Ghoul keepers

Long-time fan Nigel Burton reports on an overdue resurrection and a celebration of its movies at a film festival in Whitby.

MARTIN SCORSESE, the Oscar winning American director, once said: “If we saw the Hammer Films logo, we knew it would be a very special picture.”

He wasn’t alone. For two decades fans flocked to cinemas to watch them. Hammer became a byword for Gothic horrors with a peculiarly British feel. Rather like the Carry Ons, Hammer became a kind of repertory company using the same actors (Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Ripper), often the same sets (compare Rasputin The Mad Monk with, say, Dracula, Prince of Darkness) and the same music (by James Bernard), all filmed in the same small studio by the Thames.

A Hammer film could always be relied upon to feature buxom wenches, vivacious vamps, dashing heroes and lashings of blood all served up in garish Eastmancolor (the cheaper alternative to Technicolor film).

Today, more than 30 years since its last movie, the term Hammer horror is still widely used. Hammer is deeply embedded in British culture.

Set up in 1932 by Enrique Carreras, a Spanish-born theatre owner, and William Hinds, a jeweller- turned-vaudeville comedian, Hammer was a fairly obscure British production company that specialised in adaptations of popular TV shows and radio series.

It hit the jackpot in 1954 with The Quatermass Experiment, a remake of a BBC sci-fi serial.

In Britain, Hammer figured the popularity of Quatermass would ensure strong ticket sales. Creature features were still popular in America too, but, just in case, Hammer re-cast Quatermass as an American, importing Brian Donlevy to give the picture an authentic US flavour.

Re-titled The Creeping Unknown overseas, Quatermass did excellent box office. A Quatermass sequel, The Abominable Snowman and X-The Unknown followed, but the science fiction boom was showing signs of waning, so, in 1956, studio boss James Carreras (Enrique’s son) turned to a more traditional terror tale – Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley’s original novel was already in the public domain so remaking it wouldn’t cost Hammer a dime.

To avoid a law suit from Universal, Phil Leakey, Hammer’s makeup wizard, came up with a design far removed from Boris Karloff’s flattened skull and bolt through the neck. Christopher Lee, a 6ft 5in bit-part actor chosen for his height, looked as though he had been in a car accident. Made for a mere £70,000, The Curse of Frankenstein was a massive success.

The studio’s next picture, Dracula, cemented Hammer’s reputation.

Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were paired again as the count and Van Helsing.

Predictably, the critics weren’t impressed. The Observer reported sniffily: “I feel inclined to apologise...( to Americans) for sending them a work in such sickening bad taste.” The Daily Telegraph’s critic believed it was too shocking.

“There should be a new certificate – S for sadistic or just D, for disgusting,” he wrote.

But Lee was the perfect count.

From an Italian aristocratic background, his height and good looks made him perfect for the role and, after years struggling with bit parts, he put everything into it.

Cushing had been a supporting actor, coming to Hammer’s attention playing the lead in a TV production of George Orwell’s 1984. A kind, sensitive man, he brought gravitas to roles which were often beneath him.

From the Fifties to the mid-Seventies, Hammer screamed all the way to the bank cranking out dozens of horrors. It also gave the world Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC (although the plot was flimsier than a caveman’s loin cloth, everyone remembers Ms Welch in a fur bikini), the world’s first space western (Moon Zero Two) and the first (and, to date, only) “kung fu horror spectacular”

(Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires).

But the Seventies did for Hammer.

Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre made its films look quaint rather than frightening. Efforts to update Dracula, Dracula AD 72 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula failed, and when changes to the UK tax system prompted the Americans to pull out, the money dried up.

The final horror – To The Devil, A Daughter – was exactly that, a sub-par Exorcist rip-off unworthy of the Hammer name.

‘HAMMER horror – won’t leave it alone,”

sang Kate Bush way back in 1978 and we won’t.

The studio and its films have been kept alive by fans. A search for Hammer horror on Google brings up 178,000 hits including sites dedicated to unfilmed projects, Hammer glamour, Hammer posters, Hammer music and even a dictionary.

This year the studio is making a comeback. Its first film, Let Me In, has garnered the kind of critical acclaim Carreras would have given his right arm for and others, including one starring Lee, are in the pipeline.

Next weekend fans of the originals can sate their appetites at the second Bram Stoker Film Fest in Whitby when stars Caroline Munroe, Shane Briant and Martine Beswick will also be on hand to introduce some of their ghoulden greats.

James Carreras once commented that audiences for a Hammer movie would spend “at least 30 per cent of their time rocking with laughter.” After the depressing “gore-nography” of Saw and Hostel maybe the time is right to put the fun back into frights?

■ The Bram Stoker Film Festival runs from Thursday to Sunday, October 17. A two-day pass to the Hammer Exhibition costs £10 (not including film screenings). Tickets for individual films are £6 each.