The film is based on a story by Bram Stoker and involves vampire snake-people, is that horror credentials enough?
I don't really see 'gore fest' films as truly, generically horror as they are straight out exploitation really.
Anyway, Lair of the White Worm strikes me as a bit of a gothic horror, lots of allusion, metaphor and suspense. It is also a touchy hammily acted in places like 70s hammer horrors but I believe this is intentionally camped up.
The obvious, over-riding factor is that this is a Ken Russell film, almost a genre of it's own.
There are a few, almost a Russell trademark, lurid hallucinatory/visionary scenes (as were also present in The Devils and, to an greater extent Altered States), but there is also a nicely compelling dream sequence (Grant's character), which is styled in a rather Kubrick-like manner, with fixed camera perspectives but depicting quite suggestive, freudian action.
Moreover the film has a playful tongue-in-cheek, knowing humour that gives an enjoyable levity and irony to the more heavy-handed demands that the story makes on the audience's suspension of belief.
Another Russell trope is an overt, expressionistic undercurrent (if not a contradiction in terms) of broad sexuality throughout the film. There is some clanging phallic symbolism, some slightly perverse and flirtatious wordplay in the script and also Donohoe is literally hypnotic in most of her two-handed scenes, seducing all and sundry.
There is also a little censor-baiting blasphemy (again very Russell) but nothing too sinister and there is arguably some plot integrity to it's inclusion.
All in all a well executed and highly enjoyable if, at times, fantastical film.
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