In 1943, a ten-year-old boy named Rajmund Polanski was hiding from the Nazis in the Polish countryside. The Catholic farming family sheltering him, the Buchalas, lived in a remote village where the old superstitions still held. During those years of hiding, the boy absorbed the customs, the psalmody, the folk terrors of rural Eastern Europe: the saints, the spirits, the things that walk at night.
Twenty-three years later, that boy, now called Roman Polanski, co-wrote a screenplay about a bumbling professor and his hapless assistant who travel to the Carpathians to hunt vampires. It would be his first color film, his most personal comedy, and the production on which he would meet the woman he would marry.
The film was called Dance of the Vampires. Americans would know it by a different, much worse name. It flopped on release, was butchered by its own studio, and nearly derailed Polanski’s career. It is now regarded as one of the finest horror-comedies ever made.
The Cadre Films Machine
To understand how The Fearless Vampire Killers came to exist, you need to know about three men and a small production company.
Gene Gutowski was a Polish-American film producer and, like Polanski, a Holocaust survivor. He met Polanski in 1963, when the young director was thirty years old, living in France, and spoke barely any English. Gutowski persuaded him to move to London and make English-language films. Together they founded Cadre Films and produced three features in rapid succession: Repulsion (1965), with Catherine Deneuve losing her mind in a Kensington flat; Cul-de-sac (1966), a tragicomedy shot on Holy Island in Northumberland; and Dance of the Vampires (1967), their most ambitious and expensive collaboration.
The screenplays for all three were co-written by Polanski and Gérard Brach, a French writer he had met in 1959. Their partnership would last nearly thirty years and nine features, from Repulsion through Bitter Moon (1992). Brach did most of the actual writing. Polanski would talk through ideas, Brach would go away and draft, and they would revise together. Their working dynamic produced some of the sharpest screenwriting in European cinema.
The score for all three Cadre films came from the same composer: Krzysztof Komeda, a Polish jazz musician who would become, in a few short years, one of the most tragically brilliant film composers of the twentieth century. But more on him later.
The Dolomites and Borehamwood
The screenplay, dated 8 February 1966, called for deep snow, Gothic castles, and a Carpathian village where the innkeeper hangs garlic like tinsel and the villagers turn their mirrors to the wall. The production was originally planned for Austria, but a last-minute switch moved the exterior shooting to the Italian Dolomites, near Ortisei in the Val Gardena. Fischburg Castle (Castel Gardena) in Santa Cristina Valgardena stood in for Count von Krolock’s fortress.
The snow was a problem. Early spring weather melted the drifts near the original location at Cortina d’Ampezzo, forcing the crew to relocate higher up, to the Langkofel range. Local craftsmen built coffin props. Notices had to be posted in nearby hotels reassuring tourists about the nature of the filming.
By mid-April 1966, production moved to MGM British Studios at Borehamwood in Hertfordshire for the interior sequences. The original twelve-week shooting schedule ballooned to twenty-one weeks. The budget, roughly two million dollars, was the largest Polanski had ever worked with, and it was not enough. The film’s visual ambition consistently outpaced its resources.
But the interiors at Borehamwood are where the film became something special. The sets, designed by Wilfrid Shingleton, have a storybook quality: painted backdrops, candlelit crypts, baroque corridors that feel less like architecture than like illustrations from a book of Central European fairy tales. This was deliberate. Polanski described the film as “a cartoon with people.” The opening credits were designed by the French cartoonist André François.
The Cast
The casting of Dance of the Vampires is a study in unlikely combinations: a Beckett specialist, a German-Jewish refugee, a boxer, a Bethnal Green comic, and a young American actress whom the director did not initially want.
Jack MacGowran as Professor Abronsius. The Irish actor, born in Dublin in 1918, was one of the foremost interpreters of Samuel Beckett’s work. They met in 1957 after MacGowran performed in the radio play All That Fall. Beckett wrote the television play Eh Joe (1966) specifically for him. MacGowran played Lucky in Waiting for Godot at the Royal Court Theatre, appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Endgame, and won the 1970-71 Obie Award for his one-man show MacGowran in the Works of Beckett. Polanski had worked with him on Cul-de-sac and created the role of Abronsius specifically for him.
