Horror in Highgate Cemetery

[Ian]

Back in the sixties and seventies, they used to film quite a bit of horror and supernatural dramas in the eerily photogenic Highgate Cemetery – Taste the Blood of Dracula, Tales From the Crypt, and the Louis Jourdan TV Dracula spring to mind. I joined one of the tours around there recently to take reference pictures for my novel Witch Hunt. The guide claimed they stopped all filming in the cemetery about thirty years ago, but now I’ve found the 2009 Dorian Gray shot scenes there. The guide was obviously worth every penny, but having said that, does anyone know of any other films that used the location after 1980?

[Ian]

For anyone interested in this, Redmond McWilliams posted this answer to my question over in Facebook, in the Highgate Vampire Appreciation Society
It's certainly no coincidence that the last horror film to be filmed there until Dorian Gray was the BBC's Count Dracula in 1976-1977. Where once the cemetery's gothic location was seen as a boon by the original owners, this view was to change soon after it was handed over to the FoHC. The vandalism and descreations that the cemetery had suffered in the early seventies was attributed to the Highgate Vampire scare certainly, but it was also thought that its association with the Hammer Horror films had a large part to play its genesis. That being said, on-location filming activity (in general) may have largely gone quiet in the eighties and nineties due to the cemettery entering an extensive and lengthy period of restoration and clean up. And film projects of any suvstance may have been viewed as being potentially disruptive to their existing program of works.

[Tania]

Thank you. I find Highgate fascinating and the tours are brilliant. By far the best of the big 7, not least because of the Highgate Vampire. Somewhere I have a book about it which if memory serves (it rarely does) was written by Sean Manchester himself.

[Ian]

Ah, yes, Sean, or Bishop Sean Manchester, as he calls himself