Every Way Peter Cushing's Van Helsing Killed Christopher Lee's Dracula
Here’s every way that Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing killed Christopher Lee’s Dracula in Hammer's Dracula movies. The pair were close friends and worked with each other on over twenty films - three of which were part of Hammer’s Dracula run. Like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi before them, Cushing and Lee found a home starring in horror movies, with Cushing leading the Frankenstein series and Lee lending his inimitable glare to Dracula. While the pair might be best known to modern audiences for their parts in Star Wars, their names will always be synonymous with the genre.
Hammer, a British production company, produced many horror films and franchises throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s before having something of a revival in the 2010s with The Woman in Black. Their Dracula series comprised nine movies, seven of which starred Lee in the titular role, with Cushing acting opposite him as Van Helsing on three occasions. These films - Horror of Dracula, Dracula A.D. 1972, and The Satanic Rites of Dracula - always feature Van Helsing defeating Dracula in the finale.
Here’s every way Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing killed Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the Hammer Horror movies.
Horror of Dracula (simply Dracula in the UK) was the first film in Hammer’s series. A loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s original novel, the movie foregoes Dracula’s rather arduous journey from Transylvania to England, instead grounding the production in Romania - though audiences wouldn’t know it from the performances as each actor speaks with a clipped English accent. At the climax, Cushing’s Van Helsing hunts Lee’s Dracula and arrives at his castle by carriage before the two come face to face. Dracula attempts to strangle Van Helsing but the good doctor fights back, eventually bounding across a tabletop, leaping, and tearing down the curtains to expose the Count to sunlight. The vampire crumbles, turning to dust before viewers' eyes, and Dracula is defeated.
Dracula A.D. 1972 was the seventh film in Hammer’s Dracula series and something of a soft reboot - with a then-contemporary setting, as per the title. A bunch of hippies revive Dracula, led by the vampire’s acolyte Johnny Alucard, and Van Helsing’s ancestor sets about returning him to the grave. Cushing actually defeats Lee twice in this movie; once in a Victorian-era flashback wherein Van Helsing stakes Dracula through the heart with the spokes of a broken carriage wheel, and again as his descendant where he tosses holy water over the vampire and forces him onto a bed of spikes with a shovel. The sequel is a rip-roaring adventure and was largely underappreciated by critics of the age, and it eventually inspired the modern-day segment of the Steven Moffat/Mark Gatiss penned Dracula show in 2020.
The Satanic Rites of Dracula was the eighth film in Hammer’s series, the last to star Christopher Lee, and a direct follow-up to Dracula A.D. 1972. A blend of political thriller and supernatural horror, The Satanic Rites of Dracula chronicles the vampire trying to bring about Armageddon by unleashing a deadly virus, utilizing a cult of prominent scientific and political figures to do his dark bidding. Dracula’s defeat is pretty laughable in this entry, with Van Helsing luring him into a hawthorn bush before staking him with a bit of old garden fence. It’s hardly a fitting end for the Prince of Darkness or, indeed, Cushing and Lee’s time together in the Hammer Dracula franchise, though the pair would eventually reunite for 1983’s House of the Long Shadows.