Wit & Attitude Quote by Terence Fisher

Fisher lets the mask slip: the famous fangs were never just about fear. His blunt arithmetic - "a hell of a lot of joy" repeated like a punchline - turns Dracula from gothic menace into mass-market fantasy, and the profanity does real work. It drags the conversation out of polite horror-movie respectability and into the sticky, obvious truth that Hammer's Dracula was engineered to titillate.

The intent is partly defensive, partly proud. Fisher is justifying a creative choice that, in the mid-century British context, had to be smuggled past censors and middlebrow critics as "atmosphere". By naming women as the primary beneficiaries, he also signals a canny awareness of audience desire: the erotic charge isn't an accidental byproduct of Christopher Lee's cape and stare; it's the point. Dracula becomes a socially permissible proxy for female appetite - dangerous, consuming, and thrilling precisely because it breaks the rules. Saying "we'd have been very disappointed" frames eroticism as an expectation, not a scandal, flipping the usual moral panic on its head.

The subtext is even sharper: horror sells best when it's in bed with sex, and sex sells best when it can claim the alibi of horror. Fisher's Dracula offers transgression with a safety rail - you can enjoy the violation because the film will punish it. The line captures Hammer's cultural moment: a Britain loosening at the seams, where censorship still hovered but desire had already found its genre.