Hammer's Dracula Returns This Halloween
- Adam Williams
- 7 minutes ago
- 3 min read
As well as being the next film in Hammer's rich catalogue to get the 4K re-release treatment, Dracula (or Horror of Dracula for our American audience) will be returning to cinemas with lost footage.
This October, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are back together again as Hammer's original Dracula is resurrected in a new landmark 4K restoration featuring long-lost footage unseen for over 60 years.
The 4K restoration resurrects footage long believed lost for more than six decades, scenes unseen since the film’s original Japanese theatrical release in 1958.
This new presentation finally unveils Dracula fully uncensored and in its most complete form ever released in the UK and US. For the very first time anywhere in the world, audiences will experience the full film in stunning 4K.
As reported by Deadline.
A fully restored 4K version of 1958s Horror of Dracula starring Christopher Lee as Bram Stoker’s nightmarish creation will be released into cinemas, in time for Halloween, John Gore owner of the Hammer Horror Films label, tells Deadline.
Gore explains that footage cut by censors and distributors at the time of its original release was discovered in a Warner Bros. warehouse.
Newspaper items of the period report that women, and a few men apparently, were fainting during screenings when Lee’s vampire character lunged rather vigorously at the necks of his victims, the creature’s fangs dripping with blood. Such scenes were deemed too gory.
“It was the fangs that scared them,” Gore suggests. “People were screaming, which was the point,” he argues.
“We managed to get the uncut original Christopher Lee Dracula. So we’ve just been remastering that now. So there’s like three minutes missing. Hammer’s business was based on the censor. Getting that X-rated certificate was crucial to marketing, but they could only go so far because the censors didn’t like what they saw — all that blood,” and the film had just over three minutes deleted.”
“So Warner Brothers, they have this massive, massive storage near LAX where everything from the 1920s onwards is there. I mean, there’s like 10 Batmobiles and God knows what. And they found the director’s cut of the original 1958 Dracula. So we will be unlocking that and the world will get to see the bits they weren’t seeing, which is mostly to do with how Dracula dies at the end.”
Other reintroduced footage, Gore continues, “is a bit that’s so famous, it’s where Christopher Lee descends on the woman and is about to bite her. It’s so sexual and they had to trim that because it just looked like it was nothing to do with vampires,” he says trying to describe the scene with great delicacy.
“So they had to trim a bit of the sexual stuff and then how he’s destroyed at the end. They cut quite a lot out because they went, ‘It’s too gruesome.’ And now that’s back in. All the crucial points that were axed are now back in.”
Hammer's Dracula Returns This Halloween
Silver Salt Restoration, one of the more recent additions to John Gore Studios, oversaw the restoration. Gore has also admitted they are looking at Hammer's entire back catalogue, so expect plenty more to come. You can check out the teaser trailer below and head over to their website to Sign-Up For Updates.
And if you're wanting to check out more on the film in the meantime, check out Episode Two of Hooked On Hammer as we deep dive into the 1958 iconic Hammer Horror. Available to listen to (for FREE) now on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, our YouTube Channel & more. Full list of available streaming platforms on our Podcast Page.
