Andrée Melly: A Vampire and a Macabre Vampire-Like Creature
Women’s History Month 2023
Andrée Melly’s career spans nearly forty years, including movies and television series. She has only starred in one genre tv show and two horror films, but both horror films were directed by an important horror director, and she created one of most alluring vampires ever seen on the big screen.
She starred as Ilse in “Ancient Sorceries”, season 2 episode 6 of Tales of Mystery (1961-1963), a television series based on the works of horror writer Algernon Blackwood. Me: There’s an Algernon Blackwood tv series! Also me: Unfortunately, the entire show is believed to have been lost. Here’s to the film preservationists. Hopefully, one day.
Let’s go backwards in time for the next two films, and save the best for last.
Melly starred in the inheritance murder story and horror comedy The Horror of it All (1964) It was produced at Shepperton Studios, was a remake of The Old Dark House (1932), and was written by horror fiction writer Ray Russell, whose most well-known work is the short story cum movie “Sardonicus” and Mr. Sardonicus (1961).
The Horror of it All was directed by one of the best and most prolific directors from Hammer Film Productions, Terence Fisher. His Hammer output was nearly thirty films, and that was more than half of all the films he directed, which included some of the best: The Horror of Dracula (1958), Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), The Devil Rides Out (1968), and one of my favorites, The Four-Sided Triangle (1953).
In The Horror of it All she plays a “macabre vampire-like creature,” a look she created a few years earlier when she first worked with Fisher in her most notable role as one of the brides in Hammer’s Brides of Dracula (1960), considered the second Dracula film in the Hammer Dracula cycle.
Yvonne Monlaur plays the lead Marianne Danielle who stays at the castle of Barroness Meinster as she travels to a new job at a school. It’s there that she meets the Barroness’s son, Baron Meinster (David Peel), who is chained to his room. Once settled at the school she is wooed by the escaped Baron.
At the school Monlaur’s Marianne meets Gina, played by our Andrée Melly. Gina dominates her scenes with a strong alluring presence even before she is bitten by the Baron. And after she is bitten and dies, her body is padlocked into a coffin which is stored in a barn and guarded by Severin (Harold Scott).
Melly’s rise from the coffin is one of the more dramatic ones in the movie if not in vampire film history. One by one the padlocks fall off of the coffin without unlocking and right in front of Marrianne and Severin. It looks like the u-shaped shanks of the padlocks just slip right through the shanks of each hasp and they just fall to the ground still locked. It’s a great trick.
After Severin leaves the barn, Gina pushes off the coffin lid and rises as a vampire. Her pale complexion and black hair already make for a great vampire look. She slowly walks toward Marianne attempting to seduce her “Put your arms around me, please. I want to kiss you, Marianne.” It’s a nice erotic lesbian seduction. One we see evolve even more in Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (1970).
In an interesting side note, Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing kills David Peel’s Baron. Andrée Melly and another bride played by Marie Devereux watch the fight from a doorway. The last we see of them is when the barn catches fire and they run away from the doorway. Typically in vampire lore, all the vampire’s victims usually return to being human when the vampire is killed. So Andrée Melly’s Gina is still alive in the Hammer universe.