Twins of Evil: Hammer's Puritans-vs-Vampires Morality Play

Most Hammer vampire films know exactly who the villain is: the aristocrat in the castle with the appetite and the cape. Twins of Evil (1971) is the one that hedges the question, and it is the better for it. The film hands you a monster in the castle, all right — a decadent count dabbling in Satanism — and then plants directly opposite him a second, human monster: a fanatical witch-hunter burning innocent girls in the name of God. For most of its length Twins of Evil is a study of two fanaticisms, the supernatural and the puritanical, circling a pair of young women caught between them. That it comes packaged as a piece of early-1970s exploitation, with all the sensationalism the era demanded, only makes the moral seriousness underneath more surprising.

The end of the Karnstein line

Twins of Evil is the third and final film in what fans call Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy, the studio’s loose adaptation cycle drawn from Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla. The sequence began with The Vampire Lovers, the most faithful of the three and the one that first put the Karnstein name and Le Fanu’s gothic on Hammer’s ledger, and continued through Lust for a Vampire (1971) before landing here. By the third film the source material has almost entirely evaporated — the Karnstein family and a resurrected Countess Mircalla are about all that survive of Le Fanu — and the writer Tudor Gates has grafted on something the novella never contained: the witch-finder plot.

That graft is the whole reason the film is worth revisiting. The label “Karnstein Trilogy” is itself a retrospective tidying-up; Hammer did not set out to make a planned cycle, and the three films vary wildly in quality and intent, which is part of why the third can swerve so far from the first. The trilogy had been drifting towards straightforward titillation, and Twins of Evil pulls it back towards drama by giving the vampirism a genuine antagonist who is not a hero. Director John Hough, young and energetic, was on his way to The Legend of Hell House and a run of muscular thrillers, and he stages the film with a briskness and a taste for the sardonic that the trilogy badly needed by 1971. He understands that the interesting collision here is zealot against zealot rather than fang against stake.

Cushing’s witch-hunter

The film belongs to Peter Cushing, and to a performance sharpened by real grief. Cushing plays Gustav Weil, the leader of a puritan brotherhood of witch-hunters who ride out at night to drag suspected women to the stake — a self-appointed instrument of God who is, in practice, a murderer of the innocent. It is one of Cushing’s darkest roles, and he plays it without a shred of the warmth he brought to Van Helsing: gaunt, rigid, terrifyingly certain. Weil is convinced he is righteous, and the film never lets him off the hook for it.

There is a piece of context that hangs over the performance. Cushing filmed Twins of Evil very shortly after the death of his wife Helen, the central relationship of his life, and by all accounts he was hollowed out by the loss. Whether or not one should read biography into a performance, the fact is that his Weil carries an almost unbearable severity — a man who has purged every soft thing from himself — and the gauntness the grief left in his face becomes part of the character’s fanatical asceticism. It is a haunted piece of screen acting, and it lifts the whole film.

Cushing’s Van Helsing had always been the genre’s model of the good hunter, the rational man who kills monsters so that others may live. Casting the same actor as a hunter who kills the innocent is a deliberate and disquieting move, and it works precisely because the audience arrives trusting that Cushing face. The film spends its goodwill on purpose, letting our faith in the actor stand in for the villagers’ faith in Weil, so that we are as slow as they are to see what he has become.

Opposite him, Damien Thomas plays Count Karnstein as the other pole of the argument: a bored young aristocrat who turns to Satanism and black magic out of decadent curiosity and gets more than he bargained for. The genius of the script is that these two men, the puritan and the libertine, are the same sort of creature — each certain of his own exemption from ordinary morality, each willing to destroy the young to feed his conviction. The village girls burn between them.

The twins, and the frank register of 1971

The women the title advertises are Maria and Frieda Gellhorn, orphaned twin sisters sent to live with their uncle Weil, played by Madeleine and Mary Collinson. The Collinsons were real-life identical twins from Malta and had recently become the first twin centrefold in the history of a certain men’s magazine, and Hammer’s casting of them is a naked piece of 1971 commercial calculation. What the film does with them, though, is smarter than the stunt: it splits its heroine in two, making one twin virtuous and obedient and the other rebellious and drawn to the Count, so that the sisters become the film’s moral fork made flesh — the same face pulled towards salvation and damnation.

There is a poignancy in the twins’ story off screen as well. The Collinsons were dubbed, acted little afterwards, and are remembered chiefly for this one strange film, which gives their doubled presence a faint melancholy in hindsight — two young women hired for a gimmick who ended up anchoring a genuinely serious picture almost by accident. Hough shoots them for contrast rather than titillation wherever the plot allows, using the identical faces as a visual argument about how thin the line between the saved and the damned really is.

This is the frank, sensationalised Hammer of the early 1970s, when the studio, losing ground to bloodier and more explicit competition, pushed its content as far as the certification would allow. Twins of Evil has the requisite décolletage, the Satanic ritual, the flashes of the era’s permissiveness. What keeps it from mere exploitation is that Hough and Gates route all of it through the central moral machine. The sensationalism is the bait; the puritan-versus-libertine argument is the hook, and the film keeps its eye on the hook.

Why it works, and where to go next

The reason Twins of Evil outlasts most of late Hammer is that it refuses to give the audience a clean villain. A standard vampire film lets you enjoy the monster’s punishment; this one implicates the punishers. When Weil’s brotherhood burns an innocent girl in the opening reels, the film has already told you that the men with the torches are as damned as anything in the castle, and every subsequent scene is coloured by that knowledge. It is a morality play in the oldest sense — a staged argument about the wages of certainty — wearing the costume of a monster movie.

For the trilogy that leads here, The Vampire Lovers is the essential first stop, the film where Hammer’s Karnstein cycle and Le Fanu’s Carmilla first met. For the studio’s parallel 1971 experiment in the tragic female monster, turn to Countess Dracula, released the same year, which routes a different real legend — Elizabeth Báthory — through the same Hammer machinery with Ingrid Pitt at the centre. And for the wider lineage that Twins of Evil belongs to, the century-long argument the vampire film keeps having with itself, the vampire cinema canon is the map. Twins of Evil earns its place on it as the entry where the stake-wielders turn out to need watching as closely as the vampire.

Spoilers below

The plot turns on the mismatch between the twins. Frieda, the rebellious sister, is seduced by Count Karnstein and drawn into his world; when he becomes a vampire — raising the ancestral Countess Mircalla from her grave and being turned by her — Frieda is made one too. Maria, the virtuous twin, remains innocent throughout, and the film builds its cruellest irony out of the pair’s identical faces: Weil and his brotherhood, unable to tell the sisters apart, seize the wrong twin, and the righteous witch-hunter comes within moments of burning his own innocent niece at the stake, mistaking her for the vampire she resembles.

The resolution forces Weil to confront what his certainty has made of him. Confronted with proof of his error — and with a real supernatural evil that his blunt fanaticism had been too crude to locate — he turns his zeal, at last, towards the actual monster, storming Karnstein’s castle. The climax pays off the film’s whole design: the puritan and the libertine destroy each other, Weil dying in the act of finally doing something right, the Count destroyed by the very violence the witch-hunter embodies. Frieda is lost to the vampirism she chose; Maria survives, the innocent half of the fork spared. The film closes having burned both its fanatics down together, which is the only ending its argument could honestly allow.