Psychic reality, and its structuring in terms of internal objects and object relations, is made manifest in Phantasy, of which day and night dreams and the play of children are the most clinically relevant examples. With these, however, we must link other forms of phantasy, the myths and legends of primitive people, folk-lore and the imaginative creations of literature and art in all ages which together constitute a continuous revelation of the phantasy-life of the human race, and throw tremendous light on the workings of the unconscious. All these taken together display an inventive, creative, imaginative activity of the human mind which is not, like science, concerned with the accurate portrayal of the outer material world by intellectual activity, but rather with an expression, every bit as accurate of the inner mental world, the world of emotional events which forms the inner hard core of personality-functioning. The prosaic mind may dismiss all that as ‘mere imagination’ or as fantasy or even ‘fantastic nonsense’ and – to come back to our starting point – dreams. The practical mind is apt to contrast ‘hard facts’ like money and guns with the ‘useless’ products of the imagination, ‘such stuff as dreams are made of’. The dreamy person with his head in the clouds is despised. It is true the dreamer is orientated inwards rather than outwards and may become disoriented in out reality, at a loss and useless in practical affairs. But the so called hard-headed, practical man is usually just as helpless in face of emotional realities. His evaluation of the product of emotion involves a two-fold error. He believes that he is free from phantasies and dreams, whereas he is only unconscious of what goes on in his inner world and is phantasy-ridden without knowing it. This is usually discernible at least in such forms as confident prejudice and narcissistic self-evaluation. Further, he believes dreams and phantasies can be contrasted with hard facts as unreal, and dismissed as of no importance. But these same products of imagination are themselves ‘hard facts’ in a psychological sense, of a peculiarly inescapable kind, having ‘psychic reality’.

Harry Guntrip, Personality and Human Interaction

It is wrong to despise popularity in the cinema – popularity there is a value as it isn’t in a book. A film with a severely limited appeal must be to that extent a bad film.

Graham Greene, The Spectator

… Let us settle the matter once and for all; the marvellous is always beautiful. In fact only the marvellous is beautiful.

André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto

Introduction (2024)

This study of the British horror film and its many sources, now extensively updated, first appeared in 1973 at a point when there were no other books on the subject and most opinion on British horror was negative. The book sold out quickly and the publishers wanted a new edition but for reasons, explained in the old introduction below, the next did not appear until as late as 2007.

After such a long gap, massive shifts had occurred in the movie industry by the time I wrote the second Heritage. But, strange to report, the changes back then – after as much as four decades between 1973 and 2007 – were nothing, compared to what has happened now in the sixteen years since the last edition. These sixteen years have seen such huge changes in film production, content and delivery, it is arguable they are as big as the arrival of sound itself. Perhaps in some ways bigger.

Events have indeed been so breathless it is necessary to recap. Back in 2007, film sets and film itself had barely changed in more than half a century, they were an odd anachronistic composite of chemistry and electronics: films were shot on celluloid, (meaning special effects were still limited), developed in a cumbersome expensive process, edited near-manually, copied at further great expense and ultimately driven in large cans to the cinemas where they were then (almost always) first shown to audiences.

All of this has been swept away. Celluloid would finally be banished (with a few exceptions for star directors like Christopher Nolan) and everything from film set to cinema has become digital, ending any need for developing labs, physical editing and copying while also transforming the special effects on which fantasy, horror and science fiction thrive. This shift has enabled budgets at the very lowest indie end to actually fall (yes even after inflation) and therefore unleashed a tidal wave of micro-budget indie genre, appraised at length in later chapters, with some even channelling the old Hammer themes.

As to the distribution side it is true old movies by 2007 were available for home viewing via DVD/Blu-Ray, which helped me enormously last time around, providing rediscovery of many important ‘lost’ films. But at that point large screen LCD TVs were only just starting to appear, costing in real terms five times the price they are now, nor was streaming a major factor though it was much discussed in the industry. So, I doubt many people had a real grasp of what was coming or dreamed that, within a few years, you would be able to bring into your own home on big high-definition domestic screens just about the entire film catalogue of the past and now increasingly the present too.

This has had a far-reaching impact on cinemas and the nature of film narrative.¹ Major studio features have tended to be fewer and more expensive, concentrating on spectacle, especially action and fantasy superhero stories (once so rare as a subject you would be lucky to see one every few years). Meanwhile many movie genres that were once a staple of our multiplexes – the Hitchcock-style thriller, the historical saga, the disaster picture – have gravitated almost exclusively to TV and streaming. Horror, though, has proved one of the most resilient genres: indeed, it is remarkable to report how low-budget horror² survived the cull and remains one of the few genre stalwarts of the multiplex, alongside fantasy, action and comedy.

In the last chapters of this book, I deal with the massive number of new British horror movies in this era, boosted by an explosion in TV and streaming, which has blurred the boundary between the theatrical features and TV movies to the point where it barely exists. Throughout I have added newly rediscovered movies from the past and in places often changed or updated my opinions. Sometimes I felt I had been far too harsh, but certain films have not worn well, though I am glad to say most of the classics are still as great as they ever were.

The original A Heritage of Horror obviously celebrated, among other things, the continuation of the Gothic literary strain in British cinema, something at that point few had commented on. But, perhaps because the original Hammer had such an unusually large footprint for a British company (and one we are never likely to see repeated), it is occasionally asserted that I restricted my argument to that style of horror alone. For example, in his useful and very welcome study of twenty-first-century British horror movies, Contemporary British Horror Cinema (the first study of British horror to cover only the new century) Johnny Walker quotes a single remark of mine in the last edition – that some of the gothic themes still resonate – as a kind of red flag warning, urging readers of the ‘need to move beyond the literary Gothic if we are ever … to fully understand … contemporary British horror cinema.’

He is right of course but what surprises me is how he could ever suppose I would disagree! The first Heritage, devoted almost half its space to other movies, other companies and entirely different themes (psycho thrillers, science fiction, Amicus, early slashers) and also pointed out – in a final chapter deliberately titled Towards a new Horror Mythology – that the newest freshest ideas in horror were coming from the US! I also was at some pains to point out in the last edition that it was no longer possible to make horror films like Hammer’s efforts. So I am surprised anyone would worry I was still judging all by Hammer and the Gothic novels. But it certainly shows the company’s impact and in fact now much new and intriguing material has emerged, (see Chapter 2) about the old Hammer and the people at its top including the link with organized crime in America.

Another change that is highly relevant to this new edition is that the nationality of horror, once so clearly defined first by Universal on the one hand in the US, and later by the original Hammer and other companies in the UK, is now far vaguer and less obvious than ever, especially for English-language productions. Talent effortlessly crosses the borders of a world shrunk by fast travel and communications, as is demonstrated by the massive success in the US of British actors (and also directors and writers) to the point where such cultural exchange is now barely noticed. In such a context this new edition will naturally aim to be as inclusive as possible. After all, looking back to the early classics, that quintessentially British horror The Innocents (based on the novel Turn of the Screw by Henry James) had an American screenwriter, adapting an American born novelist with American money yet it was always bracketed with English horror and feels utterly English thanks to its setting, themes, actors and director.

Today, with its massive budget, the ground-breaking Game of Thrones (discussed under TV in my closing chapter) has moved this multiculturalism a step or so further: like The Innocents it boasts largely American writers and finance but, at the same time, several of its directors are British, the majority of its cast are British/Irish, 80 per cent of it was shot in the UK or Ireland, while, as indicated later, its stories and myths and events draw deeply on Anglo-Saxon and Norse culture. Creatively it is therefore very much a co-production and has as much right to be included here as The Innocents or even the American scripted The Devil Rides Out.

When I signed off from the last edition in 2007 on a cautiously hopeful note, I was naturally unaware of the amazing changes coming. The boom I chronicled then, far from going away, has accelerated dramatically in all areas of British horror movie production from commercial and indie to micro-budget, the latter now as I say even including the kind of Hammerish period titles I never expected to see again.

So, as well as offering a chance to revisit, and expand on, the major milestones of UK horror as more emerges about the production of these films in confidential files, this new edition also provides a welcome opportunity to explore the current abundance of horror movies, including many from the talented women filmmakers who brought a whole new perspective to UK indie horror cinema.

Finally, a quick comment on another major change, namely the massive expansion of movie information and criticism on the internet. There is more information available now than we ever thought possible before, but that can also mean there are many false trails and misleading clues. Box office data is in some respects less hidden (though still not always clear) but it remains as tricky as ever to measure impact outside of obvious cases of topicality.

For example, Rotten Tomatoes (owned by a major Hollywood studio and a movie ticket selling company) quantifies reviews both by critics and public but its conclusions demand some scepticism. For example, a recent quickly cancelled (and, it seemed to me, generally reviled) Netflix action series scored 100 per cent for critics and 99 per cent for audience, an amazing total, about as high as you can get. But closer examination revealed only six critics and seven members of the public had actually reviewed it, thirteen people out of the entire world! Most of the critics’ comments were neutral at best – the reviews being presumably short paragraphs at the end of a column – and yet the site’s blunt scoring meant that was enough to count as a big endorsement, while the seven public write-ins could easily have been just pure PR. Digital movie information merits as much interrogation as the old media did – perhaps, in the end, more.

Note on the Text of the New Edition (2024)

There were no textual revisions to the original Heritage published by Gordon Fraser in 1973 and only one edition in the UK and one in the US.

When the book was eventually revived by the second publisher I. B. Tauris, scanning was still expensive and cumbersome so (rather to my anxiety) Tauris had the original text retyped manually. This took a long time and, when it came back to me, unfortunately there were masses of random transcription errors – doubly annoying since the original had been relatively error free. We eliminated most of them but, because we were busy making the book twice as long we missed a few (as enthusiasts inevitably noticed). There were also major problems with the index, which was compiled elsewhere and had countless omissions.

As a result, only a year after publication, Tauris agreed to do a new 2009 version, at their own expense, with a new index and apart from finally excising the transcription errors, I took the opportunity to add some extra material including some added text and footnotes. It is therefore a little moot whether this new 2024 book is the third or fourth revision of New Heritage but it is certainly the book’s third major updating.

INTRODUCTION (2007)³

The first edition of A Heritage of Horror was written when I was little more than a teenager, but I can easily recall the three individual moments that inspired it. I was far too young to see the Hammer horrors when they appeared, but I will never forget the experience of seeing the second and I still think the best and most paranoid Quatermass serial, Quatermass II, on TV in my early years at primary school. Nigel Kneale’s dark and expressionist vision of a Tory Britain, slowly being eroded by vicious authoritarian aliens, was given an extraordinary patina of monochrome East European angst by Rudolph Cartier. Not long before his death, in a moment which I admit made me very happy, I was asked to speak before Kneale at a screenwriting symposium. There was no need for me to talk about his huge influence on my work; I had only to run the opening sequence of my first produced script, Rainy Day Women, which was a slavish attempt to duplicate the sheer alienness of Marsh and Quatermass’s journey at the start of Quatermass II, where they travel into a despoiled England with ‘roads leading nowhere’.

Hammer of course had been clever enough to adapt Kneale’s work into horror movies, but I had no real awareness of Hammer as a studio until some while after my first viewing of Kneale’s serial when I saw the trailer for The Revenge of Frankenstein at my local cinema in Scotland. All horror trailers at the time were amazingly strident, parading their gore and the fact they were censored with a panache unimaginable now. ‘As this is a U certificate advertising an “X” film,’ screamed a voice over a huge red ‘X’ in the trailer for Horrors of the Black Museum around the same time, ‘we repeat, we cannot show you the scene as it appears in the picture.’ That classic trailer flashed this up three times, climaxing in a green ‘X’ on red and the words: ‘To experience all the horror of the Black Museum you must see the complete film’.

The Revenge of Frankenstein trailer went even further and constituted perhaps the most brazen announcement of a British studio’s identity there has ever been. In a complete break from tradition, Hammer begins the trailer with dedicated material that had nothing to do with the film itself, but involves instead a direct challenge to its intended audience. Peter Cushing, as Baron Frankenstein, introduces himself threateningly to camera, looking like some dandified terrorist. He informs us he has been sentenced to death but has escaped and intends to have his revenge on humanity. The rest of the trailer emphasises the gore and horror that will be unleashed – ‘You will see a human hand severed from the body’ – and also Hammer’s ability to deliver it as effectively as they did in The Curse of Frankenstein.

