Gerald and Marianne Harcourt, are a honeymooning couple in early 20th-century Bavaria who become caught up in a vampire cult led by Dr. Ravna and his two children Carl and Sabena. The cult abducts Marianne, and contrives to make it appear that Harcourt was travelling alone and that his wife never existed. Harcourt gets help from hard-drinking savant Professor Zimmer, who lost his daughter to the cult and who finally destroys the vampires through an arcane ritual utilising the Seal of Solomon that releases a swarm of bats from Hell.
Originally intended to be the third movie in Hammer's Dracula series, it was another attempt by Hammer to make a Dracula sequel without Christopher Lee. The final script, by Anthony Hinds, makes no reference to "Dracula," and expands further on the directions taken in Brides by portraying vampirism as a social disease afflicting those who choose a decadent lifestyle. The job of directing was offered to Don Sharp, who later said he had never seen a horror film before being asked to the job by Tony Hinds. Hinds told Sharp he thought the director would be ideal based on Sharp's other work. The director watched Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and Stranglers from Bombay and became enthusiastic. "What intrigued me about them was after about 20 minutes I was totally hooked despite a totally absurd situation," he said later. "I thought it was wonderful - here was a genre with its own ground rules and self contained world and you could be theatrical but treat it realistically to grab the audience and make them believe something absurd." Sharp said he was worried that "as Hammer progressed, the goal seemed to be for each picture to top the one before it and they were becoming satiated with violence. So I persuaded Tony that it was better to suggest 'Is it going to happen?' and give the audience a little touch of it, and then go on and really get your big shock at the end. There could be a good size shock in the middle too but not all the time." Sharp said "I've always believed there needs to be a separation between suspense and shock. You lead on a mood but if you introduce the shock moment too quickly then it's expected. If you hang on keeping the same mood and tempo as the rest of the sequence, and then shatter the mood with a sudden violent moment, that's when it really works." The film went into production on 7 September 1962 at Bray Studios. It was not released until 1964. This is the only credited feature film screen role of Jacquie Wallis, who plays Sabena. The film's climax, involving black magic and swarms of bats, was originally intended to be the ending of The Brides of Dracula, but the star of that film, Peter Cushing, objected that Van Helsing would never resort to black sorcery. The paperback novelization of Brides does, however, use this ending.
Alternate version
Retitled Kiss of Evil for American TV, Universal trimmed so much of the original film for its initial television screening that more footage had to be shot to fill the missing time. Additional characters that didn't appear at all in the original release were added, creating a whole new subplot. Every scene that showed blood was edited out, e.g. the pre-credits scene in which blood gushes from the coffin of Zimmer's daughter after he plunges a shovel into it. Also, in the televised version it is never revealed what Marianne sees behind the curtain, a sight which makes her scream. A couple of the cuts result in scenes that no longer make sense: while the theatrical release had Harcourt smearing the blood on his chest into a cross-shaped pattern, the televised version omits the blood-smearing, leaving the vampires' inaction unexplained. The additional footage shot for the televised version revolves around a family, the Stanghers, who argue about the influence of the vampiric Ravna clan but never interact with anybody else in the movie. The teenage daughter, Theresa, throws over her boyfriend in favor of Carl Ravna who has given her a music box which plays the same hypnotic tune that he plays on the piano elsewhere in the movie.
Critical reception
of The New York Times wrote, "Until the picture floridly hops off the track toward the end, this horror exercise is a quietly stylish, ice-cold treat, beautifully tinted, well-directed and persuasively acted." Variety wrote, "Horror fans will dig this latest effort from the Hammer Film shop in Britain. It is a slickly-produced color story of evil doings in Bavaria, circa 1910, replete with suspense, demonism and mystery tightly wrapped in a skillful package of effective performance and well-paced direction." The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "No new developments seem to have emerged in the vampire world, and this film is a straightforward and rather tame rehash of the standard formula... The direction is competent enough, though Don Sharp reveals no flair for this kind of thing, and there is a signal lack of atmosphere."
Home video release
In North America, the film was released on 6 September 2005 along with seven other Hammer horror films-The Brides of Dracula, Nightmare, The Evil of Frankenstein, The Curse of the Werewolf, Paranoiac, Night Creatures, The Phantom of the Opera-on the 4-DVD set The Hammer Horror Series, which is part of MCA-Universal's Franchise Collection. This set was re-released on Blu-ray on 13 September 2016. In July 2020, Scream Factory released the film with a Collector's Edition Blu-ray that included both 1.85:1 and 1.66:1 aspect ratios, as well as the TV version Kiss of Evil in standard definition.