The result is one of cinema’s great comic performances. Abronsius is the anti-Van Helsing: where Peter Cushing’s vampire hunter in the Hammer films was decisive, athletic, and authoritative, MacGowran’s professor is moth-eaten, absent-minded, and physically incompetent. He gets stuck in windows. He forgets crucial information at critical moments. He is, ultimately, the unwitting agent of the film’s catastrophe. MacGowran brings to the role a specific Beckettian quality: a man who persists in a task long after any rational person would have stopped, not out of courage but out of an inability to conceive of any alternative.
MacGowran died on 30 January 1973, at the age of 54, from complications of influenza. He had just completed filming on The Exorcist, in which he played Burke Dennings. His character dies in that film, too.
Ferdy Mayne as Count von Krolock. Born Ferdinand Philip Mayer-Horckel in Mainz, Germany, in 1916, Mayne came from a Jewish family. He was sent to Britain in 1932 to escape the Nazis, trained at RADA and the Old Vic school, and built a sixty-year career as a character actor. His Count von Krolock is the most elegant vampire in cinema outside of Christopher Lee: silky, courteous, melancholy, and genuinely menacing when the courtliness drops.
Alfie Bass as Shagal. Born Abraham Basalinsky in 1916 in Bethnal Green, London’s East End, the youngest of ten children of a father who had fled Jewish persecution in Russia. Bass played the innkeeper Shagal, who becomes a vampire and delivers one of the film’s most celebrated lines. When his victim Magda holds up a crucifix to ward him off, Shagal replies: “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!” It is a joke, but it is also something more: a logical extension of the vampire mythology’s own rules. If a holy symbol only works on those who held it sacred in life, then a cross is useless against a Jewish vampire. You would need a Star of David. Critics have noted that the character, named after the painter Marc Chagall, represents Polanski’s first direct expression of Jewish experience in his films.
Terry Downes as Koukol. Here is a piece of casting that deserves to be better known. Downes, who played the Count’s hunchbacked servant, was not primarily an actor. He was a professional boxer, nicknamed “the Paddington Express,” who had won the World Middleweight Championship in 1961 by defeating Paul Pender. He held the title for ten months. The man playing the shambling, grunting hunchback was, in real life, one of the finest athletes in Britain.
Iain Quarrier as Herbert von Krolock. The Count’s son, an openly homosexual vampire who pursues Alfred rather than any female character. Quarrier, described as a dead ringer for David Peel, was cast as a direct parody of Peel’s Baron Meinster in Hammer’s The Brides of Dracula (1960). It was an early, relatively sympathetic portrayal of a queer character in horror cinema, and it is played for comedy without malice.
The Girl in the Bath
Sharon Tate was not supposed to be in this film.
Polanski wanted Jill St. John for the role of Sarah, the innkeeper’s daughter. But producer Martin Ransohoff, who had discovered Tate and held her under contract to his company Filmways, insisted. St. John withdrew shortly before shooting. Polanski agreed to cast Tate on one condition: she would wear a red wig.
The audition story has become part of the film’s legend. Polanski reportedly hid and leaped out to frighten her, and the resulting scream was so genuine that it sealed the casting. Once filming began, Polanski was demanding, by some accounts requiring seventy takes for a single scene. Neither was initially impressed by the other. Their romantic relationship developed during the months of production.
Tate’s Sarah is all porcelain curiosity and bath-bubble vulnerability. The bath scene, in which falling snowflakes mix with soap bubbles before something much darker arrives, remains one of the film’s most visually striking sequences. It is also, in retrospect, almost unbearably poignant. Polanski and Tate married on 20 January 1968 at the Chelsea Register Office in London. On 9 August 1969, Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, was murdered at the age of twenty-six by members of the Manson Family.
The film preserves her at the start of everything: young, luminous, not yet touched by the horror that was coming.
Komeda’s Lullaby for Vampires
Krzysztof Komeda, born Krzysztof Trzciński in Poznań in 1931, was a trained physician who adopted a stage name to hide his jazz career from colleagues at the laryngological clinic where he worked. His 1965 album Astigmatic is considered one of the most important European jazz recordings ever made.
He scored four Polanski films: Knife in the Water (1962), Cul-de-sac (1966), Dance of the Vampires (1967), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). For Dance of the Vampires, he composed a score of extraordinary delicacy: choral passages in slowed minor-key vibratos, a harpsichord providing archaic texture, and a guitar-and-oboe waltz (“Snowman”) that mutates into a minor-key chant. After the main titles, the film has no music for nearly its first thirty minutes. When the score finally enters, it sounds like something from a music box in a haunted nursery.
