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 UK cut an X certificate on 2 November 1971, and IMDb logs a UK
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 the UK
Availability of a cult title like this comes and goes, so treat everything here as "check before you commit". On the streaming
side, the arthouse service MUBI 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
Amazon UK, so a copy is usually findable second-hand even when the streaming version is not.
What blood suckers are called in nature
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. The familiar examples, in Britain and
worldwide, are mosquitoes, leeches, bedbugs and — the source of all the vampire folklore — vampire bats.