Certainly Dracula did bring a hell of a lot of joy to a hell of a lot of women. And if this erotic quality hadn’t come out we’d have been very disappointed.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it ’s disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

Do I believe in the supernatural? Oh yes, certainly. I can’t believe, I can’t accept that you die and that’s the end. Physically maybe it is a fact. But there’s something about the mind that’s more than that.

Dracula did bring a hell of a lot of joy to a hell of a lot of women.

I believe in building things up, naturally, but I've never isolated the monster from the world around, or tried to avoid showing him.

Chris Lee and Peter Cushing I can't speak too highly of them. In fact to my mind the best films were those in the early days, with Cushing and Lee.

The process is very gradual, you see. At first there's the tainted stage; they know what will eventually happen to them if they go on but they say, 'Oh God, don't do it to me do it again, please, please.'

The reflection of the flame in the glass seems to be touching the hand. And you feel the helpless fear of these dismembered parts. This sort of thing can hardly be visualized at the script stage.

We're not as materialistic and income-tax conscious as we think. At the moment our superstitions are tucked away, but come out sometimes in strange ways sex crimes, black masses.

One blob of red in the wrong place and the audience isn't looking at the hero, they're looking at a patch of curtain (or something similar) and your whole effect is lost.