full of good men, even if there are monsters in it.'

[parry_na · 7/10 · 3 November 2017]

In this curio, Pere Portabella filmed many silent scenes from Jess Franco's 1970 production, the oft-derided 'El Conde Dracula', and pieced them together. His images are deliberately very grainy and clumsy, as if his goal is to create a documentary-style product - Portabella was by this point known as a documentary director after all. Christopher Lee as the main man features here, alongside other stars Soledad Miranda, Herbert Lom and Franco himself.

Any time we are in danger of being treated to moments from the familiar story, there are inserts from behind the scenes featuring false cobwebs being sprayed over coffins, a poor old rubber bat being coerced into action, and general larks from the cast and crew. What results is a curious hybrid of genuinely unsettling scenes, often filmed without dialogue and saturated with unearthly moans and noises, in stark, heavily-grained black and white.

In fact, the only dialogue we're treated to is at the end of the film, with Christopher Lee's very grand reading of a scene from the novel.

The whole experience is an odd one, and certainly not everyone's pint of blood. I'd suggest, however, it's worth a look. I rather enjoyed it.

What we have with 'Vampir Cuadecuc' is a curiously powerful, abstract experiment, some of which looks very impressive in a noir-ish kind of way, and some of it simply showing actors rehearsing and effects being applied. It reminds me of 1932's 'Vampyr' in that the imagery is stark and sombre and disconnected, but ultimately very moody and atmospheric.

Blurring the worlds of horror and the Avant-garde!

[samxxxul · 9/10 · 13 May 2020]

One of the most important clandestine productions in Spanish cinema, "Cuadecuc, Vampir is an Arthouse documentary film shot on the set of Count Dracula while Jesus Franco was making it. Catalian solitaire Pere Portabella crumbles Jesus Franco's 1970 film, Count Dracula ', to build his own gaze on the leading vampire in Bram Stoker's novel. Produced by Hammer Film, from an idea by poet Joan Brossa, "Cuadecuc, Vampir" was made with negatives stolen from state television, the work is constructed through the filming of "Conde Drácula" (1970), by Jesús Franco, with Sir Christopher Lee and the muses Maria Rohm and Soledad Miranda in the cast. This film is undeniably included within that semi-clandestine stream of films that were made openly in opposition to the Francisco Franco Regime. The sound is by Carles Santos violating the traditional template and replaces soundtrack with an abstract soundscape of coffins, makeup and filming preparation, knocks, worked by reverberation effects, delays and echoes.

'Cuadecuc, vampir' is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Not only does it show how 'The Count Dracula' by Jesús Franco was made, but it hypnotizes, like you have landed yourself on the set and forces you to take advantage of it. It is also one of the favourite films of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. Cuadecuc, Vampir feels a lot like an ancestor of E. Elias Merhige's Begotten (1990), blurring the worlds of horror and the Avant-garde. The final passage with Sir Christopher Lee is so wild, the Dracula monologue and the look into his eyes adds to 10/10 rating for this great piece of Art. My respect for Pere Portabella and other artists involved in this film for suspending the notion that a fourth wall even exists.

Art school only.

[apjc · 1/10 · 19 November 2017]

Terrible, if it was a silent movie that'd be OK. The soundtrack is awful pretentious nonsense. Morricone could do it far better, it even lacks the basic horror type menace. Just repetition of meaningless percussion and synthesized noise with no meaning or relevance to the original horror story. If I could I'd give it minus points.

franco as Dracula

[martinflashback · 10/10 · 1 April 2011]

Director Portabello takes silent footage from the filming of Jess Franco's fourth-rate Dracula film and makes a multi-leveled masterpiece. The striking sound track consists of drills, scrapes, and finally, Christopher Lee reading the end of the Stoker novel. The electric buzzing is occasionally interrupted by snatches of pop songs and long periods of silence, which adds to mystery as tech and cameramen slide into view behind the stony, mute actors. Is this the imposed silence of awful Franco years? Portabello is Catalan, and the Catalan tongue was forbidden under the fascist regime. No speaking of Guernica, of the war, no criticism or free press. The master narrative of the appalling Franco dictatorship is interrupted by the disjointed tale of Portabello's paste-board castle and sleepwalking horror tropes. To re-edit the banal film (Franco's) and the evil, banal regime (Franco's) so that all its artifice may be displayed in the clear light (under the visible lights of the set). Fashionable girls laugh over a coffin holding a dead man, men walk through forests arranging cobwebs, Lee's imposing angular figure stares ahead, all granite. Deaf, too: they can't hear the flies. Lee and Portabello also made the equally sublime Umbracle, a similar tale of horror haunted by taxidermy, secret police, and Lee singing a song in French. This film shows that the continuum of the Gothic is still a potent vessel for art and politics. Portabello is a genius.

Eerie documentary on the filming of Jess Franco's Dracula

[inkybrown · 10 January 2002]

This is an avant-garde experimental documentary about the filming of Jess Franco's Count Dracula. There is no dialogue, only an atmospheric background score and sound effects (except for at the end, when Christopher Lee reads an excerpt from Bram Stoker's novel). The movie is hard to describe; it shows footage of scenes from Count Dracula being filmed, the actors preparing, special effects, and so forth. It is the only footage of Soledad Miranda as the person she was in real life. In one of the film's most magical moments, director Portabella captures the filming of Lucy's staking, including the precious preparatory moments of Soledad's stage makeup being applied and Jack Taylor (who plays the role of Quincy Morris) gathering her up in his arms and placing her inside her casket. Other memorable moments are Christopher Lee goofing off, Soledad smoking in bed while a shot is prepared, and Soledad and Maria Rohm each flirting with the camera at various points. There is some confusion about how the title is written. I have seen it referred to as Vampir-Cuadecuc, Vampyr/Cuadecuc, Cuadecuc-Vampir, and Cuadecuc (Vampir). The actual on screen title is Cuadecuc, with Vampir in smaller letters below. Therefore, I refer to it here as Cuadecuc/Vampir.

