The strange thing about The Body Beneath, also known as Vampire’s Thirst, is how British it is, considering it was made by Andy Milligan, something of a phenomenon on the New York indie-exploitation scene from the mid-1960s onwards. A one man band who generally shot on 16mm, his work is much admired in some quarters. Nicolas Winding Refn is a fan, for instance, and lent his own 35mm print of another Milligan film, Nightbirds, to the BFI when they were restoring it for their Flipside series. Flipside is where the weird stuff is to be found.
If you’re already up to speed on Milligan, a film-maker with titles like Pelvis, Gutter Trash and Surgikill to his name, this may be be as familiar as it is unusual. It is very British, a strangely quaint, highly theatrical, insanely gothic horror kicking off in Highgate Ceremony – spookiest of London’s “Magnificent Seven” of old cemeteries – where, in the film’s opening moments, a woman is being bitten by three blonde female vampires.
Candace (Emma Jones) has soon returned home to her husband Graham (Colin Gordon), who is entertaining a bumptious cleric called the Reverend Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed), a distant relation, so the reverend says, who just happened to be in the area and thought, in the interests of genealogical research, that he’d look Graham up. In fact the reverend and his wife, Alicia (Susan Heard), are vampires and are using Graham and Candace as a conduit to what they’re really after – Susan (Jackie Skarvellis), another member of the Ford family, and a pregnant one. The plan: to hijack Susan’s unborn baby and use it to stiffen the bloodline, which weakens over the centuries (apparently).
Milligan’s use of vampire lore is interesting. For starters he’s adding to it – the weakening of the bloodline and its corrective. But he’s also hidden his vampire-in-chief inside it. A vampire posing as a man of the cloth – nice. Later, leeches will be administered in another bit of lore extension – they’re a great way of relieving excessive blood pressure in a vampire, so we’re told.
Graham and Candace, then later Susan and Paul (Richmond Ross), her fiancé. Still later Anna (Susan Clark) – another Ford – Milligan darts about as if daring us to guess who he’s going to torture in the grand guignol finale that’s surely scheduled for the film’s concluding scenes.
Is he saying something about coercive family structures? Possibly. About religion and the loss of faith in the modern world? Also, possibly. But he seems more interested in working up an atmosphere of monstrous gothic madness. Gavin Reed’s performance as the eccentric reverend is florid and wildly theatrical and Milligan’s use of 16mm film makes it visually a case of super-saturation as well. The colours in this film are like the performances: thick and chewy, and Milligan’s determination to fill the frame no matter how unnaturally adds another layer of oddness.
Milligan, famously, used library music in a lot of his films, collaging together bits and pieces culled from old Hollywood B movies. That’s the case here, with lots of atonal spookiness and freeform noodling. It works really well, adding to the unsettling, disjointed atmosphere. If you go for the BFI Flipside release (packaged with Nightbirds, which was shot back to back with this) you can deselect the score entirely, which to my mind diminishes the movie but someone clearly thinks not.
Yes, it’s technically not really up to snuff, with fluffs galore and echoey sound, and there’s some pointless nudity to keep the thigh rubbers on board, but Milligan’s way of shooting and putting the film together is really distinctive. The big finish, for instance, dissolves away the solid and becomes a surging wash of diffused imagery, soft focus and light in the lens. Breaking all the technical rules, he achieves filmic impressionism in a highly idiosyncratic way. Having not come across Milligan before, I can see why fans like Winding Refn rate him. This film is currently rating 4.1 out of ten on the IMDb (as I type). Honestly.
The Body Beneath (with Nightbirds) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
