For years I’ve been trying to remember something I would have seen on cable TV probably in the 80s. I’m not sure if it was a scene from a movie or perhaps an anthology horror TV show. From what little I remember it looked like it was set in England in the same period that a lot of Hammer horror was. I don’t remember if there was a real vampire in the story at all or not, but I think not. I basically just recall someone tricking a man into staking another man to death under the pretense that he was a vampire…
So I think the guy kills someone, then draws some blood from the neck with a syringe. He then drugs or knocks out some other guy and ends up dumping him in a crate in the attic, and uses the syringe to leave trickles of blood from this guy’s mouth. Then he goes and gets another person (an older superstitious man) and takes him up to the attic and is like “look! a vampire!” so the other guy stakes him to death.
This has been a memory fragment of mine for a LONG time so I’d be very grateful for any help! Thanks!
“Dead of Night” (1977 TV movie)
This was an anthology movie comprised of three terror tales, the one you’re remembering is called ‘No Such Thing as a Vampire’.
I found the entire movie on YouTube, and the vampire story is the 2nd one and starts at about 25 min. of the video. Here it is.
https://youtu.be/7H3O6S3rK6s
Holy crap, that’s it. Thanks so much Livinghead, that’s been nagging at me for years. If I had seen the movie when I was older I would recognize Patrick Macnee and Elisha Cook Jr. It’s funny, in my faded memory the perpetrator looked much different, with a thinner face, glasses and maybe some facial hair, which just goes to show how we try to fill in things we don’t remember. But that’s totally it.
Thanks man, I really appreciate it!
Wow, cool! It was my pleasure and thank you for letting us know.
It’s kind of interesting that this film turned out to have the exact same name as the 1945 “Dead of Night”, which I only discovered a few years ago but enjoyed a great deal (I think TCM ran it around Halloween one year).
I have another vague memory that I was falsely associating with this memory fragment but I will post that separately so someone might be able to get a point for it. 🙂
Hey Livinghead, not sure you’ll see this since this has already been marked as solved, but I thought I’d share that after eluding me for all these years, now that you identified it for me I’ve learned that it’s based on a Richard Matheson story, and I actually have a Matheson short story collection THAT HAS THIS DANG STORY IN IT. It’s actually volume 3 in a series of such collections and I guess I never made it that far in… if I’d read it I think I would have recognized it immediately.
My ignorance knows no bounds. 😀 I guess when in doubt, EVERYTHING is probably based on a Richard Matheson story….
Mysterioii, don’t feel bad. Richard Matheson was a great horror writer and very prolific. If it was a good horror movie or episode on TV in the 1970s, his name was probably on it.
Here are just a few:
The Night Stalker
The Night Strangler (sequel to The Night Stalker)
Duel (1971, Spielberg’s 1st movie)
Dracula (1973, starring Jack Palance as the Count)
Trilogy of Terror (1975)
Dead of Night (1977)
And too many others to name right now.
And tons of Twilight Zone episodes etc. Dude, let me tell you about the memory fragment that haunted me the longest… decades… (sorry for the ramble). I remember being in like first grade and already having this weird memory of some “scary show”, all I remembered was like a guy with glasses at a desk going through a suitcase full of money and then some ghostly foggy apparition with tentacles and a big central eye-like disk materializes in front of him… To me, it was a scary thing, but I never could remember what it was. DECADES later, I buy all the Night Gallery DVD sets and I’m making my way through the episodes, and land on a COMEDY skit called “The Funeral”. I don’t recognize it til the very end but it’s straight up what I had remembered from my childhood like 35 years before. The very last shot of the sketch is the part I was remembering. And guess who it turns out wrote that sketch?
Richard Matheson.
When I looked it up it turns out that the original air date of that episode would have been when I was 18 months old. I *could* have caught it on a rerun, but given the fact that it was already a “distant memory” when I was 5, I think I probably toddled into the room while my dad was watching it, was too young to process much about it at all, especially the comedic nature of it, and the visual just burned into my brain. I was beyond ecstatic when I was finally able to identify that one.
Solved!