silverwhistle

The impression I got was that it was less the gore, and more the Romantic/erotic element in Hammer horror that was considered unsettling, especially before the '60s really got under way!

"Trust me, I'm a doctor...!"

silverwhistle

Yes! There was a Gothic/Romantic fairy-tale element to them. You generally knew that the nominal 'goodies' were going to win, but it was difficult not to root for the vampires and monsters as well, because they were such good fun. And for some of us, Ingrid Pitt's Carmilla was our first non-heterosexual romance heroine, even if she did have fangs!

"Trust me, I'm a doctor...!"

Carmel

Yes and Dracula was quite sexy too

catflap

Doesn't there seem to be a "Hammer revival" announcement every five years or so?

I hate to agree with the earlier poster who stated that the cheap and nasty American gore reflected the wishes of the current audience, but I'm afraid that's the way it is.

The likes of "Hostel" and the latest "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" are getting the sort of saturation release that is par for the mainstream course. Once upon a time such flicks would not have escaped the grindhouse - drive in circuit. It goes to sho they are now accepted and here to stay. Boredom in the audience will be the only way the cycle will stop.

Hammer could possibly compete in such a market...but do you really want the Hammer brand attached to the type of horrors in currently slicing their way through multiplexes?

Nah, let's celebrate the glories of their past. You can't go back.

batman

If Hammer did indeed make a return to film producing I would like to see the company making stylish and intelligent movies like the ydid in the early days. The early horrors, the Quatermass films and thrillers such as 'Hell is a City' were all great films, and very British as well.

I, for one, would steer clear of attempts to make Brit versions of trash like 'Saw' etc. There are enough skilled film makers at work in the UK to come with something uniquely British that is also worth watching.

Bats.

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Aaryk Noctivagus

They could make a start by releasing those in DVD widescreen rather than cropped pan and scan as they are presently.

DB7

I'd agree, although Hammer made nearly 300 films it's shouldn't be forgotten that some of it's best films were psychological thrillers, crime dramas and sci-fi rather than the gothic horrors the name is synomonous with. Even today the market isn't totally dominated by Saw (which is probably the best) and a clutch of derivative slashers like Severance and retro remakes (Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw); there are well-produced occult chillers like An American Haunting, Skeleton Key, The Others (borrowing from The Innocents) and The Ring (a variation on Night of the Demon).

Aaryk Noctivagus

And there I was thinking it was a early British Alfred Hitchcock movie - lol

DB7

I'll give it its due, the modern slasher films may be gory but the girl coming out of the well and through the television set in the original Ringu scared the bejesus outta me. Just didn't see that one coming.

Hitch would have approved.

batman

Me too .... I watched it on VHS at about 3am one Christmas morning 'cos I couldn't sleep .... it scared the doodah out of me and when I did get to sleep I dreamed about the bloody thing!!!! Pity the sequels weren't very good. I think the Brits could do a film of that type very well, also ''Audition', another good Jap horror. With much of Britain covered in urban landscapes these days there is scope to use these areas, and what remains of the countryside, to great psychological effect.

Bats.

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Aaryk Noctivagus

I'm sure the Great Director would have.

I must admit I prefer 'The Grudge' and its sequel... but then I'm talking about the American remakes. (I have seen the original 'Ringu' but its script is a bit loose).

I prefer the British 'Dog Soldiers' and 'The Descent' though.

None of these are slasher flicks though. No Slasher Flick holds a candle to 'Psycho' as told by Hitchcock. Empty gore is so very dumb.

Look at 'The Omen' (British/USA) which used intelligent suspence and compare it to its awful non-suspence remake. Same script, but the results were miles apart.

If New Hammer makes intelligent Horror and Science Fiction... then I welcome its return. Otherwise, it would be a disgrace to its name.

Aaryk Noctivagus

I certainly hope so... at least if my movie ever gets off the ground.

Ted Holmes

According to today's Independent, we have a reprint of Hammer's Dracula (1958) to look forward to which includes restored footage of gore considered too extreme in its day.

