Nevertheless this is actually a better film than Frankenstein. Many dismiss these two films as disgusting and irredeemable but Dracula proves somewhat hard to dislike despite the bad acting, stilted accents and unappealingly presented sex scenes. It hovers between the provocative and the gross, sometimes managing to create an oddly poetic synthesis of the two – in one particularly striking shot Dracula gets down on his face to lick up a puddle of blood on the floor at the base of a classical mural. Or where the albinoid Udo Kier sits over the opening credits painting his face with makeup into normal fleshtone likeness and paints his white hair black. There’s a surprising degree of sympathy presented for Dracula. And there is a better musical score than could be expected.

A good deal of the film has its tongue sewn in cheek – at one point Joe Dallesandro’s solution to protecting a virgin from Dracula is to throw her up against the wall and force his way with her. And then there’s the hysterically over-the-top climax, prefiguring Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), where Dallesandro chases Kier around the castle chopping his arms and legs off one by one. Roman Polanski of all people has an amusing cameo as a peasant in a bar.