In effect it was a colossal bit of cheek, for The Revenge of Frankenstein contains nothing whatsoever about the Count’s wish to inflict revenge; indeed, he is merely pursuing his radical scientific experiments in the usual way, albeit secretly. But as an announcement of Hammer’s eruption into the cinema of the time, the trailer is one of the most perfect artefacts of its kind.

I was totally captivated by it. I could not see the film but I did at the time read Jimmy Sangster’s novelisation, a perfect introduction to Sangster’s notion of Victorian licentiousness. His Victorian world was of course not the real one at all but a riot of sexual colour and macabre incident, a vivid reaction in fact to the dull, repressive British 1950s. Close to the story’s beginning he describes a tavern ringing with the orgiastic cries of wenches plying their trade in upstairs rooms, a detail that was uniquely shocking at the time and in retrospect seems almost as fantastical as the Baron’s experiments. Later, when I was old enough, I tried to see some of Hammer’s work, which was not as easy as it sounds since I was mainly reliant on television and late-night shows. Indeed, this difficulty is reflected in the mistakes that cropped up in a few places in this book for which at long last now I can apologise, as when I described a key character in Quatermass II as ‘Willie’ (in fact the name was Vinnie).

I think I did grasp there was something interestingly English about Hammer, a raffish commercial expertise alongside a slightly old-fashioned country house studio setup. But it was not until years later that the theme of A Heritage of Horror suddenly presented itself to me in a university library. I had begun to study the Gothic novels, and Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony, and was suddenly becoming aware that the theme of Hammer’s films went back a good deal further into Britain’s literary past than the novels Frankenstein and Dracula. The more I read, the more I realised that Hammer was tapping into something more fundamental to our psyche than perhaps anyone had really appreciated. A fellow student called Paul Ward, whom I barely knew, had also connected the actor Peter Cushing to Gothic fiction in my hearing during a seminar on Thomas Love Peacock. It was a sunny afternoon. I recall the library was busy and I wrote into my notebook: ‘arguable that horror is to Britain as western is to America.’

That this was something of a radical or even heretical statement at the time is hard to believe now. But, in those days, critics seemed fixated on the western, a genre that held little interest for me. And what I felt in that moment was that here, right under our nose, was our genre and one which I had always loved. With the typical paranoia of the novice, I suddenly dreaded someone else would make the point in print before me. But I need not have worried, for film critics then were barely interested in horror at all, let alone its British offshoot.

In the circumstances I was lucky to be published at all and even luckier to be well reviewed. Many people, it seems, were genuinely quite startled to discover (or be reminded of) the deep hostility that had greeted the British horror movie in its most innovative years almost two decades earlier. As a result, the first edition sold out quite rapidly. Nobody had described Hammer’s movies as ‘gothics’ before as far as I know, but it subsequently became the accepted description. And there were some strange and gratifying ancillary effects for, since this was the first book to take English horror seriously, it helped kickstart a re-evaluation of many filmmakers and even, according to screenwriter Stephen Volk, inspired at least one horror movie (see Chapter 10). There were two personally gratifying moments for me. One was at a film festival when Morag Fisher whispered in my ear, so as not to be overheard by her filmmaker husband Terence, that the book had ‘changed everything for him’. The other was a more surreal occasion in a London screening room when I was meeting Martin Scorsese and found him being talked shot-by-shot through an old Michael Powell movie by Powell himself. Later when the lights came up and Scorsese introduced us, Powell’s face suddenly lit up and he grasped my hand saying ‘I owe you a great debt.’ It sounds self-serving now but at the time, given how badly Powell was treated here, it felt pretty good.

The publisher wanted to reprint. But by then James Fraser, the man who commissioned the book and put so much work into it, had left the publishing company and – rightly or wrongly – I felt it would be unfair to do a new edition without him. Years later when that was no longer a consideration, I found it hard to find time. So, the new edition of A Heritage of Horror was constantly postponed and, as a result, the book became rare and copies changed hands at fairly ridiculous prices. But I was always amazed and grateful that it has been cited in almost every horror movie book concerned with British horror since.

Sometimes it was described as merely a study of Hammer, but in fact it covered most of the other companies working, many in detail. What I did not and could not know (and what may have helped to give the book its strange longevity considering it was out of print for 30 years) was that I was then writing about a form that was on the point of dwindling away almost to nothing. For, within ten years of the publication of A Heritage of Horror, the sustained production of commercial genre cinema in Britain by British companies would, for a time, become just a memory.

After publication of the original Heritage I came to know some of the original Hammer staff and finally obtained access to the most confidential files, which I quote and scrutinise here.

To my amazement as I studied the files, I even came across my own name and memos that flew back and forth at Hammer, prompted by my own early interest in the company. The correspondence between Sir James Carreras and his lawyer dwelt on an abortive attempt to shut my book down by threatening a ‘passing off’ legal action. The lawsuit never materialised, but, as this and so much else demonstrates, Hammer could at its height be an amazingly secretive place.

How much of the book’s original thesis would I defend now? Most, which is why I have retained much of the original in what follows, though with many revisions and additions that amount to another book in length. Some critics have commented that certain aspects of Heritage, like the section on Terence Fisher, were too steeped in the ‘auteur theory’ of its time in which the director is seen to be pre-eminent. I agree with this in part and have since worked on enough films myself to be aware that the auteur classification can be of limited use. Many, if not most, good films, especially horror films, result from teamwork. But then the original Heritage also paid considerable attention to writers and producers. And I still feel that in his modest way Terence Fisher, an English eccentric, who suddenly by complete accident found a field in which he could play with his very Anglo-Saxon dreams, did make an extraordinary contribution to the British horror film. One of the great and unremarked oddities of the British horror boom of the late 1950s was that, in their desperate attempt to find filmmakers for the new genre, producers turned not – as would happen now – to the young and untested but to the old and experienced. With the result that at the age of 53, when most directors now might be lucky to find employment at all, Fisher began a whole new career. Indeed, now that more of his films are available, like The Four-Sided Triangle (discussed in the Fisher chapter) which turns out against the odds to be a remarkable early run at a Frankenstein story, I find myself regretting I could not see more of his work while I could ask him about it. For this book I have sat through any number of pre-horror UK movies, most lacking all interest, yet beside these there is a confidence and style about Fisher’s early films which continues to impress me. From these, it is possible to see exactly why Anthony Hinds hired him for The Curse of Frankenstein and in the course of writing this new book my admiration for Fisher the filmmaker has, if anything, increased.

Of course, what has changed even more than fashions in film criticism is British cinema itself and, besides elaborating much of what I wrote then and supplementing it in many areas, the new edition presents an opportunity to update and examine what has happened since the book was written. Many people have noted that my hopes at the end of the original edition for a renaissance were, at the time, never fulfilled. I agree with those who think it probably came closest with the company Palace and Stephen Woolley, a huge horror enthusiast, who produced Interview with the Vampire (though it was American and not for Palace).

The book also enables me to add many titles and revise my own opinions. Obviously where I could see new material, I have done so. Have I revisited all the other films again? In some cases, I know them so well it would be pointless except maybe on a big screen. In many others where memory has faded, I have found it very useful and sometimes altered my judgement accordingly. To take one example I was very surprised to find that, barring one misjudged special effect at the end (a far more destructive effect than that in Night of the Demon), The Skull is an extremely frightening film, which can be viewed not as a supernatural movie but a descent into madness.

Incidentally, in a retrospective book like this, it is unavoidable that key plot details (‘spoilers’) are sometimes disclosed, something which is rightly considered unforgivable in daily criticism. However, I try not to do this until well into a discussion, giving the reader a chance (one I often take myself) of skipping details of a particular film until it has been seen.

Finally, though, for the reasons stated, much of the argument advanced in the original remains intact. I have made extensive additions and revisions throughout, adding many new chapters and sections; occasionally too – as with the original introduction which follows in its original form apart from a few small changes – I add new comments at the end, clearly marked as such.

INTRODUCTION TO FIRST EDITION

No matter how painful and even humiliating the process may turn out to be I believe the time is rapidly approaching when we are going to have to make a detailed revaluation of British cinema. The circumstances which have prevented this up to now are too obvious to need enumeration: for one thing, America and certain other countries have appeared much richer hunting-ground for serious film critics; for another, the films on which to base such a study have not always been forthcoming. But, as has been emphasised so many times before, it is only by a detailed critical response to the English commercial cinema that one can possibly hope to promote a climate in which it may prosper and, to take one specific example, the shameful waste of artistic talent during the 1950s for which the British film industry is rightly notorious can be almost directly linked to the negligible standard of writing about films in the country during that time. So far as the American cinema is concerned some level of critical consensus has already been attained; what was heresy yesterday is orthodoxy today and directors like Hawks and Fuller⁴ – to name only two – have reached a level of recognition that would have been unthinkable ten – or even five – years ago. Yet in the British cinema the basic groundwork for critical opinion has scarcely been laid; the work of its veterans remains unexplored, unmentioned and virtually unknown.

But it is not my wish in a survey of this kind to write a polemic, which would be unnecessary and ill-timed. I want simply to probe an area that has been the significant major casualty of the refusal to take commercial English films seriously. It is noticeable that even in circles that are generally sympathetic to the claims of popular art, the ‘horror’ genre always seems to be regarded with more suspicion and scorn than, say, the western or the gangster movie. To some extent this must be because the term ‘horror’, as it is employed with regard to certain types of films, does have unfortunate and wholly inaccurate connotations. ‘Gothic fantasy’ or ‘myth’ or even ‘fairy tale’ would describe far more precisely the idioms discussed in this book, and I use the word ‘horror’ reluctantly, only because it has come to be understood by both public and the film industry as a distinct cinematic designation which, unlike say ‘fantastique’, remains sufficiently broad to cover all the various aspects of the field, whether supernatural, psychological, historical, mythical or scientific.

It certainly seems to be arguable on commercial, historical and artistic grounds that the horror genre, as it has been developed in this country by Hammer and its rivals, remains the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim its own, and which relates to it in the same way as the western relates to America. It is perfectly true that English filmmakers were among the slowest to capitalise on their own native Gothic tradition. It was not until 1956 that the country that had first produced Dracula and Frankenstein (as well as countless equally important Gothic prototypes from earlier writers) began consistently to employ the various Gothic motifs in its films. But the sheer volume of the success which followed (on a consistent commercial level quite unlike anything else this country’s cinema has ever seen) suggests that a fairly fundamental source had been tapped; and not the least significant element of what happened was that, despite the fierce international demand for the product, for a very long time practically no producers in other countries successfully managed to remount classical horror themes to cash in on English success in the field. Certainly, Roger Corman was able to employ the writing of his fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe to some advantage; and the Italians made a determined effort to produce films with pseudonyms on the credits, and English actors/technicians, which they hoped audiences would assume were English. But the British cinema (including not just Hammer but other smaller companies: this is a national phenomenon) still dominated the ‘horror’ market for a period of almost 20 years with a series of films which, whatever their faults, were in no way imitative of American or European models but derived in general from literary sources. The phenomenon is intriguing enough in its own right, and the literary basis of the films is so striking that I make no apology for the literary orientation of this book; the film medium is not an extension of literature (or of anything else) but in this instance literary comparison becomes not only illuminating but essential. The uniqueness of English Gothic cinema will be best understood in the first place, not simply through analysis of individual films, but by an examination of the peculiar status of ‘horror’ in the English cultural tradition.