In December 1968, at a party in Los Angeles, the Polish writer Marek Hłasko pushed Komeda from a rocky escarpment during a drunken incident. Komeda suffered a severe head injury. Initial X-rays showed nothing. His condition then deteriorated sharply, and he was transported back to Warsaw in a coma. He died on 23 April 1969, four days before his thirty-eighth birthday, without regaining consciousness. Hłasko reportedly said that if Komeda died, he would follow. He drank himself to death less than two months later, on 14 June 1969.
In the space of less than a year, Polanski lost his composer, his wife, and the world he had been building since he arrived in London.
Slocombe’s Eye
Douglas Slocombe, born in 1913, had begun his career as a newsreel cameraman during the Second World War, filming the German invasion of Poland and the Netherlands. He went on to shoot Ealing classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) before Polanski hired him. He would later photograph the Indiana Jones trilogy.
Dance of the Vampires was Polanski’s first color feature and his first widescreen production, shot in 2.35:1 Panavision. Slocombe gave the film what critics have described as a surreal, dreamlike quality: deep shadows, cobalt night skies, snow that glows rather than reflects. He later said Polanski “put more of himself into this film than any other” and that it revealed “the fairy-tale interest that Polanski has,” rooted in his “conscious attention to a Central European background.”
The visual approach was deliberately excessive. Where Hammer Horror used bright Technicolor and clean Gothic sets, Polanski and Slocombe wanted something that looked painted rather than photographed. The film’s palette is jewel-toned: cobalt, crimson, amber candlelight against vast blue darkness. It is Hammer turned up to the point where the style becomes its own commentary, gorgeous and absurd at the same time.
The Ball
The masquerade sequence is the film’s centerpiece, and its technical execution is one of the most ingenious practical effects in 1960s cinema.
The setup: Abronsius and Alfred, disguised in borrowed domino masks, infiltrate Count von Krolock’s midnight ball. The vampires perform stiff, mechanical dances, like decrepit automata executing antiquated patterns to music-box waltzes. The scene is modeled on the vampire ball in Hammer’s Kiss of the Vampire (1963), but Polanski’s version is the superior execution: more elegant, more eerie, and building to a revelation that the Hammer film never attempted.
A large mirror hangs on the ballroom wall. In it, only three figures are reflected: Abronsius, Alfred, and Sarah. The vampires, having no reflections, are invisible in the glass. The undead gradually notice that three unexplained figures are moving in the mirror. They turn. The music stops. The intruders are exposed.
Here is how Polanski filmed it. He built an exact duplicate of the ballroom set behind a sheet of glass, which stood in for the mirror. Body doubles of the three human characters matched their movements on the duplicate set while the actual actors and vampire extras danced on the main set. The “reflections” were real people on a real second set, not an optical effect. The precision required to synchronize the movements was enormous, but the result is seamless and uncanny.
The mirror does not save anyone in this film. It reveals. And what it reveals is that the living are outnumbered, exposed, and out of time.
When Evil Wins
Most horror-comedies of the 1960s ended with the monsters defeated and the heroes safe. Polanski’s film does the opposite.
After the ball, Abronsius and Alfred flee the castle with Sarah in a horse-drawn sleigh. They appear to have succeeded. The castle recedes behind them. The Carpathian mountains shrink into the distance. But during the escape, Sarah, who has been bitten, awakens as a vampire and sinks her teeth into Alfred’s neck in the back of the sleigh. Professor Abronsius, oblivious, drives on.
The narration explains what the professor has accomplished. By carrying the infected Sarah and now the infected Alfred out of the isolated Carpathian region, the old fool has become the vector for the very plague he came to destroy. Instead of containing vampirism, he has unleashed it on the wider world.
This ending is perfectly Polanski. In his films, good intentions are the mechanism by which catastrophe spreads. Knowledge without wisdom is dangerous. The intellectual who cannot see what is happening in his own sleigh is more destructive than any vampire. It is an ending that anticipates, in tone if not in detail, the darker horror films of the 1970s.
