Incense for the Damned (also known as Bloodsuckers, Freedom Seeker and Doctors Wear Scarlet) is a 1971 British horror film directed by Robert Hartford-Davis and starring Patrick Macnee, Johnny Sekka, Madeleine Hinde, Alexander Davion, Peter Cushing and Edward Woodward.

Richard Fountain, a brilliant young don at Oxford's fictional Lancaster College,[3] has lost touch with friends after going to Greece to research a book on mythology.

Derek then tells Tony of the rumour that Dr. Walter Goodrich, the Provost of Lancaster College and also Penelope's father, is the cause of Richard's impotence.

He calls academe "the protection racket of the Establishment" and denounces the dons as "thieves who have come to take your souls", pointing to Goodrich as the worst of the lot.

[7][8] Hamilton writes that Incense for the Damned had only a limited theatrical release, after which "it was consigned to brief appearances over the next few years, propping up obscure double-bills".

Even so ... Incense for the Damned is well enough constructed to amount to a richly subversive exercise in the genre, and the various contrasts (between Oxford cricket pitch and Greek pagan temple) and ironies (the scarlet coated dons greedily consuming a College Feast while Richard vampirises the Principal's daughter) are not so much exploited as left to accumulate in power and significance.

In this respect the comparative vacuum at a directorial level may well have finally benefited the film, for more overt shock tactics could only have undermined its pleasingly extravagant symbolic structure.

"[11] British film critic Phil Hardy calls Incense for the Damned a "fairly faithful adaptation of Simon Raven's modern vampire novel, Doctors Wear Scarlet".

Hardy also says that the "subversive potential" of the story is wasted on time-consuming "depictions of 'hippy' decadence with clichéd psychedelic effects, badly staged chase sequences and facile oppositions between alleged Greek paganism and the genteelly repressive Oxford cricket pitch".

[12] Hamilton points out the historical context of the film, noting that it was made "at a time when anxiety about the so-called counterculture movement was coming to its peak and the drugs, psychedelic music and anti-Vietnam War protests were taking a more sinister turn"; e.g. the Charles Manson-led murders in Los Angeles in August 1969.

He calls the film an "inept and barely watchable mess" but adds that "it is no longer possible" to say how much of the blame for its failure "on almost every level' falls on Hartford-Davis and 'how much was the result of post-production interference".

[5] Critic Gary A. Smith labels Incense for the Damned a "fragmented mess" and blames the producers for "Post-production tampering" which included "extensive editing ... the inclusion of a totally gratuitous psychedelic orgy scene (it runs a grueling seven minutes) and a pointless tacked-on ending".

[6] In addition to standalone DVD releases, the film can be found (as Bloodsuckers) as part of the 3-DVD box set Superstars of Horror: Volume 1: Peter Cushing (Umbrella Entertainment, 2005).