Comment 2007: Despite the denial in the second paragraph, I have to be honest and admit A Heritage of Horror was in certain respects very much a polemic. With all the righteous indignation of a teenager (as I was when I first started it), I was almost less incensed by the die-hard haters of horror, who could so easily be dismissed, than by the so-called fans of the form, who in those days – unlike today – seemed to have no genuine enthusiasm whatsoever, but expressed their embarrassed appreciation in picture books with endless puns and camp jokes as if they were half-ashamed of their own weakness in liking the thing at all. To my judgemental eyes at least, these people just did not seem, to engage with the subject at all in any useful or meaningful way. Many of them were elderly purists who regarded Hammer as a usurper and worshipped Bela Lugosi (not all: I had enormous respect for screenwriter/ critic Paul Dehn whose reviews generally showed he was on the right side). Eventually in a later book on vampire cinema, I took enormous pleasure in dissecting Lugosi’s performance in the first Dracula, and I return to this subject in the Dracula chapter below.

There is, however, I now believe, something much more culturally significant about the initial hostility to Hammer, and even about the embarrassed coyness of those who liked horror but dared not quite admit it, than I realised when I first wrote this book. It relates, among other things, to the extraordinary British cultural obsession with what for want of a better word we have to call ‘realism’, a subject I explore in ‘Horror and the Tyranny of “Realism”’ (pp. 22–5).

1.And, of course, on culture and society so that even the British ‘tyranny of realism’ discussed at length at the end of Chapter 1 is undoubtedly less pronounced now in the digital era, weakened by the sheer proliferation of narrative and no doubt too by the lessening power of mass news outlets though moral panic is unfortunately just as prevalent as ever.

2.Though given the micro-budget boom perhaps we should now refer to this and the B-Pictures of yesterday as medium budget.

3.With minor revisions (2024).

4.Howard Hawks and Samuel Fuller, still known to film students today, though perhaps not to too many others, were the great auteurist causes of their time.

Acknowledgements

Many people helped in the compilation of the original A Heritage of Horror, which was effectively the first-ever study of Hammer and English Gothic cinema. In the last edition I also acknowledged further helpers and some who championed horror cinema in the UK even if they did not directly aid me. Inevitably this time around many more people have given their time and advice.

Therefore, in the circumstances and for space reasons I think it is best if I now just offer these names from all the editions in alphabetical order while stressing this is in no way intended to underplay the gratitude I feel. Note that the list does not include authors and books I have consulted which are either in the text, or the bibliography.

Derek Adams, Vincent Barnett, Charles Barr, Elizabeth Cameron, Ian Cameron, Michael Carreras, Jimmy Carreras, Alison Catchpole, Terence Fisher, John Fraser, James Fraser, Jude Harris, Alan Howden, Alan Hutchinson, Sheryl Kaye, Mark Kermode, Richard Klemensen, Steve Lawson, Richard Matheson, Colin McArthur, David McGillivray, Laura Mulvey, Lynda Myles, Kim Newman, Stan Nicholls, Gary Parfitt, Christopher Petit, Julian Petley, Alice Pirie, Jack Pirie, Bob Rixen, Jimmy Sangster, Graham Smith, John Smith, Michael Wallington, Tom Walmsley, Denny Wernham, Sheila Whitaker, Paul Willeman, Peter Wollen.

1

The Characteristics of English Gothic Literature

’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;

For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare

Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air

Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror there –

A women’s countenance, with serpent-locks,

Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks.

P. B. Shelley, ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’

‘The Tempestuous Loveliness of Terror’

Thanks in part originally to the pioneering work of Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, it is now fairly widely accepted that the English Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were not a curiously isolated and negligible phenomenon, but part of a far more widespread movement which was to have enormous implications for European culture. The influence of the three major exponents of the form (Mrs Ann Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis and Charles Maturin) was seen to be crucial, but it has also been observed that these writers and their successors develop certain themes which seem to have a specifically English resonance. Praz singled out, for example, as an essential feature of English Gothic, the calculated and atmospheric presence of the Persecuted Woman (adapted in the first place from Richardson’s Pamela) who existed side-by-side with her opposite the Fatal Woman, or Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (‘It was in England that the Fatal Woman found its most complete form’). He drew attention to the innate Manichaeism of the English, the predilection for cruel and terrifying spectacles (‘Le Vice Anglais’), Shelley’s influential advocation of the ‘beauty of the Medusa’ and the romantic cult of the Vampire or Fatal Man emanating from Milton’s Satan. In fact, it is almost uncanny how far his analysis – written in 1931 – prefigures those themes and ideas, which were to be revived so assiduously by the British cinema in the late 1950s. It is one of the purposes of this book to explore this analogy, which has far-reaching implications; it may be that the themes relate to certain psychopathological aspects of the English or British temperament (in this connection Praz himself points to the time-worn stereotype of English reserve and repression). There are also good reasons for recalling that much of the literature discussed was written in nineteenth-century England, a period notorious for its rigid if superficial conventions.

The background and origins of the Gothic movement, which took England by storm in the late eighteenth century, is a constant topic of interest. A new preoccupation with death, solitude and the visual/emotional appeal of ruins are all factors that dominate the change of sensibility, and the ‘barbarism’ of the Middle Ages began to seem to many a fabulous escape from the rigid demarcations of Augustanism. The first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, was significantly the result of a bizarre dream experienced by the fanatical medievalist Horace Walpole in 1764. For its original publication, the novel pretended to be a translation from an ancient rediscovered Italian manuscript of the sixteenth Century and was praised as such, selling many copies. But, when Walpole later admitted it was fiction, the critics turned against it. By modern standards it seems a mechanical affair, and the form did not properly come in to its own until the writing of Mrs Radcliffe began to make an impression in the 1790s.

The work of Mrs Radcliffe still constitutes something of a problem to the critic because the territory she staked out in her time has since become common ground, and the modern reader is likely to be bored stiff by her prolonged moralising, annoyed by her simpering heroines and unconvinced by her scowling villains; but even now her two main novels The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Confessional of the Black Penitents do generate power. There is scarcely any need to demonstrate her adoption from Richardson of the Persecuted Woman motif (which is in any case like La Belle Dame Sans Merci as old as literature, being merely brought to a special peak by Gothic writers), but it is of some importance that she was perhaps the first writer to properly grasp the essence of what the Surrealists later called ‘the castle question’. The castle of Udolpho, standing in its foreboding valley surrounded by mountains, is the most powerful figure in the overall structure of the novel. As Varma points out in his definitive study The Gothic Flame, it is one of the key features of the Gothic idiom that the passive agent of terror becomes the castle, while the active agent is the villain who inhabits it. The villain ‘is born as an adjunct to the castle and his nature is dictated by its origin’. This was part of the framework that Bram Stoker was to build a hundred years later into his masterpiece Dracula, and the visual importance of ‘the castle question’ for the cinema is obviously crucial.

Mrs Radcliffe also understood, though not quite as well as those who succeeded her, the relative importance of landscape in the Gothic schema. She is able to instil it not just with gloom or foreboding, but with an overriding melancholy that suggests the vulnerability of living things, and almost places her characters within a tragic context. At the same time her capacity for neat and arbitrary moral distinctions gave way in the last novels to much more subtle characterisation, and in this respect her villains, especially, represent an absolutely crucial step in the development of the romantic hero, a subject of immense importance, which Praz and other writers have considered at some length: Mrs Radcliffe’s villains are scowling, posturing and damned, but, particularly in her greatest novel The Confessional of the Black Penitents, had far more energy and verisimilitude than any of their opponents. They were also endowed with certain physical characteristics (‘gaunt face’, ‘piercing eyes’) which recur again and again in Gothic literature, for they signify what Praz has called ‘the metamorphoses of Satan’. It is no coincidence that Byron claimed to model his scowl on Mrs Radcliffe’s villain Schedoni in The Confessional of the Black Penitents, for Byron can be seen as the next in the chain which extends (originally from Milton’s Satan) through Mrs Radcliffe’s pale and piercing-eyed villain right up to Dracula (‘extraordinary pallor’, ‘positively blazing’ eyes), perhaps the greatest incarnation of the Fatal Men who stalk remorselessly through the pages of romantic literature.

The question of how far German sources were behind the English ‘tale of terror’ as it evolved under Mrs. Radcliffe’s guidance has been much debated, and some of the English writers undoubtedly plagiarised German models. But scholarship seems in some respects to have confirmed Coleridge’s forthright statement that the movement was ‘English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by re-adoption’. In any case, when accused of plagiarism, Poe once wrote that ‘terror is not of Germany but of the soul’, and it certainly seems that much of the so-called ‘German’ literature published in England during the craze was not German at all, but was described as such simply to increase its popularity. Surprisingly, the most obvious influence on Mrs Radcliffe’s writing seems to have been Shakespeare. Indeed there is so much Shakespearian tragedy and farce in The Confessional of the Black Penitents that it greatly detracts from the novel’s effect. Even worse, her plots revolve around shamelessly theatrical situations, absurd coincidences and all the worst apparatus of melodrama; but ‘Mother Radcliffe’, as Keats called her, still has to be reckoned with, not only because her work still retains a degree of power, but because of the enormous creative vitality that it generated in her contemporaries including Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Scott and Shelley. One of the more extraordinary indirect results of her writing was the publication in 1796 of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk, which as Frederick Garber has observed ‘went as far beyond her as she had gone beyond Walpole and Clara Reeve’.

The Monk is certainly one of the two indisputable masterpieces of English Gothic fiction. Like the other, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, it is constructed rather clumsily with the tedious interpolation of an unremarkable ghost story but, in spite of this, its power survives undiminished. Not surprisingly its publication caused a resounding scandal and even Coleridge was reduced to a vituperative outburst, calling it ‘a poison for youth and a provocative for the debauchee’. Mrs Radcliffe herself was appalled by this new manifestation, and her novel The Confessional of the Black Penitents is often seen as a kind of literary reply. Later, Lewis produced two melodramas for the stage with similar results: ‘Never did Covent Garden present such a picture of agitation and dismay,’ wrote one spectator. ‘Ladies bathed in tears – others fainting – and some shrieking with terror – while such of the audience who were able to avoid such demonstrations as these sat aghast with pale horror painted on their countenances.’ Lewis is one author who would undoubtedly have relished the translation of his effects into the cinematic medium.

Ambrosio, the hero/villain of The Monk, is another incarnation of the Fatal Man, with ‘colourless cheeks’ and ‘fiery penetrating eyes’. But Lewis has gone much further by giving him a personality that is psychologically convincing, even by the standards of modern characterisation. Ambrosio is the proud hypocritical Abbot of a strict religious order, who is gradually seduced by the explicit guile of a beautiful seductress Matilda, later revealed as an agent of the Devil. Gradually in the course of the action, the whole of Ambrosio’s superficially upright character collapses before the reader’s eyes, as his long-suppressed sexuality begins to exert more and more control over his actions. Lewis is able to convey this with the most remarkable clarity, since he is far less reticent in describing events than Mrs Radcliffe and his prose style is exuberantly graphic. He even effects the most daring juxtaposition of sensual/ necrophile imagery, as in the episode where Ambrosio manages to lure the heroine to his lover’s bower – which turns out to be a morgue – ‘here among these lovely tombs, these images of death, these rotting loathsome corrupted bodies’. It is quite likely that Lewis was influenced by De Sade, and he was certainly one of the first English writers to ignore the precept that it is necessarily more effective to suggest horror than to portray it. He even grasped that the strange and the horrible could in certain respects be transformed into beauty, and his writing – which influenced Shelley enormously – can be put forward as one of the first celebrations of the beauty of the Medusa. The sheer panache of the description adds immense force to Ambrosio’s Faust-like tragedy, and finally separates Lewis from most of his contemporaries; by the end of The Monk, as surely as by the last act of Macbeth, we are in the presence of a man who is damned. The final description of his punishment at the hands of the Devil goes far beyond anything that the old Hammer ever did, reminding us that Luis Buñuel wanted to make The Monk for years:¹

The sun rose above the horizon; its scorching beams darted full at the head of the expiring sinner. A myriad of insects were called forth by the warmth; they drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio’s wounds; he had no power to drive them from him, and they fastened upon his sores, darted their stings into his body, covered him with their multitudes and inflicted on him tortures the most exquisite and insupportable. The eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal and dug out his eyeballs with their crooked beaks.

