Introduction

History

Screenplay

Casting

Shooting

Post Production

Gallery

Links

Over the years, an accrument of rumours and vague recollections by actors and others have resulted in a great deal of misinformation finding its way into print regarding the making of this film. (One “authority” even states that it was shot in 3D). To correct this and prevent further speculation, here are the facts about Mark Of The Devil.

The screenplay: The reason for the screenplay being credited to the fictional name of Sergio Casstner was because a further non-German name on the credits would, technically, have exceeded the permitted number of non-German workers on the film to qualify for government tax incentives. A similar system to protect jobs operated in most countries including the UK.

Agreeing to this technicality of a credit, Armstrong started work on re-writing the screenplay.

According to Armstrong, "There was no actual plot, as such, in Adrian’s script, The Witch Hunt Of Dr Dracula. The first few pages started out with Albino, a witchfinder, raping, torturing and burning girls as witches. His lust for a particular girl, Vanessa, who worked in the inn, led him to rape, torture and condemn her as a witch. The arrival of Gadshill Cromwell, an English witch-hunter with his assistant, Jeff Wilkins, meant even more girls being tortured and burnt. It was then revealed - round about page twenty, I think it was - that Gadshill Cromwell was actually Dracula and his coachman was a mummy. From what I can best remember of the next rambling hundred or so pages: Dracula then had all the village girls taken up to his cave inhabited by witches and subjected to a series of depraved sexual tortures, including anal and vaginal impalings presumably inspired by Vlad the Impaler. At the end, the witches flew off into the night while a voice-over spoke of a new generation rising up to conquer the world. Believe me - it really, really was irredeemably awful!"

Armstrong took as a starting point, Hoven’s opening idea of a local amateur witchfinder finding his power usurped by the arrival of a State witchfinder, and set about writing a completely new screenplay which he called Mark Of The Devil.

"What interested me was the idea that the terrible things a local amateur might do are nothing to what the State will do once it takes over in the name of God and justice. I have always found it alarming how institutionalised religion so often provides justification for people to commit the most appalling crimes in the name of a loving and forgiving God."

It was a theme he had initially explored in his first stage play, The Rise And Fall Of Armageddon.

"I set about researching the historical torture and execution of witches in Europe," he continues. "What really got to me was the crudeness of the methods used - there was nothing remotely sophisticated about them - and so I wanted to make a movie that was not only authentic but remorseless in its depiction of torture - not so much trying to shock the audience with one particularly graphic scene but rather to erode any sense of voyeurism by depicting sheer unrelenting non-stop brutality from start to finish - and with no easy, compromising feel-good ending."

Of certain scenes: "It was during this research I discovered having one’s tongue torn out by the roots was the common punishment for blasphemy. There were, also, a couple of actual case-histories buried in Hoven’s script which I used: one of a nun who had been raped by a bishop - incorporating speeches taken from trial transcripts of the time. The other was the case of a young baron who had been accused of witchcraft so that the Church could steal his estate - an idea which I expanded into an integral storyline within the whole. I also created the role of Christian, to provide a pivotal centre-point between the lofty bigotry, spiritual hypocrisy and corruption of the Established Church epitomised by Lord Cumberland, and the simplistic rural pagan-based ideas of Life embodied in the character of Vanessa."

The 1st draft of Mark Of The Devil was completed in four weeks and sent to Hoven and Herbert Lom.

Lom, as yet not contracted to the film, was unaware of Hoven’s script, The Witch-Hunt Of Dr Dracula and, consequently only read Mark Of The Devil, which he liked and asked to meet with Armstrong to discuss his character.

At the time, Lom was in England filming Jess Franco’s Dorian Gray with Helmut Berger. Meeting on set, Lom’s only request for changes involved the character’s implied homosexuality. Bowing to the star’s sensitivities, Armstrong found Lom was happier to be impotent rather than a closet gay and he agreed to make the appropriate adjustments. Lom’s only other request was to have a "nose". He felt the character needed a larger nose than his own.

Pleased that his star was happy with the script and agreeing to do the film, Armstrong flew to Munich to meet Hoven for the start of pre-production and was shocked to find Hoven not only hated the screenplay but claimed that the distributors, Gloria Film, preferred Hoven’s original The Witch-Hunt Of Doctor Dracula.

Armstrong, still recovering from the traumas of The Haunted House Of Horror, allowed his agent to resolve the problem. As Herbert Lom had agreed to do Mark Of The Devil, there was clearly no way that the Dr Dracula script could re-emerge in any form but, to appease Hoven and, as Hoven was claiming more importantly, to appease the distributors as well, Armstrong was advised by his agent to compromise and incorporate some of Hoven’s concerns into the screenplay as part of the 2nd draft.

Changes made, additional to Cumberland’s sexual problem, included further authentic speeches from trial transcripts, the inclusion from Dr Dracula of a modified whipping scene with Vanessa and Albino and the enlargement of a role for the father of a family arrested for puppetry. The reason for this became clear later when Hoven cast himself as the father and his son, Percy, as the young boy.

Involved in pre-production work by day and re-writes in the evening, Armstrong recalls, "It was exhausting - especially the nightly script battles with Adrian, but I’d learnt a lot from Haunted House on ways to protect my work so, in the end, very little ended up compromised from my original screenplay."

Only days before shooting was due to to commence, a make-or-break meeting was called by Gloria Film, the distributors. "I’d been led to believe, all along, by Adrian that Gloria Film hated my screenplay and preferred his original Dr Dracula script. I went in to the meeting all ready to do battle and was completely floored by the head of the company saying how much he loved Mark Of The Devil and wanted nothing to do with Dr Dracula which, incredibly, Adrian was still pushing to them as the movie he wanted to make. When we left the meeting, Adrian had his required guarantee for the picture and I anticipated we would now be heading for a trouble-free shoot. I assumed he’d be as delighted as I was until he said, vehemently, 'I want to kill myself. This is not the picture I want to make!' I knew, then, I was in for a bumpy ride. In fact, as I recall, I think that was probably the last polite conversation we had with each other."

History - Casting

Copyright © 2005 Michael Armstrong