Christopher Lee: The Lord of Horror

"For sixty years he never stopped throwing himself at the camera and at us, reaping our fear and our delight"

​​​​Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers. Please enjoy this free preview, and consider upgrading to support two struggling journalists at once! — Talia

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Tall.

Slender.

Sinister.

An angular face, huge expressive eyes, and that voice…

Deep, sonorous, lush, hypnotic.

No wonder Christopher Lee excelled in his (many, many) roles as a patrician Svengali: he played Dracula, Lord Summerisle in 1973’s The Wicker Man (widely considered by me, Talia Lavin, to be the greatest film ever made in all of cinema history), Saruman in Lord of the Rings, Count Dooku in Star Wars—and a sundry mix of pirates, asylum owners, murderers, monsters, mummies, creatures, and supervillains in between. In 213 films between 1948 and 2017, Lee played in any number of absolute cheesefests (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Meatcleaver Massacre, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, The Terror of the Tongs, The Pirates of Blood River et al), but no matter how execrable the material, he made the screen his confidante, the viewer his accomplice. 

I’d be remiss in not mentioning a few other details of Lee’s biography—releasing a heavy-metal concept album about Charlemagne at the age of 90, a legendary stint in RAF Intelligence during World War II that saw him traversing continents, brushing with death innumerable times, and climbing Mount Vesuvius three days before it erupted—that make him such a legend. It’s no wonder that after the war, he couldn’t conceive of returning to an office life, and decided to become an actor.