Yo, sucker: Cult Dracula - Independent Online Edition > Features

The DVD people will be delighted.

batman

I wish you luck .... I have a damn good (IMHO) comedy script thats's been lying dormant since the mid-90s. I had one independent producer interested but he couldn't raise the cash. Ho hum ..... back to psychiatry .............Bats.

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DB7

Hurrah for Hammer

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 24/05/2007

The Hammer Horror Top 10

Will false fangs and flimsy nighties be enough to bring the quintessential British film studio back to life, asks film historian Sinclair McKay

We live in an age of guilty pleasures. From ITV's Midsomer Murders to the music of Duran Duran, there are some tastes that we know we can never justify artistically, but secretly revel in none the less. And now, a vintage guilty pleasure has come creeping out of the national cupboard like a particularly garish fairground skeleton.


Ingrid Pitt in The Vampire Lovers
Things that go bump in the nighties: The Vampire Lovers

"Hammer Horror - won't leave it alone!" sang Kate Bush in 1978. She wouldn't, and we still won't. Witness the gleeful reactions to the news that Hammer Films - those purveyors of quintessentially British Frankenstein and Dracula sagas, all gore and heaving décolletage - is going back into business. And witness the enthusiasm for the British Film Institute's restoration of the studio's original 1958 Dracula, unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival, which will come out in cinemas later this year.

Its return coincides with Hammer's 50th anniversary and I've just written a book on the subject: a hilarious labour of love, as it turned out. I was taken aback at just how widespread the affection is for these films, and not only among the stars who kept such admirably straight faces throughout production. Hollywood director Martin Scorsese is a Hammer fan - he says he likes the "implied metaphysics" of the genre and his favourite is Frankenstein Created Woman.

One actor who kept the metaphysics, such as they were, rumbling on, was Francis Matthews, who remembers having to act out a brain transplant with Peter Cushing in The Revenge of Frankenstein in 1958. The prop brain, which had once belonged to a sheep, baked under the studio lights. "Someone forgot to put it in the fridge overnight," says Matthews. "When I uncovered it the next day, everyone fled the studio."

Anyone you talk to about Hammer has instant flashbacks, and always to such key elements as the regulation flimsy white nighties; Dracula's red contact lenses; and the night-time Transylvanian woodland scenes, clearly filmed in Berkshire in the middle of the day. And then, of course, there were all those outsize fangs, which were apparently made by a sinister dentist in Belsize Park, north-west London.
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Now the Thames-side studio near Windsor, which between 1957 and 1974 led the world in macabre melodramas, has been bought by a consortium of filmmakers and businessmen. Their ultimate aim is to honour the old classic films while simultaneously reaching out to a younger generation with a fresh new wave of productions, giving a regenerated twist to the Hammer name.

Ah, the name! Even that highly distinctive - and aggressive - moniker owes more to accident than design. The studio's original owner, William Hinds, had originally been part of a music hall double act. The name of his act was Hammer and Smith, named after the London borough in which Hinds lived. So much did he like the sound of his stage name "Will Hammer" that in 1934 he bestowed it upon the fledgling film company he had formed with cinema-owner Enrique Carreras.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, there were no gothic horrors from the studio, just romances and crime thrillers. It was Enrique Carreras's son James who, in 1957, spotted the potential in hauling classic old monsters out of their crypts. The resulting films constituted some of British cinema's biggest success stories; as well as making enormous profits, the look and feel of the productions was widely imitated. For a time, the only way to do horror was the Hammer way.

Not that the films enjoyed the warmest of receptions. Indeed, when the Hammer Horrors first appeared with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 the critics rose up like a torch-bearing mob, horrified by the (minimal) shots of blood. The word "Hammer" became synonymous with the shocking limit of cinematic nastiness - and how we loved it.

Millions of us would troop along to the local, stickily upholstered ABC cinema, arm speculatively thrown over girlfriend's shoulder, poised to start creeping further, not unlike The Beast With Five Fingers. And then there were the 1970s Saturday night double bills on BBC2. For those of us brought up in that decade, Hammers were a rite of passage. In school, older children would whisperingly boast of having watched Dracula: Prince of Darkness "all the way through".

