These days you’d call The Vampire Lovers a genre mash-up. The main problem with mixing up the genres is explaining to the audience what they’re going to see. The marketeers solved the issue of selling this to both the horror audience and those who didn’t care in what form female nudity and sex came at them. The problem was if you targeted the sexploitation market, which was quite straightforward, you were going to miss out on a heck of a lot of big city first run business.
So Hammer/AIP came up with a clever plan. They would tag the female vampires “blood nymphos.” Exhibitors weren’t provided with much more of a hook than the prospect of naked female bloodsuckers and, as if were a James Bond picture, a battalion of female beauties kitted out not in the traditional bikini but in diaphanous gowns.
The marketeers reckoned, correctly, that the media were not going to fall in line by publishing juicy snippets regarding the stars or interesting details from the production, so nobody bothered in the Pressbook of drumming up much in the way of that, hoping that photos of said beauties, in as much disarray as newspapers would accept, would do the trick.
The best they could come up with was suggesting exhibitors hold a midnight screening. However, the gender switch was played up. “Do you know what a vampire looks like?” was the headline marketeers were hoping for, expecting to generate column inches or public interest in the cinema lobby by pointing out, vampires could be of either sex.
The rest was standard vampire marketing fare – deck out the cinema with fangs, capes and such, dress up staff. Cinemas were encouraged to stick teaser posters on abandoned buildings and fences.
Luckily, by this point, while mainstream media ran shy of the “permissive society”, fan magazines were less rigid in their attitudes. The traditionally staid ABC Film Review was happy to go down the diaphanous route and magazines like the more liberal Continental Film Review regularly featured nude pictures of stars inside. The conservative Photoplay made hay by playing up the licentiousness of the movie.
Humor rarely worked in Pressbooks, but here the awful pun was in evidence on the cover, “Cut yourself a slice of profit and get ahead” (Get It?).
But the bulk of the promotional work came from the adverts. Taglines included “Taste the deadly passion of the blood nymphs.” And “Not for the mentally immature.”
“Torture crypt of the blood nymphs…hiding an erotic nightmare of tormented lusts that throb in headless undead bodies,” could not have provided a more obvious target.
“Even the loveless can love…even the dead can desire.” And, as usual, the ad team would take the best of the taglines and mix them up, so you’d end up with “An erotic nightmare of tormented lusts…where even the lifeless can love…even the dead can desire.”
“Even the dead can love…and with lifeless lips drain the living of their passion and their blood.” Throw in “A bloodstained tale of terror and revenge…an erotic nightmare of the undead” and “Terror and torture embrace in ungodly blood lust.”
“Beautiful temptress or bloodthirsty monster…she’s the new horror form Hammer.”
Interestingly enough, while the diaphanous and traditional cleavage made a continuous appearance, in many of the posters there was little evidence of female-on-female activity.
There was greater emphasis on the woman as a terrifying image, which, of course, was not in itself groundbreaking.
The Magnificent 60s 