“WE NEED TO find a language that uses some of the Hammer retro look and feel, something of that Gothic tradition, but it needs to be classier than the old stuff. That’s the hardest thing for us to get right, far more than raising the money.” So speaks Terry Ilott, the head of Hammer Films redux, which was resurrected three years ago by a consortium including Charles Saatchi, and now has plans for remakes, original movies, stage shows and video games.
Hammer Films — the Studio that Dripped Blood and made 250 films between 1935 and 1976 — wound up its film production after its home-grown grand guignol was rendered quaint and shoddy by the likes of The Exorcist and The Omen. The studio made a TV series in the 1980s and tried to develop a Hollywood remake of its 1954 hit, The Quatermass Experiment. But by the 1990s it was effectively moribund, except for the tending of the company’s hefty back catalogue, which includes such perennials as Dracula, Prince of Darkness, The Mummy and The Devil Rides Out.
But until a new Hammer film sees the light of day, the studio’s profile resides with the subculture of fan club reunions and memorabilia conventions that shows no sign of waning. Hammer scream queen Ingrid Pitt, who starred in Countess Dracula, The Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil, is hosting her seventh annual reunion birthday bash this autumn.
Hammer is not alone in the British film industry in trying to reinvent itself. Ealing Stud-ios, having revived itself as a production site for hire, aims to release more comedies in the hope of introducing the brand name to younger audiences. The Carry On series is daring to try to revive its own magic after a disastrous first attempt in 1992 with Carry on Columbus.
But it is Hammer Films that one can’t help feeling has the most potential to recapture its former glory. The horror genre is back and booming after a mild drought in the 1990s. It has survived parody, cheap imitation and over-saturation in certain sub-genres, especially the teen slasher market, but it has a die-hard core audience across the globe. As Dog Soldiers (werewolves) and 28 Days Later (zombies) proved, modestly priced British horror films can do more than respectable business when made with a little panache.
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Finding that panache will be one of Hammer’s biggest challenges. In its later years the studio was synonymous with cheesy, creaking horror clichés — slow-moving monsters looking alarmingly like men in rubber suits, village pubs falling silent with every outsider, rustic innkeepers cautioning: “You don’t want to go up there.” But of late what the Hammer name signifies has changed. It is partly the critical re-evaluation that comes with nostalgia. Even Russ Meyer is now lionised as an independent visionary. It is also thanks to the Hammer films being released on DVDs in deluxe box sets.
People are now watching or rewatching Hammer films and being pleasantly surprised. They are not all camp howlers with cardboard sets and dry ice. Admittedly many of the films were as cheap as the drive-in horror films being cranked out in America at the same time, but the Hammer films often had a seriousness of purpose, a tight-lipped high-mindedness, which American exploitation never achieved.
The evolution of this grand, yet tightly budgeted Hammer style started in the 1950s when Hammer was struggling for product, after two decades churning out all manner of B-movies and adventure films. Hammer raided the Hollywood treasure trove of 1930s horror for inspiration and began reworking such public domain classics as Dracula and The Mummy after their first attempt, The Curse of Frankenstein in 1956, took off around the world.
Hammer did more than rip off the Hollywood classics, though. They made them uniquely British. Forbidden to imitate the Boris Karloff incarnation of Frankenstein, they put the emphasis on Baron Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing) and made him the real monster. The perverse glow on his face as he listens to the monster mangling his pregnant mistress is, if anything, more unsettling than any number of stitches or bolts through the neck.
Cushing was a vital component of Hammer’s uniquely British approach; its use of well-bred theatrical performers to serve up lurid thrills with all the conviction of a Shakespeare rep company. Such conviction would have produced instant camp if it had not been filtered through the creative and technical ingenuity of Hammer’s backroom staff.
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The studio minted a trademark Gothic look — a lush, heavy, set-bound brand of Eastmancolor cinematography — which remains eerily foreboding to this day. It developed a distinctive musical style — the Hammer sound of terror — with an unsettling mix of violins and drums by composer James Bernard that predated Bernard Herrmann’s work on Psycho.
Most indelibly, it made icons out of its stable of elegant leading men, such as Christopher Lee, by having them play such richly haunted monsters. They restored emotional complexity to the genre.
Lee’s Dracula surpasses Bela Lugosi’s, with his icy sexuality and hauteur gilded with ominous civility. “I’m glad that you have arrived safely,” he declares suavely, descending his huge staircase into a massive close-up. “I am Dracula, and I welcome you to my house.” Most crucially, Lee made his Dracula soulful, revealing the monster’s majestic loneliness.
It is axiomatic of classic horror that the monster becomes humanised while the pursuers turn into a baying mob — King Kong, Frankenstein, The Mummy, are all torn down by a pack of human wolves after revealing poignant emotions. Hammer at its best understood this: the function of great monsters is first to terrify us and then to unlock our ambivalence about human nature and forbidden desires.
It is something that Terry Ilott understands too. He has promised that Hammer horror will continue to use “fantastical beings” with confounding dilemmas to match the hero’s own troubles, beings that speak to and for the subconscious of the audience. One can only hope.
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Are Hammer horror films worth reviving?
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