Vampire (1964)

By the mid-1960s George Harrison Marks could stake a claim to being the most famous glamour photographer in Britain. A reputation enhanced by Marks diversifying into directing feature films like Naked as Nature Intended. As well as numerous 8mm glamour films, designed to feature his models taking their clothes off and aimed at the home viewing market.

Regularly billing himself –with trademark immodesty - as ‘The King of the Camera’ and the ‘World Famous Photographer’ Marks was certainly one of the more cineliterate of the characters shooting 8mm glamour films back then, and could boast to owning a bookshelf that creaked under the weight of tomes about the talkies, Charlie Chaplin and Horror cinema. Influences which were visibly filtering down into his own short films. Marks dabbled in horror film themes for a number of his 8mm glamour productions. In ‘The Mummy’ (1966) the eponymous creature plays peeping tom to a number of topless serving girls before attempting to make off with one of them (Teri Martine). ‘Flesh and Fantasie’ (1963) , now more commonly known as 'Nightmare at Elm Manor', sees June Palmer staying the night at a creepy Manor, where she suffers nightmares about being pursued by a cape wearing bald man, and of course loses her clothes in the process. Whilst in ‘Perchance to Scream’ (1967) Jane Paul is transported back to the Middle Ages where an evil monk orders topless women to be flogged and beheaded.

Having let his friend Stuart Samuels play the villains in the latter two films, Marks himself steps into the lead role for 1964’s ‘Vampire’, casting himself opposite topless model Wendy Luton. Like a zillion other 8mm glamour films, Vampire opens with a woman, Carmilla (Luton) undressing, and striking nude poses in her bedroom, before retiring to bed. However all is not well in the land of nakedness, as elsewhere Count Dracula III (Marks) rises from his grave in search of fresh blood. Taking the rather unusual approach of hypnotising his victims with a pendant, Dracula III lures Carmilla back to his crypt where she is soon sporting bite marks on her neck and her very own set of fangs (she has also managed to acquire a pair of panties in the meantime as well). Fortunately for ​Carmilla, she is spared further unpleasantness as dawn breaks, forcing Dracula III back into his coffin.  In a twist on traditional vampire lore, rather than the sunlight reducing her to ashes it instead restores Carmilla back to her pre-vampirised state. Thus allowing her time to wander around the vampire’s lair...pose nude...discover a second vampire asleep in a coffin...faint...pose nude some more...before finally exacting revenge on Count Dracula III.

In light of the comedy name Marks gave to his vampire character it comes as a welcome surprise to discover that Vampire avoids spoofery and is entirely played straight. Hidden under ghoul make-up and with his hair and trademark goatee tinted grey, the Harrison Marks on display here is far removed from the goofy roles he usual gave himself in his own films, or indeed the gregarious ladies’ man, alcoholic, cat lover and pornographer that Marks was in real life.

Special mention should also be given to the eccentric but highly talented Tony Roberts. Marks’ studio manager who built the incredible sets for the glamour films, that over the years would see Marks’ studio transformed into a Chinese garden, an Egyptian pyramid, a French bistro and even an alien spaceship. Roberts lived in a tenement building near to Marks’ Gerrard Street studio, along with the entire Roberts clan which included a brother noted for his love of practical jokes- such as causing explosions and spiking people’s drinks- and a sister who had worked as a Bluebell girl in Paris. Roberts quickly became part of Marks’ inner circle, and together the two men often behaved like a comedy double act. “He was a really nice guy” remembers Teri Martine “kind of on the quiet side, but loved what he did”. Roberts’ sets here really are the business. Decorated in cobwebs and dry ice, his crypt and dungeon creations wouldn't shame a Hammer or Mario Bava film from the period. Its telling that once Roberts’ sets began to disappear from Marks’ 8mm films in the mid-1970s so too did Marks’ interest and enthusiasm for making them.

For an 8mm glamour film, Marks main concerns here seem to have been evoking a horror film atmosphere and savouring his fleeting, ten minutes of glory as a horror film star. Of course that isn't to say Vampire goes completely against type for a Marks production. A huge close-up of Wendy Luton’s breasts, worked into the scene where she explores the vampire’s lair, serves to remind you that –unlike Count Dracula III- it wasn’t Wendy’s neck that Marks’ audience were hoping to get an eyeful of.

Evidently Marks must have enjoyed transforming himself from The King of the Camera to The King of the Undead, as he donned the cape and fangs again a year later for a vignette in his feature film ‘The Naked World of Harrison Marks’(1965). One that saw him being imagined as a Dracula type figure. Not that exciting moments such as that could keep Marks awake during a preview screening of that film “we were no sooner in our seats then George fell asleep” recalls Teri Martine “and was snoring so loud I had to wake him up”.

Viewed collectively Marks’ horror themed 8mm glamour films do put forward a credible case that Marks may well have had a couple of decent horror feature films in him, should the opportunity to fully work in the genre have ever arose. Sadly by the end of the 1960s Marks had become firmly typecast in the minds of the British public as a man who photographed and filmed boobs for a living. “I had a screenplay I wrote, a heavily dramatic feature” he later remembered “but no one would take Harrison Marks seriously with a dramatic feature. They’d say ‘go and do one like the last one with lots of girls and laughs’. I thought fuck it that’s what they want, that’s what they get.” Fate it seemed had decided that it was bare breasts rather than bared fangs that George Harrison Marks was destined to be remembered for.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Bedabbled #4 in 2014. Vampire can be seen online for free at the BFI Player