The picture was apparently shot in and around the San Francisco-Oakland area over several years, from roughly 1973-75, and wasn't actually released until 1978. The story takes place at an old movie palace (filmed at the long-gone Fox Theater in Oakland), several days before a horror convention is to take place. As the convention committee -- writer Professor Seabrook (Dan Caldwell), pert ingenue Cindy (Barrie Youngfellow), and mystery fan Scotty (John Cochran) -- whip the theater into shape, the show's Guest of Honor arrives. He is movie vampire Malakai (Jerry Walter), a Hollywood eccentric who believes in living the part, right down to sleeping in a coffin and shooting his pictures only at night. In tow are Malakai's creepy publicists: B.B. (Ray K. Goman) and Harris (Hy Pyke).

Not at all surprisingly, Malakai turns out to be a real, undead vampire. What's more, the Burke and Hare-like B.B. and Harris really are Burke and Hare, kept alive with Frankensteinian equipment smuggled into the theater's basement. As the trio arbitrarily begins choosing victims and draining their blood, and as our three heroes (joined by eccentric comic book dealer Gary) begin to unravel the mystery behind the killings, a Van Helsing-like vampire hunter Ben-Halik (Irving Israel) shows up to fill in the blanks and pass out stakes.

The few who have written about this extremely obscure picture often refer to it as tongue-in-cheek, suggesting something similar to the campy monster movie segments in The House That Dripped Blood (1970) and The Uncanny (1977). Actually, Nightmare in Blood is much more along the lines of The Projectionist (1971) or My Lovely Monster (1990), movies made by movie buffs with a genuine affection for the horror/fantasy genre. The film has several interesting concepts, such as making Ben-Halik a Jew who had originally pursued Malakai as a Nazi-era war criminal; only later did he determine Malakai also happened to be a vampire. (In a grievous misstep though, the filmmakers use stock footage of real Holocaust victims being bulldozed into mass graves, an out-of-place image in Saturday matinee material like this.)

The film abounds with references to both horror movies and their stars, from Lon Chaney to Christopher Lee, to comic books like Vault of Horror and Plop!. Indeed, there's even a nice scene that's practically a love poem to the influence of comic books. In the theater, there are posters hung everywhere worth pennies then and thousands now. (Oddly, one of these is for The Fighting Rats of Tobruk, a 1944 British war movie!) A major subplot involves a condescending local horror movie host, George Wilson (Morgan Upton), and a censorship advocate, Dr. Karl Unsworth (Justine Bishop), both shrewdly calculated to piss off the very audience that Nightmare in Blood was targeted at. Guess what happens to them?

There are several movies within the movie, one of which offers a fleeting glimpse at a very young Kathleen Quinlan. The most prominent of these faux films though is "The Zaroff Doom," notable in that it features Kerwin Mathews battling Malakai but more obviously referencing Mathews's Sinbad persona. Watching his scenes (and how well Mathews aged), leaves one wishing the actor had continued in the Sinbad role through the 1970s Harryhausen pictures.

As for Nightmare in Blood, the film is at once more polished than you'd expect yet still overwhelmingly cheap and generally routine in its horror elements. The film was shot in Techniscope, and cinematographers Kenn Davis (who co-wrote and co-produced) and Charles Rudnick manage some decent compositions, and the movie's score is pretty good for such a low budget film.

Outside of Mathews and Quinlan, the cast consisted of local talent, many of whom had small parts in Hollywood productions filmed in the Bay Area, such as the Dirty Harry movies and the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The acting is uneven, with several performers shamelessly hammy, but most, yet again, are better than usual for such cheap films.

Video & Audio

Happily, Nightmare in Blood is presented here in its original Techniscope aspect ratio in a 16:9 anamorphic transfer. It appears a 35mm theatrical print was used, judging by the long scratches and missing frames here and there. Considering the obscurity of this title and that at its peak probably no more than a half-dozen prints were ever struck, one should be thankful the film exists at all. The mono soundtrack also seems derived from the same print source and is fair at best; there are no subtitles.

Extras

The DVD has a pretty nice selection of extras, several having nothing to do with the movie, but amusing in their own way. First and foremost is an audio commentary track, one of the most entertaining this reviewer has heard in a long while, featuring director/co-producer/co-writer John Stanley and the aforementioned Kenn Davis. In sharp contrast to the superficial big studio commentary, the pair are nostalgic but forthright about the problems they endured getting the picture made and distributed, saying up front that theirs is both a "how-to" and "how-not" to make such a picture. They offer up a lot of interesting tidbits, pointing out future director Fred Dekker (then 13 years old) as a mask-wearing extra, and how actor Jerry Walter went on to loop innumerable stormtrooper voices in Star Wars.

Next is a nine-minute Interview with Leonard Maltin about his annual TV Movies and a seven minute interview with writer Richard P. Jewell (now an Associate Dean at the USC School of Cinema-Television) about his book The RKO Story. What does this have to do with Nightmare in Blood? Nothing, but director Stanley, for those not living in San Francisco during the late-1970s/early-1980s, also hosted a local horror movie show, Creature Features, from whence these segments are derived. Both pieces seem to date from about 1983, and both use scads of film clips that, despite their extremely poor quality, may inadvertently turn this DVD into a collector's item. Two other Creature Feature segments, one spoofing The Bad Seed the other, of all things, a Tae Kwon Do demonstration featuring an extremely nervous and dry-mouthed martial artist/instructor, will appeal only to nostalgic San Franciscans who want to remember the show. A photo gallery rounds out the batch.

Parting Thoughts

Nightmare in Blood is no lost masterpiece of horror, but it's nearly a classic compared with such equally cheap but unwatchable efforts as, say, She-Freak or The Mighty Gorga. Unlike those pictures, Nightmare in Blood isn't full of contempt for its audience. Clearly, Stanley and Davis aspired to make the kind of movie they themselves would want to see, and that counts for something.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films. He is presently writing a new book on Japanese cinema for Taschen.