The tiny red bugs on Irish windowsills — clover mites
If you searched "blood suckers" from Ireland, the odds are you are not after a slot at all — you are trying to identify the
tiny red bugs that appear on windowsills, skirting boards and around window frames in spring and autumn. Those are almost
always clover mites (Bryobia praetiosa), and despite the "blood sucker" nickname they do not bite people, pets or
anything else — they have no interest in blood and feed on plants such as clover and grasses. They are harmless, a seasonal
nuisance rather than a health worry. The one thing not to do is squash them, because they leave a red stain; instead wipe or gently
vacuum them away, seal the small gaps around windows and doors they crawl through, and cut back any lush grass or planting pressed up
against the outside wall. Do that and the "tiny red bugs in Ireland" question usually answers itself.
The 1970/71 Bloodsuckers film
If you searched "Bloodsuckers" expecting a film, the picture you want is Incense for the Damned — a British horror also
released as Bloodsuckers, Freedom Seeker and under its source title Doctors Wear Scarlet. It adapts Simon
Raven's 1960 novel Doctors Wear Scarlet, an Oxford-set story steeped in classical scholarship. Its protagonist is Richard
Fountain, a promising young don and Greek-mythology scholar at the fictional Lancaster College, who travels to Greece and falls
under the spell of a woman named Chriseis. Raven uses vampirism less as literal horror than as a metaphor: Fountain's "infection"
stands for sexual obsession, addiction and the moral decay that can creep through a cloistered academic world. His colleagues,
alarmed by the change in him, set out to bring him home — and to work out whether what has taken hold is supernatural,
psychological, or simply an appetite he can no longer control. The book's cool, ironic tone sits a long way from the lurid poster
the film would eventually carry.
The production matched that unease with real-world chaos. It was shot in the spring of 1969 across Greece and Cyprus, but the
money ran out mid-shoot; filming resumed later with new scenes, and the gaps were bridged by voice-over narration. Director
Robert Hartford-Davis was unhappy enough with the result to disown it entirely, which is why surviving prints credit
direction to the invented name "Michael Burrowes". The release history is just as tangled: an American Bloodsuckers
double-bill opened on 14 May 1970, the BBFC handed the British cut an X certificate on 2 November 1971, and IMDb logs a British
appearance in September 1972. Rather than pin it to a single clean date, it is fairer to describe a 1970–72 release that
limped out in patches on either side of the Atlantic.
The cast of Incense for the Damned
The cast is the main reason the film is still remembered. Top-billed is Patrick Macnee as Major Derek Longbow. Macnee had
just come out of The Avengers — the original series ended in 1969 — and Incense for the Damned catches him in that
in-between phase before The New Avengers revived his career in the mid-1970s. Through these years he took a scatter of
urbane-authority parts across British film and television, trading on the unflappable, well-tailored charm audiences already knew
from John Steed. Here that polish is put to work in a rough, low-budget horror: Longbow is the composed man sent to retrieve a
colleague who has lost himself abroad, and Macnee lends the ramshackle production a steadiness and a touch of class it would
otherwise lack. It is a small, professional turn in a film that badly needed one.
Around him sits a genuinely strong supporting line-up. Peter Cushing — the reason most collectors seek the film out — plays
Dr Walter Goodrich, the establishment academic. Patrick Mower takes the lead as the doomed scholar Richard Fountain, and
Imogen Hassall is Chriseis, the seductive figure at the centre of his undoing. Edward Woodward, soon to be famous for
Callan and The Wicker Man, rounds out the principal cast. It is a better roster than either the budget or the troubled
shoot would lead you to expect.
Where to watch it in Ireland
Availability of a cult title like this comes and goes, and it is rarely a fixed fixture in Irish catalogues, so treat everything here
as "check before you commit". On the streaming side, the arthouse service MUBI — available in Ireland — is the natural home for
older, curated cinema. MUBI runs a few strands worth knowing: MUBI GO pairs a subscription with a cinema ticket, letting members
claim a seat for a hand-picked new release each week; Gift MUBI is simply a way to buy someone else a subscription; and
MUBI Editions is the service's physical-print arm, releasing selected films as premium home-video objects. Whether this specific
title is streaming there at any given moment varies, so search the catalogue rather than assume.
Physical media is the more reliable route. The Bloodsuckers cut appears on Severin's Cushing Curiosities Blu-ray box
set (November 2023), assembled for exactly this kind of hard-to-find Peter Cushing rarity, and it also turned up years earlier on
Umbrella's Superstars of Horror: Peter Cushing DVD (2005). Beyond those, plenty of Peter Cushing DVDs remain on sale through
online retailers, so a copy is usually findable second-hand even when the streaming version is not.
What blood suckers are called — and the insects that really bite
One last meaning, for anyone who arrived from a biology question rather than a slot or a film: animals that feed on blood are described
as haematophagous, and the behaviour itself is called haematophagy. In everyday language a blood sucker is a leech
or parasite, and used of a person it simply means an exploitative freeloader who lives off someone else. The creatures that
genuinely draw blood in Ireland are mosquitoes, midges, fleas, bedbugs and ticks — not the harmless
clover mites above. Most bites are just a small, itchy red bump that settles on its own, but a tick bite that develops a spreading
bull's-eye rash should be checked by a GP, since it can be an early sign of Lyme disease.
Blood Suckers on screen — the film and the ‘Rock Squad’
The name keeps resurfacing across other media, which is part of why the Irish search results are such a jumble. There is the 1970/71
British horror covered above; a newer title, Bloodsuckers: Origins / Bloodsuckers (2025), has been surfacing on the free
streamer Tubi; and the Blood Suckers Rock Squad turns up in music and YouTube listings that have nothing to do with
either. None of them is what brought most people here — this page is about the NetEnt slot, so if that is what you came for, the
demo is only a click away.