When the London Cemetery Company founded Highgate Cemetery, they envisioned the "garden cemetery" as a place of beauty where Londoners could escape the smoke and dirt of their city. The graveyard offered controlled nature — serene, parklike, safe — beside the wilderness of Hampstead Heath.
By the end of the 1960s, Highgate Cemetery was choked with weeds, shadowed by a dense forest of ornamental trees, and colonized by wildlife from Hampstead Heath that included foxes, hedgehogs, and rabbits. The overgrown cemetery was featured in Taste the Blood of Dracula, one of Hammer Studio's costume thrillers starring Christopher Lee. Perhaps that inspired the outbreak of vampire hunting that mutilated Highgate Cemetery in the 1970s.