Lewis was one of the first writers to use every weapon in his verbal artillery to compel the reader into a direct experience of the corruption and decay that he describes, and the fact that Ambrosio slides, inch by agonising inch, during the course of the novel into the fate quoted here makes it all the more unendurable. Understandably the influence of the book was immense, and we can safely include Scott, Shelley, Byron, Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Hoffman and even Coleridge (for all his protestations) among the writers who absorbed it. Lewis’s vigorous approach more or less formed one side of the English approach to horror. But in 1820 his achievement was to be convincingly superseded by a novel which can claim to be the quintessential masterpiece of Gothic fiction simply because it has a poetic quality which Lewis, for all his sense of theatre, could never have emulated.

Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer is one of those books which moves uneasily around the backstage of literary history, refusing either to be ignored or categorised, but always registering a strong dominating presence. Maturin was an eccentric Irish clergyman (the role of Ireland in Gothic literature is immense – Stoker and Le Fanu, for example) who wrote mainly in order to supplement his tiny income. He was encouraged by Scott, with whom he had a lifelong correspondence, and put together Melmoth only a few years before his own death in 1824. It is an extremely long and superficially incoherent book in which narrative succeeds narrative like so many Chinese boxes, but the whole thing is welded indestructibly together by a strange theme which relates closely to that which had preoccupied Lewis in The Monk. Melmoth is a man who has made a bargain with the Devil and has 150 years in which to find a substitute who will take his place and spare his soul. Gradually – through the traditional means of discovered manuscripts and various narratives – the book traces his attempts to do so, and in the course of this. follows him via the coast of nineteenth-century Ireland, a madhouse on the outskirts of seventeenth-century London and the cells of the Spanish Inquisition, to a deserted island in the Indian Ocean: every possible manifestation of human misery and distress is explored but no-one will accept Melmoth’s offer, and finally he returns to his mansion in Ireland where he is claimed by the Devil.

The enormous canvas of the novel obviously represents a great challenge to any writer, and Maturin rises to the occasion with absolute confidence. Melmoth is yet another embodiment of the romantic strain that culminated in Dracula; his eyes blaze with a ‘premature lustre’, and when he goes to a wedding, the priest falls dead in trying to pronounce the blessing while the bride becomes a corpse in the arms of her husband; in another of his adventures, a lover cannibalises his mate, and in another he attempts to seduce the most innocent and untainted girl in the world who lives on a desert island: ‘Heaven only knows the source of that wild fondness with which he contemplated her, and in which was still mingled something of ferocity.’ But, despite the increasing accumulation of horrors, in the course of the book the character of Melmoth himself gradually becomes a rigorous and eloquent metaphor for the human condition.

The tone which Maturin adopts to cover every imaginable and unimaginable source of human anguish is at times strongly reminiscent of Dostoevsky (the long account of a monk being tortured by his fellows), and much of it has a strange quality; for example, he describes vampires as ‘these dark and shadowless things that sport themselves with the reliques of the dead and feast and love amid corruption’. It is easy to see why Baudelaire was so desperately eager to translate Melmoth into French, although his death finally prevented it.

Like The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer inaugurated and revitalised certain themes of paramount importance in any consideration of the English attitude to horror, but most significantly it strengthened in Europe as a whole the overriding impression that the cruel Fatal Man – typified by Melmoth, Schedoni and Byron – was not a fiction but the manifestation of a real English trend. This fact, which is of immense significance in analysing the appropriateness of English horror films with English actors as an international phenomenon, is examined fully by Mario Praz in the chapter on ‘Swinburne and Le Vice Anglais’ in The Romantic Agony. There he traces the pervasive stereotype to George Selwyn (1719–71), a sadistic English nobleman who actually travelled to Paris to watch the execution of Damiens in 1756, and upon being asked if he was a professional executioner, is reported to have delighted the audience by replying: ‘Je n’ai pas cette honneur; je ne suis qu’un amateur.’ Whether or not this and other anecdotes that proliferated at the time about English sadism were true, they undoubtedly made a widespread impression on the Continent and were virtually bound to come full circle and exert some kind of influence on the English cultural landscape. Maturin himself takes up the matter wholeheartedly, beginning his story most sinisterly with a terrified old Spanish woman who has ‘a peculiar and personal horror of the English’, and screams out ‘No English … Mother of God protect us … Avaunt Satan.’ Later, in the wedding scene, Melmoth’s nationality is emphasised by the frightened throng (he is referred to ominously as ‘the Englishman’), and finally in a section much later in the book Maturin actually makes an oblique reference to Selwyn, the sadistic nobleman whom Praz traced: ‘It is actually possible’, one of his characters states, ‘to become amateurs in suffering. I have heard of men who have travelled into countries where horrible executions were to be daily witnessed for the sake of that excitement which the sight of suffering never fails to give; from the spectacle of a tragedy or an auto-da-fé, down to the writhings of the merest reptiles on whom you can inflict torture, and feel that torture is the result of your own power.’

Once we have recognised this quality of English sadism or, more precisely, Selwynism underlying the general constellation of events and characters that emerge from the Gothic novels, and were absorbed into the mainstream of nineteenth-century Romanticism, we are in a far better position to consider later manifestations of the Gothic strain in English culture. The achievement of Maturin and Lewis is there to remind us that Selwynism can be utilised to create a highly effective and perfectly legitimate work of art, just as much as it can deteriorate into sensationalism. But what is important is that the critic has some awareness of these components of Gothic literature, rather than simply throwing up his hands at what he always imagines is some new and particularly degenerate form of morbidity. Ironically, the critical reception that greeted Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein or Powell’s Peeping Tom some years later may be compared sentence for sentence, if not word for word, with the reaction of the nineteenth-century literary establishment to The Monk and Melmoth the Wanderer.

From Maturin onwards, as most literary historians have observed, the Gothic strain in English literature becomes extremely diffuse, and consequently more difficult to analyse: its influence gradually permeates through the romantic period – moving into all the other arts, and taking in the Pre-Raphaelites and the Decadents in its wake. In a precise literary sense, it is transformed on the one hand into a shorter form of ‘tale’, as in the ghost stories of M. R. James and Sheridan Le Fanu, while on the other it combines with certain picaresque traditions, being not merely richly visible in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson but also in what might be called the metaphysical thriller, where heroes combat wholly irrational forces within a taut closely-knit linear framework. But we must be careful about linking the latter too closely with the modern crime story/thriller, for only occasionally – as for example in the earlier work of Thomas Harris – does this draw with real effect on the rich Gothic resources that the greatest exponents of the metaphysical thriller like Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker pioneered to such advantage. Also, of course, the influence of the Gothic would be pervasive in mass-circulation pulps from ‘Varney the Vampyre’ to comic books, and the style undoubtedly now has a special place in the latter’s offshoot, the graphic novel.

Surrealism and the Gothic Tradition

The reputation of English Gothic literature has been apt to fluctuate, but in the early 1920s it attracted the attention of Andre Breton, the founding father of one of the central movements of twentieth-century art: Surrealism. In the ‘Manifeste de Surrealisme’, Breton set out his position as follows: ‘I believe’, he declared, ‘in the future resolution of those two states, in appearance so contradictory, that are dream and reality, in a sort of absolute reality; of surreality … Let us settle the matter once and for all; the marvellous is always beautiful. In fact only the marvellous is beautiful.’

Despite his dislike of the novel as a form, Breton had specifically and understandably singled out the English Gothic novelists as admirable illustrations of his thesis: Walpole, Lewis, Mrs Radcliffe and Maturin (besides Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear) were taken up wholesale by the Surrealists, and for this and other reasons it was thought certain in the 1920s and 1930s that England would produce a Surrealist movement equal to that in France. The history of what subsequently happened is, for a number of reasons, revealing.

During the decade following the Manifesto of 1924, Artaud translated The Monk into French, and Surrealism spread even as far as Japan, while England took some time to register its presence. Eventually, in June 1936, a mammoth International Surrealist Exhibition took place in London with 68 exhibitors, of which no less than 23 were English. The committee which organised the enormous event comprised Hugh Sykes Davies, David Gascoyne, Humphrey Jennings, Rupert Lee, Diana Brinton Lee, Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Roland Penrose, assisted by the Belgian E. L. T. Mesens, while the French organisers included Breton, Eluart, Hugnet and Man Ray. The general hopefulness of the occasion, with regard to Surrealism’s future in England, was indicated by the long series of lectures given at the Conway Hall which included contributions from Breton (‘Limites Non Frontieres du Surrealisme’), Herbert Read, Hugh Sykes Davies and Salvador Dali’s celebrated ‘Fantomes Paranoiaques Authentiques’ – delivered from a diving suit. Meanwhile, poetry readings were held at the New Burlington Gallery by French and English poets, and a special Surrealist issue of Contemporary Poetry and Prose appeared, which it was generally hoped might become an official Surrealist magazine. Later, when this had failed to materialise, E. L. T. Mesens, who had stayed in London after the Exhibition to open a showplace of Surrealist Art called the London Gallery, began to publish the London Bulletin (originally the London Gallery Bulletin). But gradually it became apparent that the movement in England was failing to gather momentum. Even the London Bulletin was forced to rely rather heavily on French contributions, and finally ceased to appear in 1940. After the war, in 1947, when the Surrealists of the world rallied to an International Exhibition in Paris, from as far afield as Bucharest and Cairo, the English contingent was so severely depleted that some were specifically attacked for desertion. And in the next two decades, the movement in this country finally collapsed to the extent that by the time of the New York Exhibition in 1960, not a single member of the English Surrealist group was represented. As J. H. Matthews concluded after an exhaustive and revealing survey (Surrealism and England in Comparative Literature Studies): ‘England hesitated on the brink of Surrealism: the history of Surrealism in England is history that might have been.’

The underlying reasons for this rejection, in spite of all the encouragement and the apparently fertile cultural milieu, are of fundamental importance, and it is possible they also provide some kind of explanation as to why other European countries never found it easy to copy the Hammer horror formula. French and Belgian horror films of that time, like Claude Mulot’s La Rose ecorchée (The Blood Rose/Ravaged) or Rollin’s La vampire nue, had an overt Freudian and Surrealist intellectual quality which the English films seemed to incorporate more seamlessly and without much difficulty into the structure of an enclosed literary tradition. Daughters of Darkness, a French/Belgian horror film, had, for example, much insight into perverse psychology and a good deal of surreal beauty, but comparing it to Hammer is a bit like comparing those two nineteenth-century disciples of Poe: the French Charles Baudelaire and the British Arthur Conan Doyle. Baudelaire may have elevated the gothic influence into art but, working to his own eccentric rules, Conan Doyle subsumed it into a highly exportable populist literary machine which proved in its own way just as important. Matthews cites one of the key reasons why English artists eschewed Surrealism as being because ‘even collectively the Surrealists in England were unable to conquer their instinctive respect for tradition in literature.’ This tradition, especially that part of it which was Romantic, contained surrealist elements, but these remained irrational in the sense that they were not rationalised according to any dialectical schema. England has sometimes been paradoxically unable to produce intentional Surrealists because, as Herbert Read concluded with some insight, ‘among artists and individuals, there is a tradition of individualism. There is an idea that this is the proper way to work; that cranky ideas, confused ideas, lonely ideas form the best background to artistic creation.’ These idiosyncratic ‘lonely’ ideas had also formed the backbone of the English Gothic and occult tradition. Even from the beginning there was a kind of reluctant ‘private’ quality about the Gothic writers; one thinks of Walpole introducing The Castle of Otranto with the plea that ‘some apology for it is necessary’, or Mary Shelley’s modest, party-game introduction to Frankenstein. The English individualism, to which Read refers in his essay Surrealism and the Creative Principle, has in some cases had a stultifying effect on the whole cultural milieu, but the Gothic would seem to be one of the areas that has decidedly benefited from it. And consequently, the French Surrealists (in older magazines like Midi-Minuit Fantastique, Bizarre, etc) often seemed to find in English horror films exactly the quality of methodical and unselfconscious eccentricity (or rational irrationality) that Breton and his co-founders of the movement detected in M. G. Lewis and Mrs Radcliffe. If there had been a full-scale Surrealist movement in Britain then I would speculate that the comparative naivety and spontaneity of the original British approach to horror movies might have been impossible. It may be that the Hammer-type horror film was one of the more welcome by-products of the English reluctance to embrace artistic systems.

Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, France/Belgium, 1971).

Horror and the Tyranny of ‘Realism’

I distrust documentary, always have.

Michael Powell, 1971.²

At the time I wrote the first edition of Heritage, I assumed that the loathing that a certain part of Britain’s official culture has sometimes exhibited towards horror and the fantastic (as described in ‘The Press Reaction’, pp. 51–2) was simply a form of moral panic, a puritanical reaction to the more lurid popular themes and – in the case of the virulent attacks on Hammer – something intimately connected to the anxiety of the 1950s. I still maintain this was a large part of it. But I now think it goes deeper.

For since then it has become obvious (and much remarked) that there was, at least until recently, in Britain’s official culture an enormous historical prejudice in favour of material that may be termed loosely ‘realism’. Of course, in a broad sense any narrative of quality, whether it is set in a mythical Transylvanian past or in contemporary London, must and should seem ‘real’ and immediate to an audience in terms of characterisation and story. That is merely a feature of good writing and I am not concerned with it here. But there is another use of the term that denotes a quite specific approach and mindset, which in fact demands that the subject itself directly reflects present social conditions, that it has a documentary contemporary feel and avoids anything too imaginative or ‘other’. That is what I mean here by realism. And it is an approach which has often seemed in the past to find special favour in Britain.

You can see this favouritism in action at once in the positive values that are immediately accorded to contemporary or realistic settings and to the adjectives like ‘gritty’ that so often qualify them. In cinematic terms the prejudice must date back at least as far as the birth of the British documentary movement in the late 1920s; it flowered in the patriotic atmosphere of the Second World War and continued into the ‘kitchen sink’ films of the early 1960s like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or A Taste of Honey, a genre that was almost contemporaneous with Hammer horror (and may well have come out of a similar reaction against the middle-class values of much previous British cinema). But, while the horror movies were generally reviled, the ‘realist’ strain received rapt acclaim. Sexual explicitness in a ‘realist’ film was then, with very few exceptions, generally applauded as ‘honest’, whereas the more mythic sexuality of the horror movies was treated with contempt and even outrage.

So it was that when Michael Powell dared to try to put a genre horror movie in a contemporary context (in Peeping Tom, see Chapter 6), his career was nearly destroyed in the uproar. If he had set his film in 1920s Berlin, he would have had no problem. But Powell was stepping on sacred ground and he is probably the most spectacular example of a British filmmaker who was seriously punished, his career destroyed, precisely for transgressing the domain of the ‘real’.

Many commentators have effectively analysed and placed this cultural prejudice. Andrew Higson, for example (in an article for Screen, July/October 1983), writes: ‘The central problem with so much writing on British cinema is precisely its allegiance to a particular realist aesthetic. The terms of this discourse must be unravelled … if the same seemingly trenchant conception of British cinema is not to be repeatedly reproduced.’ Charles Barr writes (in an article for Screen, Summer 1972): ‘The preference for a certain kind of realistic surface, for an “everyday” verisimilitude has been a recurrent factor in English film criticism and has inhibited response to a wider range of films with an allegorical or poetic dimension.’ The phenomenon was examined, extensively and highly entertainingly, by Julian Petley and others in Charles Barr’s collection All Our Yesterdays. Indeed, some of the examples produced here are truly astonishing.

It is, for example, hard to believe now that the doyen of the documentary movement, John Grierson – then apparently regarding himself as the pre-eminent UK filmmaker – actually took it upon his shoulders to order Hitchcock to abandon genre altogether. Grierson wrote that Hitchcock must ‘take counsel of Arnold Bennett and give us a film of the Potteries or of Manchester or of Middlesbrough – with the personals in their proper place and the life of a community instead of a benighted lady at stake.’ Here surely is the realist aesthetic at its maddest, beseeching a major artist of our own age to ‘take counsel’ of a mediocrity from another. Fortunately, Hitchcock never took the advice and remained the most watched (and acclaimed) filmmaker this country ever produced, while Grierson by comparison, sank into relative obscurity. Or listen to C. A. Lejeune, a critic who was later to lead the charge on Hammer, declaring revealingly of the characters in The Way to the Stars that ‘these are real people and real people do not make much of their private emotions.’ Or Richard Winnington dressing down Michael Powell that A Matter of Life and Death was too far away from ‘the essential realism and the true business of the British movie.’

All of this, to quote Andrew Higson again, is the result of a film culture, ‘which has been profoundly mistrustful of anything other than a particularly de-dramatised naturalistic form … hence the ossification of one particular aesthetic as the appropriate form for the development of a “responsible engaged cinema” while exploration of other aesthetic forms is looked down upon as an irresponsible project … It represses the traditions of the gothic, the expressionist, the melodramatic, the “magic” realist.’

The phenomenon has, therefore, now been well chronicled, and we should note the irony that this ossified and highly conservative ideology had its roots in what was once in the 1930s of course a left-wing radical movement. What has been much less explored is why British national culture has proved such fertile soil for the whole ideology to develop in such a dogmatic fashion in the first place. The prejudice may be linked in part to a distrust of America and popular art in general; but it also seems to have been encouraged by the experience of wartime, and perhaps by our national obsession with newspapers. Before digitalization, the UK had long been celebrated for having more newspapers and more newspaper readers per head of population than many other countries. And the more our newspapers drew on their own collective fantasies, the more loudly and aggressively they would often assert their defence of the ‘real’. Hardly a surprise then that the same newspapers have often voiced a widespread prejudice against any self-proclaimed fantasy, especially if it appears to be devised for entertainment. At its very worst, British newspaper criticism has sometimes seemed to apply only two tests to dramatic material: is it true (good) and, if so, is it ‘shocking’ (even better)?

Such a massive cultural predisposition (which of course has its positive aspects) must have roots in our cultural history extending back far beyond the twentieth century. Could it in some way relate to the half-successful revolution under Cromwell and to the proliferating culture of dissent (incorporating a whole earlier tradition of religious non-conformity) which resulted from it? Where a revolution is complete, as in France or America, there will be opposition of course, but perhaps there is less burning need to keep asserting and reasserting the ‘real’ as if the alternative was some loss of national identity? However, whatever the reason for this national prejudice, its effect on our cinematic history was dramatic. It may well explain why such uncritical reverence was sometimes accorded to Britain’s documentary and social realist film movement, and why the form sometimes seemed to rank as a kind of ‘official’ cinema from its origins in Grierson and Jennings right down through the wartime propaganda pictures to the skilled social realist (though in their own way quite romantic) narratives of a filmmaker like Ken Loach.

In this respect it is surely relevant that Loach has himself, just like Grierson and Lejeune before him, mounted the usual traditionalist attack against the other side. ‘I enjoy everything French,’ he said at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, ‘except for the word “genre”. The idea that you start a film with an idea from another film represents decadence, backwardness, inwardness.’ The kind of purism implied by this remark is nothing new and may well be of use to some filmmakers; but, as an overall proscription for cinema, it is frankly nonsense. Imagine any form where the practitioners are forbidden to draw on, or be inspired by, other examples of the form. Every lover of film can point to titles from both fields (genre and realist) that are classics. Why then cannot both approaches peacefully coexist, and why every decade or so in the UK does the ‘realist side’ feel compelled to attack the other?

Whatever the reason, it is obvious that there are times in Britain when the fantastic erupts into the dominant mode at its peril. But perhaps for this very reason, when it does erupt, it can do so with such a force that it is truly astonishing to behold, sweeping all before it. This happened with Hammer and it has happened more recently again. Indeed, the most recent example has finally convinced me we need have no concern at all that the fantastic strain could ever be seriously hurt or suppressed in this country, however much acrimony it receives. It will always find a way through.

To grasp this, it is only necessary to remember there was a point in 1997 when it began to seem to the media and others that fantasy in children’s literature in the UK might be coming to an end. In that year the Guardian Children’s Fiction prize and the Carnegie Medal, the two major UK prizes for children’s fiction, featured (adult-selected) shortlists which were entirely dominated by ‘realist’ works. Indeed, The Independent of 1 June 1997 noted that the titles in that year’s Carnegie Medal read like ‘a social worker’s nightmare … a book about girl arsonists, about bullying, about cosmetic surgery and teenage heroin addicts.’ A year earlier the winning book had been about drug addiction. At this time many newspaper articles revelled in the fact that fantasy fiction for children had passed the way of the dodo, and marvelled at the thought that C. S. Lewis could have won with a Narnia book in 1956. The spokeswoman for the Youth Libraries Group, which nominated and judged the entries, agreed and was in no doubt this meant progress because ‘books about difficult issues helped children to explore them.’

Here then, in precisely the place which had at times seemed like a last refuge for fantasy in this country, realism appeared to be completely and finally dominant. There was no stopping it. But, of course, as we know now, the whole field was on the brink of a vast explosion, one that is still being felt. And no doubt the adult predilection for ‘books about issues’ only served to make the explosion even fiercer. The key prizes that year, chosen by adult librarians, ignored one work published in exactly the month they were awarded. On 26 June Bloomsbury published J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

1.Buñuel’s script for The Monk was finally made by Ado Kyrou in 1973 as a Franco-Italian co-production. The subject was tackled again by Francisco Lara Polop in 1990. Neither film is commonly revived, but the Kyrou version with Nathalie Delon – while hardly a true representation of the book – had some powerful scenes. French film-maker Dominic Moll made a third version in 2011, starring Vincent Cassel.

2.Quoted in All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, edited by Charles Barr, p. 16 (BFI, 1986).

2

The Identification of Hammer

(ham'ėr), n. a tool for beating metal, breaking rock, drawing nails, or the like: –

v.t. to beat, drive, shape, or fashion; to trounce or criticise severely; to persevere pertinaciously.

The Wordsworth Consise English Dictionary

Depressing, degrading – for all lovers of the cinema only two words describe this film.

Headline regarding The Curse of Frankenstein in Tribune

To many critics, the sudden proliferation of English horror films in the late 1950s was a thoroughly daunting and inexplicable phenomenon. They seemed to spring up from the ground fully grown and armed like the warriors of Cadmus, and some otherwise astute observers were startled into statements which now look decidedly awkward. The force behind much of this was based on the wholly mistaken assumption that, like the rock music that appeared at almost exactly the same time, the movement was some temporary aberration and that it would not be long before the British cinema could settle back to its comfortable diet of war films and middle-class romances. But it is now clear, not only that the spate of gothic horror movies had roots as deep as those of the Gothic novel, but also that they were pointing the way forward to the visceral popular cinema of the late twentieth century. Britain could not dominate this field for ever, any more than after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones it would always dominate rock music, but for a time it led the way and the horror genre would for some years be one of the most popular and frequently attempted cinematic forms in England.

Given how fertile the ground proved to be, it still seems remarkable how little the cinematic horror genre had been attempted in England before the 1950s. Since I first made this point, plenty of people have tried trawling for major and important horror titles in the UK before that period – and of course much more is now available for inspection – but despite some discoveries there still seems little of major interest. Some point to Tod Slaughter, a barnstorming theatrical presence certainly, but I am not sure he’s much more.

Slaughter essentially converted his stage melodramatics (he first acted in 1905) to the cinema from 1935 in a series of quota quickies like Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) and The Face at the Window (1939). In Crimes at the Dark House (1940), a very loose adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ classic novel The Woman in White, Slaughter even does a turn as the monstrous wife-beater Percival Glyde, but gives us little more than the boorish villainy of the golf club cad. During much of the film Slaughter actually caresses, if not twirls, his moustache, his eyes narrowing as he intones his lines with painful slowness; for the murder scenes he does manage peals of standard-issue mad laughter. All of this is pretty unwatchable today unless you have a passion for the purely theatrical, though some of the sets are quite atmospheric, marking as it did the production-designing debut of Bernard Robinson, later one of the key creators at Hammer. If there was a precursor to Cushing and Lee in early British cinema, it was certainly not Slaughter but perhaps Valentine Dyall, who as we will see provided a much creepier presence than Slaughter in films like Room to Let and Latin Quarter, and years later would have to dub the menacing voice of Count Karnstein for Mike Raven in Lust for a Vampire.

