Halloween Bites! Twins Of Evil

“The devil has sent me twins of evil!”

The legendary Peter Cushing heads up the Puritanical Brotherhood as they hunt down and burn “witches” at the stake in 1971’s Twins Of Evil. But what does he do when his twin nieces come to live with him after their parents pass away and one of them decides to give herself over to the wicked Count Karnstein, rumored to be a devil worshiper? You’ll have to watch Twins Of Evil to find out what happens!

Cushing portrays Gustav Weil in the film. His nieces, Freida and Maria (twins Madeleine and Mary Collinson, respectively) come to live with him and his wife, Katy (Kathleen Byron). Freida finds Gustav’s Brotherhood to be oppressive and evil. She has a rebellious spirit and does everything she can to anger her uncle. Maria, while not liking the Brotherhood or the domineering ways of her uncle, is more complacent and a generally quite young woman. Both women attract the attention of the local men, and Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) decides that he must have them, partly because he’s always looking for a new woman to fool around with and also because he often locks horns with Weil. Freida, drawn to the count’s bad boy image, seeks out his companionship. What she discovers is that the count is actually a vampire and she decides to join him in his reign of terror and debauchery. Weil, assisted by the Brotherhood and a local school teacher, Anton (David Warbeck), who has fallen for Freida, heads out to destroy the count. I’ll stop right there as I believe that you should see this film.

This is a very well done Hammer production. The sets are beautiful and atmospheric and the music is excellent. Sure, the historical accuracy of the film is all over the place, but that’s easy enough to look beyond thanks to some wonderful acting by Cushing, the Collinson sisters, Warbeck, and Thomas. The twins are very beautiful, as are the rest of the women in this film, and director John Hough uses this to the film’s advantage, highlighting the beauty of the women in wispy clothing and hinting briefly at lesbianism (which is a running theme in all three of the Hammer Karnstein Trilogy films). The story is also enjoyable, as it gives us a hero in Cushing’s Weil, but he’s far from perfect.

It would have been very easy for Hough to focus on the female cast to pull in the 18-34 demographic, but instead, he chose to build a great story, develop the characters in a way that we can appreciate and understand them, and then present it all in a really good film. This is one of the better Hammer films that I’ve watched, and I highly recommend it.