It also links the film, quietly, to the real vampire folklore of the Balkans and Hungary, where the fear was never just about a single monster in a castle. The fear was contagion. The fear was that the dead would multiply, that one revenant would make ten more, that the thing would spread from village to village until no one was left alive. The Medvedja vampire panic of 1731-32, the most documented vampire investigation of the eighteenth century, was driven precisely by this logic of epidemic. Polanski, the child who absorbed the folk terrors of rural Poland while hiding from a far more real evil, understood this instinctively.
The American Disaster
What happened to the film after Polanski delivered his cut is one of the most egregious cases of studio interference in 1960s cinema.
Martin Ransohoff and MGM’s supervising editor Margaret Booth re-cut the film for the American market. They removed approximately sixteen minutes of Polanski’s footage. They added an animated prologue in which the MGM lion sprouts vampire fangs. They re-dubbed Jack MacGowran’s Professor Abronsius with a cartoonish voice. And they replaced Polanski’s title, Dance of the Vampires, with the unwieldy The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck.
Polanski tried to have his name removed from the credits and failed. Gene Gutowski also asked to have his name removed, in November 1967. Both men disowned the American version entirely.
The re-edit destroyed the film’s tonal balance. Polanski’s original walked a precise line between beauty and absurdity, between genuine Gothic atmosphere and slapstick comedy. The American cut pushed it toward pure camp, which was exactly what it was not. Where Murnau’s Nosferatu had invented the vampire film through shadow and dread, Polanski had written a love letter to that tradition, affectionate and irreverent and finally heartbreaking. The American cut turned it into a gag reel.
The film opened in the US on 13 November 1967 and was a commercial disappointment. The critical response was mixed at best. It nearly killed Polanski’s chance to direct Rosemary’s Baby (1968) for Paramount.
In the early 1980s, MGM unearthed a print of Polanski’s original European cut and began sending it to repertory houses. The film was reassessed. It is now the European version that forms the basis of all home video releases, and it is that version that is remembered as one of the great horror-comedies.
Afterlife: The Musical and the Legacy
The film’s most unexpected afterlife came three decades later. In 1997, Polanski directed the premiere of Tanz der Vampire (Dance of the Vampires), a full stage musical adaptation, at the Raimund Theater in Vienna. The music was by Jim Steinman, the composer behind Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, and the book and German lyrics were by Michael Kunze. Steve Barton originated the role of Count von Krolock.
The show was a sensation. It ran in Vienna until January 2000, then transferred to Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin, and Oberhausen, running for years across the German-speaking world. It eventually reached fifteen countries in thirteen languages, seen by over ten million people. Steinman’s bombastic, operatic songs turned out to be unexpectedly perfect for Polanski’s Gothic whimsy.
The Broadway transfer, however, was catastrophic. Previews began on 18 October 2002 at the Minskoff Theatre. Michael Crawford, of Phantom of the Opera fame, replaced Steve Barton as the Count. Crawford’s insistence on comedic revisions transformed the dark romance of the Vienna production into slapstick. The show opened on 9 December 2002 and closed on 25 January 2003 after fifty-six performances, losing an estimated twelve million dollars. Steinman publicly distanced himself from the Broadway version.
The European productions, faithful to Polanski’s vision, continue. The musical preserves the film’s central insight: horror and comedy are not opposites but siblings, both born from the same fear of death dressed up in costume.
Why It Still Matters
Like Werner Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser, The Fearless Vampire Killers is a European auteur film that uses a period setting to ask questions with no period at all. What it asks is whether fear can be beautiful. Whether laughter and dread can occupy the same frame. Whether a fairy tale can have an ending where the wolf wins.
The answer, delivered in cobalt moonlight and harpsichord waltzes, is yes.
The cast is mostly gone now. MacGowran died in 1973. Tate was murdered in 1969. Komeda died in 1969. Ferdy Mayne died in 1998. Alfie Bass in 1987. Terry Downes in 2017. What the film preserves is a group of people who were, for a few months in 1966, making something strange and beautiful together in the Italian mountains and on the stages of an English studio: a Beckett actor, a boxing champion, a jazz doctor, a German refugee, a young woman who had not yet become a tragedy, and a Polish director who had escaped one nightmare and was, without knowing it, heading toward another.
The snow still glows. The vampires still waltz. The mirror still reveals what should have stayed hidden.
By the Author
For fiction set against these traditions: The Vampire: Novel from Bulgaria by Hans Wachenhusen, trans. Rade Kolbas