Both of Universal’s main horror stars, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, crossed the Atlantic to make films in Britain during the 1930s. By a remarkable quirk of fate Bela Lugosi starred in The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, which was in effect the second film by an obscure film production company called Hammer Films. This tiny outfit had been founded in November 1934 by Will Hinds, a jack-of-all-trades who liked to dabble in amateur music hall under the name of Will Hammer (from the London borough of Hammersmith where he was born). A few months after the company was started, Hinds met a businessman called Enrique Carreras (who had arrived in England from Spain in 1907) and together on 10 May 1935 they registered a film distribution company called Exclusive. It was natural enough that they would use the Hammer production company to create product for Exclusive and this is how the name first appeared. But The Mystery of the Mary Celeste (which was not strictly horror but a murder mystery) made little impression, and the Hammer name would brand only three more films before the film industry hit one of its periodic crises and the company lurched into bankruptcy and liquidation in 1937. Exclusive survived but it was hardly an auspicious beginning.

Boris Karloff too had been over to make The Ghoul in 1933 for Gaumont British, the first British sound horror film, which was thought to be lost until it reappeared in the 1980s. Shot by Gunther Krampf, who was cinematographer on Murnau’s Nosferatu and Pabst’s Pandora’ Box, it is lit about as darkly as it could possibly be (even making allowances for what was then a bad video transfer), while its plot, about an Egyptologist who comes back from the dead, is far more sombre than the usual US fare. Karloff makes a very creditable (and even at times quite frightening) appearance as the revenant. But his scenes are brief and the thin story is told with an almost agonising slowness. Even by the standards of its time, when cinema was making the translation from silent to sound, the film cannot be said to work particularly well, either as horror or thriller.

Otherwise, it is fair to say we still, even in 2024, await something of great interest to emerge. There are titles that sound hopeful, like The Living Dead with Gerald Du Maurier, a 1933 British International Picture about a mad scientist who puts people into a zombie-like trance but, when seen, this turns out to be a thoroughly stage-bound adaptation of a play about hypnotism, rooted firmly in the murder mystery genre. The Terror (1938) from a hit Edgar Wallace play of the 1920s has an unexpectedly macabre and menacing beginning, in which a criminal uses gas and gas masks, but it soon settles into more familiar territory. So, there is not yet much to counter the assumption that strict censorship, working hand in hand with an attitude that documentary was our true heritage, kept British horror firmly off our movie screens in the early twentieth century.

Admittedly in the late 1940s there appears to have been some relaxation. Charles Barr tantalisingly quotes the young Harold Wilson speaking to the House of Commons in June 1948: ‘We are getting tired of some of the gangster, sadistic and psychological films of which we seem to have so many … I would like to see more films which genuinely show our way of life, and I am not aware … that amnesia and schizophrenia are stock parts of our social life.’¹ The form of words ‘genuinely show our way of life’ is all too familiar, and note too that the use of ‘schizophrenia’ here presumably means movies that border on noir and horror, but what exactly was he referring to?

So far as Britain is concerned, I can only find four major candidates, all released within a short space of time the previous winter. Roy Boulting and Graham Greene’s adaptation of Brighton Rock would obviously cover gangsters. Then there was Anthony Kimmins’ and Nigel Balchin’s rather fine adaptation of the latter’s novel Mine Own Executioner about a psychiatrist attempting to cure a traumatised prisoner of war victim who kills his wife. Other candidates include While I Live with John Harlow directing and co-scripting, a story set in Cornwall about a woman who believes an amnesiac is her dead sister. This has a certain atmosphere, since once again Bernard Robinson designed its somewhat striking interiors. But the direction is entirely static and largely overplayed, very obviously betraying its stagy origins in a Robert Bell play called This Game Garden. The last title I could unearth was The October Man from the thriller writer Eric Ambler and director Roy Baker (who would later as Roy Ward Baker go on to do various horrors), in which John Mills plays an amnesiac bus driver who thinks he may be a murderer. Though I may have missed a few films, there is not much here and it hardly amounts even to a trend; but what seems to have irked Wilson was the fact these popular themes were not apparently ‘native’. Here he was quite wrong, for it can be argued much of the appetite for 1940s films about amnesia and strange deluded states was created almost single-handedly by the popular English writer James Hilton with Random Harvest.

But Wilson’s speech provides some idea of how entrenched such attitudes were. And given this kind of official outlook, nobody need be surprised that between 1942 and 1945 the British Board of Film Censors and the COI (Central Office of Information) actually banned the import into Britain of all ‘H’ certificate films (as horror films were then designated). Eventually, in 1945, the ban was lifted and that year saw the making of Ealing Studios’ Dead of Night, which deserves its reputation as the most important English supernatural thriller prior to the late 1950s. The film dealt with one aspect of the Gothic strain which has manifested an exceptional resilience in English literature and later on British TV, namely the ghost story. It took the form of an uneasy gathering in a middle-class drawing room where various people tell their stories as darkness falls. The script is structured extremely cunningly so that it has a weird circular form (later imitated more than once as in Hubert Cornfield’s Brando vehicle Night of the Following Day) and the whole action is finally revealed to be a nightmare which is about to come true. Even within this structure, many of the individual episodes concern the conflict between different layers of reality, notably Robert Hamer’s fascinating story The Haunted Mirror, which despite its brevity is on any showing one of the British cinema’s early masterpieces.

The Haunted Mirror episode in Dead of Night (Robert Hamer, UK, 1945)

The Haunted Mirror is about a typically trite middle class English couple (they could have stepped out of any of the period’s conventional romantic dramas) who are about to be married. The girl chooses a rather baroque old mirror in an antique shop as a birthday present for her fiancé, and it is hung in the sparse angular austerity of his 1940s ‘luxury’ apartment. Gradually the mirror begins to impose its own world on his, as within it he starts to catch sight of a completely different social/ historical milieu. He sees a lush ornate bedroom with a crackling coal fire, a sofa, a silk screen and a four-poster bed, and in this ‘other’ room, which contrasts so vividly with his own rather drab surroundings, he begins to feel a presence. Soon after they marry, the girl senses the mirror ‘invading’ her husband, and she learns that it belonged to a sensual and tyrannical old man – the victim of an accident – who in a fit of jealousy strangled his wife before cutting his own throat in front of the mirror. Later the girl returns home and her husband, who is now quite transformed, attempts to strangle her until she manages to break the spell by smashing the mirror to pieces.

The entire episode is photographed with great beauty, and Hamer has contrived to make the ‘other dimension’ of the mirror a unique force in the narrative so that the spectator feels its allure and its menace as strongly as does the central character. The mirror acts as a kind of gateway through which all the dammed psychological forces of imagination, sensuality and violence gradually erupt into the couple’s repressed and artificial world. After hanging it, they admire themselves with cloying satisfaction: ‘Handsome couple’ she says, and immediately the mirror begins to exercise its influence on the man (he starts and says ‘I thought I saw something’). Even the story behind the mirror (the former owner had been driven mad by an accident which constrained his enormous energy), far from being a supernatural evasion, strikingly suggests the repression and constraint of the husband’s own milieu.

The significance of The Haunted Mirror goes well beyond the film itself, raising some intriguing questions: it can scarcely be coincidental for example that the eerie, violent, nineteenth-century world which is glimpsed briefly in the mirror, and temporarily animates the lifeless husband, corresponds almost exactly to the nineteenth-century world which a decade later Hammer depicted in film after film and whose portrayal (whatever one’s reservations) transformed the ambience of the British cinema. By the middle of the twentieth century a fanciful version of nineteenth-century England was beginning to exercise a great hold on the popular imagination and this was evident not only from the cinema but from a sudden craze for Victoriana and the redoubling of interest in Victorian mythology.

Dead of Night is a remarkable and, in some ways, prophetic film. The two Cavalcanti episodes are almost as interesting as Hamer’s, and his final episode about a ventriloquist’s obsession with his dummy (possibly another trigger for Wilson’s strange reference to ‘schizophrenia’) is actively frightening in a way few British films have managed before or since. But despite its success, its formula was never copied with the same degree of success (though the ventriloquist’s dummy segment did get a clever reworking in Devil Doll, discussed later). Hammer and Michael Carreras actively toyed with an official remake of Dead of Night in the 1970s to be set in Soho in wartime but, wisely perhaps, decided not to pursue it.

House of Darkness (Oswald Mitchell, 1947) is fairly typical of the earlier Dead of Night off-shoots. Despite being scripted by John Gilling, who later went on to do interesting work in the genre, it is a thoroughly heavy-handed and stagy melodrama, with a particularly poor performance from Laurence Harvey. The influence of Dead of Night is obvious (the whole film takes the form of a ghost story told on a film set), but only in the ending (where an eerie musical duet is played between Harvey and the ghost of the man he killed) is there even a suggestion of the earlier film’s power.

A film like House of Darkness, with its wildly overwrought, melodramatic surface and poor performances, might lead anyone to suppose that even ‘noir’ was impossible to achieve successfully in England in the late 1940s. But you only have to look at the work of actor/ producer James Mason to see how wrong this is. The Upturned Glass, which was released in the summer of 1947, starring Mason as a troubled surgeon in a script by his wife Pamela Kellino, is a small masterpiece of noir, with superb echoes of Hitchcock. Regrettably Mason decamped to Hollywood long before the British boom, but even much of his early work has a distinctly gothic flavour. In The Night Has Eyes (1942) he plays a half-mad recluse, who may be a strangler, holed up in an isolated house on the Yorkshire moors. This film, released in the US under the title Terror House, is among the closest Britain ever got in the 1940s to the American gothic model, with two feisty girls stumbling upon the house in a storm and subsequently enjoying plenty of grisly discoveries. But there is an amateurish feel to much of it and the film lacks the sophistication of Mason’s self-produced work like The Upturned Glass and I Met a Murderer. Even so, Mason’s modern and stylish reinterpretation of the Byronic surely makes him finally the most persuasive precursor of England’s later horror villains.

Corridor of Mirrors (1948) is an ambitiously Gothic romantic melodrama, starring Eric Portman and Edana Romney (who also co-scripted) as doomed lovers. With some opening and climactic scenes set in Madam Tussauds Chamber of Horrors, the film was produced and co-written by TV’s director of Quatermass Rudolph Cartier, who evidently spent years trying to set it up with himself as director, but was constantly knocked back because nobody wanted the unknown Romney in the lead. Finally, he got it made with Terence Young directing and the result is certainly atmospheric, if a little weighed down by its opulent sets and props. Romney is striking, if unusual, but Portman feels theatrical and in the end the chemistry between them fails to ignite. The most powerful sequences of the film are in its frame story, which includes the Chamber of Horrors and also Romney’s voice-over as a secretive troubled wife – fairly obviously, yet effectively, echoing the classic Brief Encounter (1945).

Another often-touted early horror title, the 1955 Three Cases of Murder, takes the portmanteau frame of Dead of Night to tell three adapted stories, each with a different director and writer (the whole thing narrated – somewhat bizarrely – by the British television personality Eamonn Andrews in dinner dress). Two of the stories have a fantasy aspect, the most interesting of which is Lord Mountdrago (from a Somerset Maugham story) which stars Orson Welles as a politician who slowly loses his sanity after he is cursed by one of his political opponents. The idea is intriguing and the setting in the House of Commons unusual but, by the standards of Dead of Night, this is static stuff and Welles is not at his best. Other critics have drawn attention to the first story of the three In the Picture, in which a man in a gallery is taken inside a painting to a house where he meets a weird and threatening family. Again, the material is unusual but, perhaps because of her background in dance and opera, director Wendy Toye gives it a whimsical tone, accentuated by Sidney Carroll’s dialogue, with character after character dropping heavy-handed, sub-poetic hints of menace. All of which is not helped by the addition of Doreen Carwithen’s fey musical score. Toye had used a slightly similar tone three years earlier, in her rightly acclaimed short The Stranger Left No Card (1952) – but, there, any whimsy was masterfully undercut by its twist ending.

