User Reviews

When film producers Hal Bellew (Sam Jaffe) and Morty Lenton (Robert H. Harris) decide to revive the horror movie genre, they reach out to washed up actor Ernst von Kroft (Richard Hale). Only thing is, they camp things up around the star of 'Vampire From Hell', and the resulting flick causes a teen audience at the premiere to crack up hysterically. Humiliated, von Kroft seeks his revenge by planting his fangs into Morty's neck. However in doing a swan dive off a balcony in the direction of Hal, the aging actor also puts the final nail into the coffin of his career. Which might not have been the worst thing, because as a Dracula knock-off, he would have been right at home. You have to hand it to Hitchcock though, he presented this episode book-ended by a swarm of harem girls, even allowing one of them to have the last word.

***SPOILERS*** Looking for a new storyline for their latest horror flick studio heads Hal Bellow & Morty Lenton, Sam Jaffe & Robert H. Harris, dig up former 1930's horror star Ernst Von Croft, Richard Hale, for their new film "Vampire from Hell". That in order to save their once very successful movie studio from going bankrupt. Von Croft who's been retired from the film business for 30 years jumped at the offer feeling that it, "Vampire from Hell",would revive his career to a new generation of movie goers as well as bring him back into the spotlight.

Von Croft works his heart out on his new assignment giving it all he's got in making the Vampire that he's playing as real and frightening as can be. It's at the primer of his new movie with Von Croft in the audience watching it that he's shocked to see himself made to look like instead of him playing a terrifying Vampire he's made to look and sound,with his voice dubbed to sound like he's Truman Capote,like a character out of an Abbott & Costello movie! Worst of all the entire audience breaks out laughing at him, on the screen,that makes Von Croft see red, blood red, and realize that he's been made a fool of by Bellow & Lenton. The two who had tricked him into staring in their film about a wimpy and comedic Count Dracula!

**SPOILERS*** Now humiliated and filled with rage and indignation Von Croft plans to get back at those that made him look and sound like an over pampered momma's boy in the only way he knows how. And that way will spell curtains for the two of them!

I have only seen this episode twice. The first time was when it originally aired in February 1961, and I would have been seven years old. I only ended up seeing it because a babysitter had it on, while my folks were out. They would never let me watch any scary programs, because I always believed the stories were true, and get frightened out of my wits. I was able to follow the story line, and got very absorbed in the drama about an aging horror movie actor, hoping to make a big comeback in a cheap new vampire movie aimed at the teenage drive-in crowd.I was saddened and felt really bad for the old guy when it becomes clear that the producers of the film have deliberately sabotaged the movie to make it ridiculous ( though why they did it, I don't remember. It may have been purely a grudge thing because they disliked the actor, or they may have felt that a comedy would be more successful than a serious film.)

It's hard to explain the power this thing had over me. It may well have been the first exposure to the idea of monster movies or horror stories I ever had. Mostly I remember feeling really sorry for the forgotten actor, who had had such high hopes for this new film. I vividly recall the scene where he and the boozy writer who had befriended him get drunk while looking at the actor's collection of memorabilia, and the old guy grows more and more intense, saying " They never laughed at me then!" and the writer tells him sadly that he saw a particular movie when he was a kid, and how great the actor had been. There was so much respect and affection on the part of the writer, William Redfield, for the actor, Richard Hale, that that part impressed me more than anything else in the show.

The sixth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, from which this episode derives, has yet to make it to DVD. But I eagerly look forward to purchasing it eventually. As I recall, the scenes with the actor in his vampire costume were quite impressive. There are also plenty of inside jokes, such as actor Robert Harris playing a schlock film producer. He had previously appeared as a homicidal makeup man in American International Pictures' How To Make A Monster, and also Merri Welles as a starlet, who later appeared in Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors. The two sleazy producers might well have been a takeoff of James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff of AIP, well known for their teenage monster pictures in the Fifties. Writer Robert Bloch had been writing horror fiction for years, and was certainly well acquainted with the movie business, so that his characters have an authenticity to them that makes the story work. Anyone who enjoys Fifties horror movies should find this very entertaining.