My own first Hammer was The Plague of the Zombies, starring André Morell, watched on a small black and white TV, the volume turned down so as not to alert slumbering parents. Then the film seemed utterly terrifying, though its DVD now carries a 12 certificate; the same, in fact, as Pirates of the Caribbean. With the hindsight that only 50 years can provide, the films have acquired some innocence. Hammer's 1959 version of The Mummy - then considered adult X-certificate material - now carries a PG rating.

In their defence, the films were nothing if not consistent: there were the saucy vamps in low-cut gowns; Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein, endlessly bestowing electrical life in gruesome laboratories; mummies rising from sarcophagi; even, on one occasion, a werewolf in the shape of Oliver Reed, making his feature film debut in 1961.

Hammer's Transylvania - brilliantly conjured at the back of their leafy riverside studios - was an artful prospect of sinister turrets, brightly lit inns, green-tinged crypts and bedrooms with French windows (all the easier for Christopher Lee's Dracula to glide to the heroine's bedside). Incidentally, poor old Christopher Lee, the screen's definitive Dracula, had less to laugh about than others because of the bright red contact lenses he was required to wear. "I was constantly crashing about and falling into things," he recalled.

As the films reached the more permissive 1970s, things got rather more full-frontal; many a lad's formative years are garlanded with images of Ingrid Pitt and Madeleine Smith in The Vampire Lovers shimmering out of those nighties. In terms of screen nudity, though, the same was pretty much true of all British films at this time. And Hammer at least made the sex rather larkier. The naffness actually wears rather well today. As actress Kate O'Mara commented wryly when speaking of Hammer's prevailing fashion trends: "The hair! The nighties!"

Some well-known actors took youthful bows in these films: among the unexpected names to be found in the credits are Martin Jarvis, Joanna Lumley, Dennis Waterman and Stephanie Beacham. Jarvis is especially amusing about the difficulties of fang-acting in Taste the Blood of Dracula: "My co-star Isla Blair had to say the line 'Kiss me Jeremy' with those huge teeth in,'' he says. "It's impossible without pulling faces. We ended up helpless with laughter. Christopher Lee got very cross."

You might wonder why it ever shuddered to an end. The truth was that in the mid-1970s, Hammer was hit by the same recession that struck the entire British film industry. American investors pulled out and Hammer could no longer afford to produce films. Added to this, a new wave of American productions such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) started to make period horrors look disastrously quaint.

Studio boss Sir James Carreras once stated that the audiences for his horrors would spend 30 per cent of the time "rocking with laughter". In other words, the films were plain escapism for a Friday night and calculated to make their audiences leave with a smile. Surely not such a bad aim for today's miserablist British film industry?

The Hammer Horror Top 10

1 Dracula (1958)
Fangs, gowns, nervy music and Christopher Lee's Count vs Peter Cushing's Van Helsing - so good that the British Film Institute has now restored it

2 Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)
Peter Cushing's mad Baron F seeks to prolong the life of a scientist by putting his brain into another body. The scientist's wife isn't best pleased

3 The Plague of the Zombies (1966)
Caribbean voodoo transferred to darkest 19th-century Cornwall

4 The Scars of Dracula (1970)
Jenny Hanley and a youthful Dennis Waterman with a never-heard-since posh accent are told at the inn that "strangers aren't welcome here", then find themselves locked in Castle Dracula

5 Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971)
In a titillating twist, the usual rotting-bandage monster is instead resurrected as negligée-sporting Valerie Leon

6 Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
Baron F transplants the soul of a dead man into the body of a beautiful woman. No one stops to ask him why

7 The Gorgon (1964)
Old snake-hair shifts her activities from Ancient Greece to a 19th-century Transylvanian castle

8 Twins of Evil (1972)
The vampiric twins in question were blonde former Playboy centrefolds. The budget just stretched to twin white nighties

9 The Devil Rides Out (1968)
The film that most people found the scariest. Still packs a punch, though the special-effects giant spider hasn't worn well.

10 The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
Set in modern-day London, this is the Life on Mars of the Hammers, complete with Ford Cortinas and Joanna Lumley. What could be better?