However, one 1952 movie has recently emerged which I found striking. Crow Hollow was adapted from the novel of the same name by the New Zealand writer, Dorothy Eden. Its plot has strong echoes of Rebecca with Natasha Parry playing a woman, caught up in a whirlwind marriage, who is taken to her doctor husband’s home Crow Hollow, an old house, inhabited by three weird aunts and a strange sexy maid, where his mother died in mysterious circumstances.

What is unusual about the film is its overt sensuality in a gothic setting. It starts with a long erotic kiss and though of course it has no overt sexual content, there is something unusually vivid about its use of detail and costume as in the unlikely yet effective scene, where a deadly spider is placed on the heroine’s dress. True, the second half of the film is more routine, but it remains a notable debut and its actor/director Michael McCarthy, who had been an assistant at Ealing, would die only seven years later at the age of 42.

Hammer’s Origins

While the British cinema was indulging in these fairly isolated flirtations with Gothic themes, Exclusive, the distribution company founded by Enrique Carreras and Will Hinds, remained a very low-key presence within the industry. However, matters changed when Enrique Carreras’s son James (1909–90) returned from a very distinguished war career to rejoin the business.²

James Carreras would prove to be both an extraordinary personality and a phenomenally forceful businessman and, almost at once in 1947, he redeemed some of Exclusive’s past misfortune by resurrecting the Hammer name as a new production entity.

It was clearly the turn of the younger generation. Already James had initiated a good relationship with a key UK industry player, Jack Goodlatte, who booked for the ABC circuit, one of Britain’s biggest cinema chains. Goodlatte indicated to James that there might be an opening for cheap British product, especially at the bottom of the bill. But James needed practical help, so he persuaded Anthony Hinds (son of Hammer’s first founder and then only 23, so 13 years younger than James) to rejoin the company too. The younger Hinds was in fact closer in age to James’s own son, Michael, who as a teenager during the war had worked for Exclusive in various junior capacities before he went off to do national service in the Grenadier Guards, rejoining Hammer/Exclusive in the summer of 1947 at the age of 20.

The interaction between these three men has often seemed mysterious, yet it is crucial to any study of Hammer. It is impossible to understand the company’s intricate and sometimes bizarre history without taking the time and detail to explore the conflicting personalities of the group at its helm (a theme explored throughout what follows – and specifically in ‘The Personalities of Hammer’, p. 65). For, contrary to what has so often been supposed, Hammer was no accident, any more than Virgin, or Dyson, or News International was an accident. There was luck of course, as there always is; but luck, as James Carreras often reflected, was only preparation and opportunity. You need to capitalise on it when it comes and Hammer had the chemistry to do so.

James himself was, by all accounts, the classic example of an entrepreneur who believed he would and could find a world-beating product. Without him there would probably have been nothing. Even so, he needed the more practical, low-profile Hinds to produce it at the right price when it arrived. And Carreras’s own son Michael – though less involved – would revitalise that product on occasion. This was, as we shall see, a colourful dynasty, one fraught with tension. And it is not just the family conflicts but the odd social conditions of the time which are hard to grasp. This was a class-ridden society and a simple anecdote illustrates the bizarre position in which Michael Carreras and Anthony Hinds found themselves after the war as young men in a family company that was both old and new. At one of the country houses, which Hammer favoured as a studio, the pair would come down to breakfast where a butler pointed out to Master Michael and Master Anthony the special silver dish which covered the butter. The rest of the crew were only shown the margarine.³

The Carreras and Hinds families were to be at the heart of Hammer’s impending metamorphosis, but so too undoubtedly were certain key talents from outside. The latter list will always be subject to debate but it would surely include Jimmy Sangster, a writer who came up through the ranks (having joined as third assistant on Dick Barton Strikes Back in 1949 when he became lasting best friends with the film’s producer Michael Carreras); director Terence Fisher; art director Bernard Robinson; music composer (protégé of Benjamin Britten) James Bernard; and makeup man Phil Leakey.

From 1948 Hammer decided to utilise large empty houses for their productions instead of renting expensive studio space, apparently according to Michael Carreras because the Dick Barton series had been badly compromised by the cramped interiors at a tiny London studio. As it turned out, this was to be one of the company’s most crucial policy decisions, for it gave their films a reasonably distinctive style and later put them in an ideal position to recreate historical/mythical subjects with major cost savings. The first house that they hired was Dial Close, Winter Hill, Cookham Green, which belonged to Peter Jones Ltd and had been a furniture storage warehouse during the war. It was a large and luxurious building with very spacious interiors, but after four films the spaces began to look increasingly familiar and it became necessary to find a new home. For the next sixteen films (over a period of about two years from 1948 to 1950), their base moved at least three times, first to Oakley Court, Bray, then to Gilson Park, Essex, and back to Down Place, Bray. The 1952 movie Cloudburst inaugurated their first full lease of Down Place, later to become Bray Studios, a rambling elegant house near Maidenhead, which would be cannibalised with such wonderful efficiency that the exterior was to double on more than one occasion as part of Dracula’s castle, while the electrical maintenance room did some service for cutaways of Frankenstein’s lab. Hammer would not finally vacate Bray until 1966.

Over this early pre-horror period the company’s output varied quite considerably, but the films were second features (which sometimes played as first features in the smaller cinemas) and the great majority were adapted from BBC radio using characters like P.C. 49 or the ‘Man in Black’ and Dr. Morelle. It became the company’s policy to try as far as possible to capitalise on subjects and characters that were pre-sold to the public either through radio, remakes (‘Whispering Smith’) or via myth and legend (Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, etc). James Carreras always preferred this approach and although it may seem timid, it eventually led them to pioneer themes and characters (like Quatermass and Dracula) which were at the time very far from conventional in film terms, especially in the context of British cinema. Even in the early 1950s it is noticeable that Hammer proved unusually flexible in coming to terms with the idea of genre, which the American cinema had been manipulating successfully for about 30 years. One of their best early efforts, produced it might be noticed by Anthony Hinds and directed by Godfrey Grayson in 1949, was John Gilling’s adaptation of a Marjorie Allingham play called Room To Let. In this somewhat atmospheric Jack the Ripper fantasy, a spooky doctor (radio star Valentine Dyall) takes a room in a house and slowly starts exercising control over those who live there. The film has a seriously gothic atmosphere of menace and some original touches that make it more interesting than the usual ‘Is my lodger a killer?’ plot. Valentine Dyall plays Dr Fell, not as some furtive fugitive but as a hypnotic, insidious presence who capitalises on his medical authority to intimidate and bewitch the house’s inhabitants, especially its women. The film also makes effective use of Oakley Court, a building that was later to feature in many Hammer horrors.

Meanwhile the post-war period was proving a very tough time for British cinema. As the industry lurched from crisis to crisis, the quota law, designed to protect UK film production by forcing cinemas to play a guaranteed number of British-produced films, was a crucial support. The Americans hated the resulting restriction, seeing it as discrimination against their films, and retaliated by forging associations with UK producers to create a mid-Atlantic product that could qualify as British in the UK but also achieve some kind of release in the US. James Carreras, only four years out of khaki and desperately on the hunt for finance, jumped at the chance of making just such a deal, first with Alexander Paal at United Artists then with Robert Lippert, at Fox. So at the start of the 1950s, Carreras inaugurated several low-budget films featuring fading American stars, the first being Cloudburst with Robert Preston and Elizabeth Sellars, written by Leo Marks. By means of this set-up, for the first time Hammer began to obtain guaranteed distribution in America, initially through UA but soon through Fox, and the deal gave them around four pictures a year until the mid 1950s when the market took yet another dive. At this desperate time the Americans decided the financial advantages of such an arrangement were over.

In fact, at the beginning of 1955, any industry observer would probably have written Hammer off as a commercial proposition. Exclusive, its parent distributor, was a relic of bygone days, for there was no longer room for small distribution companies of B-feature product as the market shrank. The American co-productions had been averagely successful, but that avenue was closed and now, with the growth of television, British cinema was in the worst financial crisis in its history, with unemployment of personnel reaching a new high and studios closing in twos and threes. It was no longer possible for any company to survive simply on a diet of second features or the imitation of American formulae. Up to this point Hammer’s films could just about pass muster as first features in the smaller independent cinemas, but they were always second features on the major circuits. Now that had to change, for Cinemascope and TV were driving the whole area of small features out of business. The fate of Hammer, as it happened, hung very largely on the box-office results of the various films they had made in 1954 in the last moments of the co-production deal with America. Up to this point, the company had proudly averaged around eight features a year, milking the American deal alongside home-grown stuff like The Four-Sided Triangle and Mask of Dust. But now, as they anxiously awaited the box-office results of their last clutch of films, Bray studios lay miserably empty for 12 months, apart from a series of featurettes and one particularly dreary ‘B’ feature (the prison drama Women Without Men). If the 1954 films had failed, or had had only a routine success, it is not impossible that the whole course of British film history might have been very different.

However, Hammer deserve credit for having considerably more foresight (or more bravado) than many other British film companies in these difficult times. The films made in 1954, on which so much now depended, showed that they were already well aware of the necessity to break into new areas, especially areas that could be better handled in England than America. Men of Sherwood Forest, for example, was their first colour film, and the 1954 batch also included an unsuccessful attempt to make the Lyons family on the radio into a major popular film series (The Lyons Abroad), as well as the usual quota of thrillers like The Glass Cage and Break in the Circle. But the title that was finally to turn the tide in Hammer’s favour and alter film history, not merely by its own enormous success but by the commercial implications of that success, came last on the list. Made in the closing months of 1954, it was called The Quatermass Xperiment.

Whereas quite a few of Hammer’s early films had been based on radio shows, this may possibly be the earliest film to be adapted from television, which was then seen as the real enemy of the film industry. It had originally been an immensely popular thriller serial on BBC television and it is certainly ironic in retrospect that the whole 1950s horror cycle, which was to prove so shocking to the British establishment, should have been inaugurated, not by some scheming fly-by-night producer, but by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The film opened at the London Pavilion on Friday, 26 August 1955, with Hammer’s fortunes at their lowest ebb after some poor returns on The Lyons Abroad. It immediately began breaking box-office records both in the UK and subsequently in America (under the title The Creeping Unknown). Within a few months Hammer had drawn up a completely new production schedule for 1956, throwing out the long-planned King Charles and the Roundheads in favour of two more horror/science fiction subjects, X the Unknown and Quatermass II, while opening negotiations for the Frankenstein character. It was the beginning of a quiet cinematic revolution.

The Quatermass Xperiment (Hammer had changed the spelling to ‘Xperiment’ to celebrate its X certificate⁴) had originally been broadcast in six episodes on BBC television in July 1953, the first of the three series concerning Professor Bernard Quatermass which were written between 1953 and 1959 by the extremely talented Manx writer Nigel Kneale⁵. All three were finely wrought variations on what Kneale later called ‘life-threatening encounters with alien life-forms’.

Many people regard the third, Quatermass and the Pit, as the masterpiece, but I have always championed the subversive sweep of Quatermass II, which is a kind of English equivalent of the American classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Quatermass Xperiment though is, in certain respects, more poignant than either, with its deeply felt story of a man who returns from space, possessed by some biochemical entity. And Hammer’s film version is particularly intense thanks to a tremendously impressive and pathetic performance from Richard Wordsworth in a Frankenstein-like role as the half-monster.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the film, when one sees it again today, is how decisively the opening sequence (which was completely altered from the TV version) seems to record the intrusion of Hammer into the cosy middle-class domesticity of the British cinema. Two utterly conventional cinematic lovers run across a meadow mouthing their lines with precisely the kind of simpering coyness which had dogged British films through the 1940s and 1950s. They are as bloodless (an important word in view of the fact that Hammer’s Dracula was about to revitalise the English film heroine) as the couple in Dead of Night, but seem if anything more artificial and less interesting. They giggle and embrace stiffly on a convenient haystack when suddenly the whole scene is interrupted by a terrible whining noise which begins to reverberate through the darkness all around them. The noise increases to ear-shattering volume and the couple stagger to their feet and begin to run in complete disarray back across the field to take refuge in a house. Later, when the noise has stopped, a man ventures outside and we see a huge tubular rocketship – which by present standards looks less like an aircraft than some surreal pronged phallus – has plunged into the ground close to where they have been lying. It would be difficult to conceive of a more symbolic or appropriate beginning for Hammer’s eruption into the British film scene in the late 1950s.