Through a dream darkly

[chaos-rampant · 25 October 2011]

I was blessed last night with one of the most fulfilling experiences of my film life, a double-bill of this and an unknown film from '71 called 'Cuadecuc, Vampir'. Together they form one of the most powerful essays on cinema, this flickering replica of the real world, and so the mechanisms that control the makings of images around us and give rise to them. See both if you can.

I will preface this by saying that I am actively seeking out films about the making of films. In quick terms, they set in motion twin concentric cycles; projected outwards, we get to see how a reality that seems incoherent and meaningless is in fact powered around creative forces with clearly reflected purpose; and if we pull further back, how life - as this staged enactment before the camera - is only an illusion of the mind, a play of light and shadow that is animated because we are watching.

So with some effort we can shift the cycles around to align around the life that we know. I take much more from these than with a film that is simply emotionally powerful.

This is the most purely abstract of those films that I have seen. One side of the mirror, the stage, the illusion, is supplied by a Dracula film that Jess Franco was shooting in Spain in 1970. The other side is the camera, the artificial eye shaping the film that we are watching, in theory a documentary shot in and around Franco's set and which diffuses that film through the dreamlike haze of Vampyr.

Both films inverse from Dracula, Dreyer's by having the Jonathan Harker character venture into the monster's den to investigate an illusion but which he is creating himself, this one by pushing back the Dracula film, quite literally, and recasting ourselves in the role of the investigator. The monster's den is the actual film within.

But Dreyer's film mattered to me deeply because it was structured around a powerful notion; a man who asserts control over a world of increasingly sinister but incomprehensible events by imagining it is what he wanted to investigate. He shapes this into the horror film that we are watching. It was the stuff that we have used to dream up horror since early times.

Now look what the filmmaker does here, it's one of the most powerful reverse reversals that I've encountered anywhere in film; he conjures a nightmare from fragments of the other - there is no dialogue, and only a rough sketch of moments from the Dracula story- but which is embedded with the makings of both nightmares. It is plainly revealed this way, because we'd be hard pressed to identify the material without prior knowledge or a clue from the title, that it's the eye creating the nightmare we see - and have confused since early times as belonging to the world at large. The background stage is nondescript life, it might have been Forrest Gump.

The unforeseen encounter with evil of some purity that we find in Dracula, and is imagined in Vampyr, here is directly transferred to the eye, an evil eye where the formations of fear and illusion begin. It is horror because of the specific way that we are looking at the thing. Like the investigator in Vampyr, the annotation is all ours but here even more direct.

The effect is doubly eerie because it's a dangerous flow we are setting in motion, heads may roll. But all of a sudden Christopher Lee breaks character, playfully lunges towards the camera, smiles, then settles down in his coffin. We see production assistants weave cobwebs around him.

And a shot that I will keep with me as one of the most eloquent; a scene is playing out in some dark catacomb dimly lit from somewhere, inscrutable Gothic stuff, and our camera slowly turns to reveal far in the background the other, a film crew observing together, giant movie lights peering all around. It's a perfect in-sight; the retina of the mind's eye, to quote Videodrome, casting its light inwards on the fleeting illusion it has staged.

The result is horror in the most purely abstract sense, a disquieting dream of shapeless anxieties as they bubble to us from some far surface. Horror because the camera is filming.

Impressive Documentary and Throwback

[Michael_Elliott · 26 February 2010]

Cuadecuc, vampir (1970)

*** (out of 4)

Extremely well-made avant-garde documentary is an experiment done at its very best. Director Portabella got onto the set of Jess Franco's 1970 film COUNT Dracula and filmed the majority of what he saw and turned it into this unique, behind the scenes look at the film. This isn't your typical documentary because the movie is silent for the majority of the running time and we never learn anything about the film being made. What this film is is a bunch of bizarre images set to some even more bizarre music and one doesn't need to be familiar with the Franco film to really enjoy what we have here. I think what makes this work so well is the fact that it has a lot more to do with the German Expressionism films from the 1920s. While watching the movie I couldn't help but think of films like NOSFERATU and THE GOLEM and had this thing seemed so close to them in terms of nature, mood and atmosphere. Those familiar with the Franco film are going to notice all the scenes here but they're shot differently here and they also have this wonderful look to go with them. One could debate how well Franco did with the novel but this movie here really becomes a bizarre, alternate version of the film. Another major plus is that we do get to see some of the actors outside their characters and this includes a couple good shots of Soledad Miranda who would die not too long after this movie was released. Apparently this is the only known footage of Miranda being herself that was captured on film. We also get to see Lee clowning around a little as he jumps towards the camera to attack it before getting ready for his shot inside the coffin. Herbert Lom and Jack Taylor are also seen in a few shots and we get one of Franco actually directing. The film runs 67-minutes and the only dialogue comes at the very end when Lee reads the death of Dracula to use from the novel. Before this is a fun sequence of him getting out of his costume and having to remove his teeth and a few other items. Portabella certainly has a great eye for style and atmosphere as this film is very impressive even in its short state. The movie hasn't ever seen a legit release as the director thought the movie too good to be included as an extra when the Franco film was released to DVD, which is a shame as it would be nice for more people to be able to see this work. Fans of the strange should certainly try to track this down as its certainly unique in its own way.