Your Daily Dracula – Ken Christopher (Guen Christof), Kwansukui Dracula (Dracula in a Coffin, 1982)
A very minor Dracula footnote, which feels like a long-delayed cash-in on the Hammer series even if it came out nearly a decade after that fizzled out. Maybe Korean vampire fans were inspired by Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires to a hope that Hammer’s Dracula would show up in Seoul … and eventually got round to making their own version. Hammer seem to have been a big deal in Korea; there’s a tantalisingly-impossible-to-locate movie called Akui ggot/A Flower of Evil (1961), which some sources suggest is an unauthorised remake of Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958). Here, Westerner Ken Christopher – billed as ‘Guen Christof’ – sports a Christopher Lee-look black wig, scarlet-lined cape and general air of gloom, though he also has spindly fangs and a slightly schlubby affect as if anyone not Korean would do for the role.
It opens with a Demeter-like ship in Seoul harbour, a crew of dead sailors with neck-wounds and the delivery of a plush black coffin from which Dracula rises stiffly like Nosferatu (or Dracula in Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires), though director Lee Hyeong-pyo makes the mistake of shooting this from the side, which makes the effect comical. Kim Seong-hye (Park Yeong-rae), a Korean girl, is the object of the vampire’s interest, and he haunts her – turning up to bite at a disco where he has odd shoulder-twitching moves and even appearing in a bowl of red soup – while her doctor fiancee (Parlk Ji-hun) and a Catholic priest (Kang Yeong-seok) put together a vampire-busting kit. An American girl (Kimberly Hood) plays the Lucy part and Dracula has time to recruit a few more disciples before he’s cornered and done away with. Notably, a Buddhist chanting monk sees off the vampire more efficiently than the crucifix-clutching Catholic Van Helsing figure.
It’s sometimes ridiculous, but seems to be seriously intended – which perhaps makes its odd Korean imposture of a style of filmmaking from the West slightly more amusing. Lee does add some strange directorial touches, with scenes bathed in red, while Christopher at least has the sudden appearances and gape-mouthed snarls down pat. Hmmm, Lee and Christopher … I wonder if that’s deliberate.
It’s interesting how Far Eastern makers of vampire films always insist on portraying their creatures as located in a Western tradition (apart from the hopping Hong Kong variety, of course). Here in the casting of Ken Christopher, a Westerner as the chief vampire. In both Park Chan-wook’s Thirst and earlier the Japanese Bloodthirsty Trilogy vampires are products of corrupt or cursed Catholic monasteries or missions, western Christian religious and cultural imports.
Posted by Alex McLean | March 13, 2023, 3:22 pmIn regards to “A Flower of Evil” (1961), the reason why it’s impossible to find is because it’s a lost film. South Korea did not have a strong film preservation unit during the ‘Golden Era’ of the 1960s up to the foundation of the Korean Film Archive in the early 1980s. While quite a few South Korean films have been preserved and restored, a huge number are apparently lost forever: when producers felt the films had outran their second-run and third-run theatrical releases, the prints and negatives were chopped up and the celluloid was utilized for special brim hats that local farmers used, or the prints and negatives were melted down for their silver content. “A Flower of Evil” was made by Lee Yong-min, and he most likely lost the film after it’s theatrical release (however, it was remade in 1969 under the title “Regret” from the original screenplay!). It’s hard to ascertain if “A Flower of Evil” is a vampire movie in the tradition of Hammer: an original shooting script exists (not viewable online, sadly), as well as 99 black-and-white still photographs that can be viewed at the Korean Movie Database online (KMDb.org). One still photograph shows a character with jagged teeth, possibly indicating some form of vampirism, but again who knows? As for Lee Yong-min, a little background: he started out in the 1950s as a cinematographer and director, and by the 1960s and 1970s he slowly advanced his way to horror with movies like “A Bloodthirsty Killer” (1965), “A Neckless Beauty” (1966), “Devil and Beauty” (1969; the first South Korean horror film photographed in 3D!), and “A Horrible Double Faced Man” (1974). I wrote about Lee Yong-min and “A Bloodthirsty Killer” on the Diabolique Magazine website and still champion his work: the Korean Film Archive recently restored “A Bloodthirsty Killer”, and I’m hoping his existing work gets the red-carpet treatment in the future.
Posted by Christopher W Koenig | February 3, 2025, 9:48 pm