Eyeing Off Dracula

Christopher Lee has died.  He was a fantastic character actor. To his dismay, some will always associate him with 'The Sound of Music' (a film he apparently detested).  To me, I will always think of Friday nights in front of the telly watching the Hammer Horror flicks that were a staple of Friday night viewing when I was about sixteen.  He was Dracula  He totally owned Dracula.  I forget all the titles, they were along the lines of 'Dracula AD72', 'Blacula' (no, I didn't make that up), 'Son of Dracula' (I think), 'Dracula Returns' (I'm sure there was one thus titled), 'Dracula Plays Ceasar's Palace' (okay, I will admit to some poetic licence on that title).  I recall watching one night in the living room (at the age of about sixteen), along with my mother and brother, and in this Hammer Horror offering the Romanian Haemoglobin Fiend had been frozen in ice.  I'm not sure why, but I'm surmising Van Helsing was unavailable, and Clarence Birdseye had to do the honours.  Some poor sap fell over and sustained a cut.  Blood trickled from the cut onto the ice, where it seeped through and got into Dracula's mouth, thus reanimating the undead incubus.  The person who had fallen woke up, and was confronted with the sight of Dracula, standing upright, arms outstretched with cape swirling.  The film's editor, for dramatic effect, decided on a close up of Dracula's face, and then to really hit home had the eyes in full frame.  Oh, those eyes glowed with a frightening and feral fierceness.  They could have stopped a charging elephant at fifty paces.  The evilness was too awful to behold.  They were red-rimmed and bloodshot.  Our lounge room was as silently charged as the ions in the atmosphere before an electrical storm as we were held in the hypnotic thrall of those eerie eyes.  Then my brother said, 'Bastard's probably been on the piss for a week.'  Well, it was a little hard to take old Drac seriously after that, and I stopped watching.  My brother was good for ruining horror movies.  I still recall clutching a cushion, my feet tucked under me on the lounge for protection from any possible monsters underneath, as I watched a terrifying scene play on the screen, when my brother let one rip.  I nearly went through the ceiling.

Anyway, RIP Sir Christopher Lee, ex-RAF WWII vet, actor, author, heavy metal muso, and particularly creepy-eyed Dracula.