By 1971, Hammer Films were grasping at straws, trying desperately to stay relevant in a changing marketplace. There was a sea change coming in the wake of Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead. Their competitors for the British horror market were producing the likes of The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, Raw Meat, Don't Look Now, and Frenzy while Hammer tried to milk the last ounce of blood from their Dracula and Frankenstein franchises. Hammer's usual Gothics seemed quaint in comparison, no matter how much bright red blood they spilled or how many nubile young women they undressed. There's a cautionary tale in this if the makers of the current crop of blockbusters want to take it. In any event, Hammer's biggest success of the era was an adaptation of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla", filmed in 1970 as The Vampire Lovers. That film added a dash of transgression to the Hammer formula, given the overt lesbianism that drives its plot. They tried it again with that film's sequel, Lust for a Vampire (1971), with diminishing returns. With the third film in the Karnstein sequence, 1971's Twins of Evil (directed by John Hough), it was back to business as usual. The lesbianism was mostly gone except for one minor nod in that direction, as was everything else that made The Vampire Lovers work. In spite of that, it's not without interest.
The plot follows twin teenage girls, Maria and Frieda, as they travel from Venice to live with their uncle, Gustav, in Karnstein, a duchy presumably in the Holy Roman Empire (the time period is vague). Their uncle is a stern puritan and the head of a witchfinding brotherhood who are in the business of burning women found to be in league with The Devil. The wilder of the twins, Frieda, chafes under Gustav's rule. The local nobleman, Count Karnstein, is favored by the Emperor, and thus his interest in the occult and devil worship are immune to the attentions of the Brotherhood, and he does as he pleases. What he pleases is to summon up his ancestor, Mircalla Karnstein the vampire, to turn him into a vampire like her. He also has his eye on the twins, and Frieda is drawn to him in turn. He makes Frieda into his vampire consort, telling her that his bite will not kill the truly wicked. Soon enough, Frieda is sucking blood from the breast of one of the count's comely captives. Maria is not blind to her sister's change of unlife. Frieda implores Maria to cover for her nightly excursions to be with the Count. Maria, in turn, is courted by the local schoolmaster, Anton, who has an interest in folklore. Eventually, Frieda is caught by the Brotherhood, presenting Gustav with a troubling choice: does he burn his niece alive. Meanwhile, Count Karnstein and his minion kidnap Maria and exchange her for Frieda in her jail cell. Frieda takes Maria's place, but is unmasked by Anton when she tries to seduce him. Anton fends her off and rides to prevent the Brotherhood from burning the wrong sister. He tells the Brotherhood that Karnstein is the culprit, and that they cannot destroy him with fire. He must be staked through the heart or decapitated. The Brotherhood storms the castle, but Karnstein and Frieda have other ideas...
Twins of Evil is symptomatic of a Hammer formula that had grown oppressive. Like many of the studio's Gothic films, it wants its cake and to eat it. Its narrative is fundamentally anti-woman and anti-sexuality, its emphasis on the rightness of patriarchy exaggerated by the Puritan sect to which Gustav belongs, and it emphasizes the moral rightness of men and the weakness of women. And yet, it is also titillating and lascivious. Like most of Hammer's films, it uses its moralizing tone to cover for its dirty mindedness. This is a starker contrast than usual given the depiction of the Brotherhood of witchfinders, who are literal puritans, and given that they are depicted as a force for righteousness in the world of the film. Hammer's films were always regressive, but this is extreme even for them.
Rather than explore the sexuality of women--particularly queer women--it salts the film with a hint as a tease to the audience, when Karnstein offers Frieda a village girl as a victim after he turns her. The thread of the plot in which Frieda worries that she might attack Maria offers the twin taboos of lesbianism and incest. A more daring film might have gone that far, but this one doesn't dare. It's a mark of how fast cinema was changing in the 1960s that, had Twins of Evil debuted during Hammer's heyday in, say, 1959 or so, it would have been groundbreaking. By 1971, however, many other films had already gained a march on it. Indeed, its central plot device of a vampire and virginal heroine being mistaken for each other is one of the key plot points of Black Sunday, while the incest taboo had already been explored in Gothic form in The Whip and the Body (though Twins of Evil's variation is entirely its own). Moreover, Hammer didn't have "Carmilla" to itself. There were other versions in the marketplace, including Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses, Harry Kumel's Daughters of Darkness, Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire, and Vincent Aranda's The Blood-Spattered Bride. Most of those explored "Carmilla's" political and sexual themes in far more detail. Admittedly, Twins of Evil takes a couple of names from "Carmilla," and virtually nothing else.
And yet, the film is handsome to look at. Like Brian Clemens (who made two films for Hammer in the early 70s), John Hough was a veteran of The Avengers TV show. Though this is hardly his best work, he stages the film better than the material probably deserves. This is Hough's only work for Hammer, and, sure, Hammer's familiar sets are in place (this was in fact filmed on sets built for Vampire Circus) and sure, the film takes place in Hammer's weird corner of Horror Movie Land where the Puritans have a foothold on some Eastern European duchy, but Hough imparts the film with a singular mood that's a hybrid of Hammer's usual on-set reality and something else. There's a line of descent between this film and the Belasco House in Hough's The Legend of Hell House two years later. The film's willingness to let blood in copious amounts may be a cynical attempt to keep up with its contemporaries, but its shamelessness along these lines is charming. It at least senses that the act of a father decapitating his daughter is transgressive, though the actual on-screen act is too cartoonish to really hit home. Regardless, on a purely visual level this is the best-directed film in the Karnstein trilogy, and maybe the best-directed Hammer film of the 1970s.
Hough is lucky in his cast, too. Peter Cushing could have been forgiven for sleepwalking through yet another vampire movie, but he seems engaged in the material. Certainly, the costume helps, and one can't help but notice a hint of Vincent Price's Matthew Hopkins in Cushing's performance, but Cushing is always a pleasure to watch. Here he plays a combination of the moral rightness of Van Helsing and the cold ruthlessness of Baron Frankenstein combined into one. It's a striking portrayal.
The supporting cast reaches beyond Hammer's stock players for actors like Dennis Price and Kathleen Byron. The Collinson twins, Mary and Madeleine, are suitably fetching even though their voices were dubbed to get rid of their Maltese accents. Only Damien Thomas seems of a piece with Hammer's line of vampires. His Count Karnstein is another vampire that might be a dig at the young hedonists of the swinging London of the day. His hairstyle is certainly of that milieu.
If anything, Twins of Evil is a symptom of a larger malaise. Hammer Films were not long for this world. They would stagger through the early 1970s until finally giving up the ghost in 1976. The boys at Bray were not entirely unaware of the changes around them, and they certainly tried out creative solutions to their immanent extinction. Twins of Evil is demonstrative of how that impulse could turn awry. The Vampire Lovers was something very different in the Hammer portfolio and enjoyed success because of it, but Twins of Evil, two films down the line, was just more of the same.
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