Lust for a Vampire

In nineteenth-century Austria, a writer named Richard Lestrange travels to a remote region to research a noble family that was said to have died out and was rumoured to have been vampires. Visiting their castle, he meets a party of young women from a nearby finishing school and, eager to stay close to them, applies for a teaching post there. Soon afterwards a new pupil arrives, the beautiful Mircalla, and strange events begin: students disappear and a teacher is found dead.

Lust for a Vampire is a British horror film from Hammer Film Productions, directed by Jimmy Sangster, who had previously directed The Horror of Frankenstein. Tudor Gates wrote the screenplay, and Harry Fine and Michael Style produced. The cast includes Yutte Stensgaard as Mircalla, Michael Johnson as Lestrange, Ralph Bates as Giles Barton, Barbara Jefford as Countess Herritzen, Suzanna Leigh as Janet Playfair and Helen Christie as Miss Simpson, with twenty-three credited performers in total. The film runs ninety-one minutes.

On TMDB it holds a rating of 5.9 from 89 votes, a modest showing for a Hammer release of this period. Sangster's second outing as director followed a long career as a writer for the studio, and the film sits alongside his earlier Gothic work in the same tradition.