The Quatermass Xperiment, being the first Hammer monster film, also proved to be an excellent demonstration of Phil Leakey’s brilliance with make-up. Leakey was to become one of the most invaluable members of the Hammer team, and his work on Richard Wordsworth managed to convey the sense of a whole body in the process of decomposition in a way that was more subtle than gruesome and greatly enhanced Wordsworth’s own tragic mime. The shots of him undergoing medical examination, or looking at his wife in the car, really do communicate an alien presence, whereas in most of the later manifestations of the same theme (like First Man into Space) the man/monster remains routine and the transition into the alien takes place off screen. The figure of Victor in The Quatermass Xperiment, limping miserably over a bombsite, his deformed hand wrapped ineffectually in an old overcoat, undoubtedly amounts to one of the most pathetic monsters that Hammer ever created.

Richard Wordsworth in The Quatermass Xperiment (Val Guest, UK, 1955).

The sudden success of The Quatermass Xperiment galvanised James Carreras who had only taken over Hammer four years earlier and who, as we shall see, had very personal reasons for dreading the spectre of liquidation and bankruptcy. A year earlier the outlook had been dismal, but now he had found a profitable seam and he did not intend to let it go.

Consequently, he instructed the Hammer team led by Anthony Hinds, who had produced The Quatermass Xperiment and who was largely responsible for its quality having written much of it himself, to sit down and create something like it. After throwing around various ideas, Jimmy Sangster – then a young Hammer assistant – argued that they could always do a version of extra-terrestrial invasion in reverse. Why not a monster from inside the earth? As a further insurance Hammer tried to buy the Professor Quatermass character and actually put him in the film. However, a somewhat stunned Nigel Kneale utterly refused to do a deal. So, Hinds commissioned Jimmy Sangster to write a script with another scientist like Quatermass at the centre of it (he was called Dr Adam Royston). And even if they lost Quatermass they could still get an ‘X’ in the title. The result, X the Unknown, went into production at the beginning of 1956.

So much for the practical circumstances behind Hammer’s sudden change of fortune and direction. But it is interesting to examine the relationship between the themes that the company (and in due course many other film companies) began to approach in 1956, and the political events in the country during those crucial 12 months. Certainly there are grounds for reflection in the fact that the year in which Anthony Eden led England into his grotesque reprise of the Second World War (with himself cast in the role of Churchill and Nasser – ‘the little Egyptian upstart’ – as Hitler) should have seen the first of a series of sombre SF (science fiction) movies, in which the British Army and/or Quatermass stand fast to repel invaders from outer space (or the bowels of the earth). These films, of which X the Unknown was the first proper example, powerfully sum up the anxiety of the period and obviously compare with the American ‘total mobilisation’ movies of the Cold War, like Them, in which all the strength of the American military moves against a number of giant ants. The genre, both in America and England, created much of its menace through the prolonged portrayal of massive troop movements and its unease centred around the effects of atomic radiation and fall-out. In fact, on the very day that the greatest British anxiety movie of all, Quatermass II, followed X the Unknown into production at Bray (21 May 1956), a headline in The Times read ‘Giant H-bomb dropped. Luminosity more than 500 suns.’ The story which follows about ‘the most stupendous release of explosive energy on earth so far’ quotes, without even a comment, a spokesman’s statement that ‘these tests and others to follow may be said to serve as an effective substitute for war’. It sometimes seems as though much of the 1950s were passed in the creation of elaborate substitutes for war; and it was against this background – of Suez, of unrelieved tension, of a sharp rise in the crime rate and a sense of impending chaos – that X the Unknown, Quatermass II and the other lesser films in the cycle were created in 1956.

And it can be no coincidence that other seismic shifts in popular culture were appearing at exactly the same time as Hammer. The screams of the teenagers who flocked to Hammer’s horrors in 1956 surely had a very direct social and sexual connection to the screams that greeted the birth of rock ‘n’ roll as Elvis Presley erupted into the UK singles charts and riots punctuated the arrival of Bill Haley and the Comets (creators of the first major rock hit ‘Rock Around the Clock’) that February.

The birth of rock ‘n’ roll was a defining break with past culture, perhaps still the most defining and decisive musical break in living memory. But equally revolutionary in its way, and also connected to horror, was the start of mass distribution pornography. The first edition of the Harrison Marks magazine Kamera featuring nude models – a major influence on Powell’s later vision for Peeping Tom – was launched in June 1957 just four weeks after the record-breaking London opening of Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein. As a publication Kamera broke commercial records, selling out within two days. All three prongs of this cultural transformation (horror, beat music and the widespread distribution of erotic material) marked what might be called a new freedom of sensation – some of which, like the horror movies, were rehearsing old themes – but now linked as never before to mass distribution. All this made 1956 and 1957 into the cultural equivalent of a perfect storm and one that that went far beyond the small cultural ripples debated at the time (for example, Look Back in Anger and the ‘angry young men’). Some, like Harrison Marks himself, may have been destroyed by it.⁶

The hurriedly concocted X the Unknown began production on 9 January 1956, with a week’s location shooting at Gerrard’s Cross. Its director was Joe Walton, a pseudonym for the American filmmaker Joseph Losey, who had left Hollywood for Europe during the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts and was subsequently blacklisted by the US studios. Seven days before shooting, the trade papers were told that Joe Walton had contracted pneumonia and would have to be replaced. Most people at the time, including many who worked on the film, believed the story and indeed Losey did have a history of bronchial illness. However, it seems certain now that the star of X the Unknown, Dean Jagger (a noted American anti-Communist), refused to work with a blacklisted director, and Hammer was forced either to abandon shooting or ask Losey to step aside.⁷

It was typical of Hammer’s Anthony Hinds that in this crisis he turned for help to the father of UK quality cinema, Michael Balcon at Ealing. Balcon was able to offer him Leslie Norman, who was then under contract to the studio. Indeed Norman’s first feature, The Night My Number Came Up, had been made for Balcon the previous year and was a kind of simplified remake of Ealing’s Dead of Night about a man who dreams a nightmare (in this case about a plane crash) and then finds it coming true. The film, like Dead of Night, starred Michael Redgrave, and had its moments, even if the ending is a bit perfunctory. Whether Norman was himself happy to work for Hammer seems to be in question. Sangster has said the director was unhappy and camera operator Len Harris stated: ‘I didn’t like him and I don’t think anyone did really … Leslie was always complaining and could be very harsh.’

The remark is interesting and there is no question the shoot of X the Unknown was incredibly tough, something which probably gives the film its edge. John Gilling, another Hammer director, also had a reputation for bad temper, unlike Terence Fisher who by all accounts kept a clear head and never lost his. Yet such remarks warrant caution because, within the pent-up, pressure cooker atmosphere of a film set, animosity is hardly uncommon. What certainly seems to be true is that Norman did quarrel with a lot of people. ‘The whole unit had a row with him at one time or another’, writes Jimmy Sangster in his autobiography. It also seems to be the case Dean Jagger gave Norman an extremely hard time and kept refusing to take direction. Even so, Jagger as the Professor in X the Unknown, like Brian Donlevy as Quatermass, managed in the end to be convincing and effective; and Norman did a good job, certainly good enough for Michael Carreras to invite him back to Hammer some years later to make the ill-fated The Lost Continent.

X the Unknown begins very well with a tracking shot of the figure of a soldier walking over desolate marshland carrying an ominously clicking Geiger-counter. The camera finally pulls back to reveal that he is performing a simple exercise with other soldiers watching, but the atmosphere of dreary desolation remains and the whole of the subsequent film is photographed by Gerald Gibbs with a sombre, impenetrable greyness which evokes muted hysteria and despair. As the last man goes through his test with the Geiger-counter, the muddy ground suddenly seems to move underneath him and the area is cordoned off by the army. Throughout this, as in much of the film, Norman adds little touches of realism which make what might have been a preposterous story, eerily credible in places. And the nightmarish conditions seem to have added considerably to the atmosphere. ‘What I can remember,’ continues Sangster, ‘is night after night of absolute freezing cold misery: transport sinking into the mud, crew members getting sick, everybody complaining … in the pouring rain and freezing cold.’

It is interesting to note that, as in The Quatermass Xperiment, Hammer and Sangster were careful to employ Gothic elements in X the Unknown rather than to limit it to a specifically SF formula. The action is set in the wilds of northern Scotland, and in the first encounter with the monster at night two boys creep through the woods, past a menacing old tower which they believe to be haunted, towards the army cordon. An owl hoots and the camera tracks in on one of the boy’s faces, overcome by terror at what he sees as his companion runs away screaming. This juxtaposition of a ghostly Scottish setting with the dark, menacing figures of soldiers, night-flying helicopters and ‘Police State’ notices (‘It is strictly forbidden for any person to pass beyond this point’) represent the film’s strongest element, though the approach was later to be perfected in Quatermass II. Here it tends to degenerate into a formula, but the two climactic sequences (in which a man is lowered into the monster’s abyss and the monster is lured out of its lair by a jeep whose wheels jam at the crucial moment) are handled with effective suspense. The other notable thing about X the Unknown is that it was one of the first movies to parody the complacent attitude of the authorities towards the threat of radiation and, indeed, its own obsession with the subject verges on paranoia: radioactive material is not simply the food of the monster that emerges from the earth, but appears in practically every part of the film, even providing a background to an assignation between doctor and nurse in a nearby hospital. In such respects there was a wonderfully brazen quality about Sangster’s screenwriting, that went well with Hammer’s poker-faced seriousness. Perhaps because of his own anti-authoritarian temperament (for he had pushed his way up through the ranks), and also his dogged experience as a production manager, he knew exactly how to milk the more subversive themes, often with a degree of mischievous zest⁸.

Quatermass II (American title: Enemy from Space) followed, and by now Kneale himself had left the BBC and could co-adapt the script from his own superbly expressionist 1955 TV series, whereas he had taken no part in the earlier Quatermass film. The script borrows massively from the original serial and is all the better for doing so. The plot is one of Kneale’s finest achievements, an unusual example of the kind of ‘Pandora’s box’ or ‘ball-of-twine’ theme in which the central character pulls at a few loose ends in his everyday experience and gradually unravels the fabric of his whole universe into chaos and nightmare. Other examples of this genre are Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the 1970 oddity Fragment of Fear. All of these films begin as ordinary thrillers and develop in a determinedly linear fashion into the realms of philosophy and dream: like Surrealist painting they combine a completely lucid narrative/visual technique with complex and even abstract themes. Admittedly Quatermass II attempts in its last few minutes to impose a reassuring climax on the narrative, but this can scarcely undermine the effect of its content any more than the epilogue which was grafted on to the remarkably similar Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Quatermass II (Val Guest, UK, 1957).

Like many of the best films in the ‘ball-of-twine’/metaphysical thriller category, Quatermass II begins with the hero, Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy), encountering a few slightly strange incidents in the course of his own routine. He is driving back from a frustrating meeting in London, at which the authorities have refused to support his rocket project, when another car nearly crashes into him. Inside it is a distraught woman whose husband has some kind of abrasion on his face and, during a garbled exchange, Quatermass gathers they have been picnicking at a place called Wynerton Flats. Without giving the matter much thought, he returns to his rocket project and, after breaking the news about the government’s attitude, works until morning on the site. The next day he is informed that the installation radar has traced a few mysterious objects falling on the area surrounding Wynerton Flats. Slightly disturbed by the coincidence, Quatermass and his assistant Marsh (Bryan Forbes) decide to drive over to the Flats. From this point on, the components of the nightmare begin to assemble. Urged on by director Val Guest, Gerald Gibbs, whose black-and-white photography on X the Unknown so nicely evoked an aura of muted hysteria, excelled himself on Quatermass II; practically all of the murky exteriors seem to have been shot in winter twilight and carry an appallingly pervasive atmosphere of impending destruction. In fact Gibb’s work is so good that, despite a number of weaknesses, the film can still claim (along with Losey’s The Damned) to be one of England’s most disturbingly expressionist movies.

Wynerton Flats, to which Quatermass and Marsh travel, turns out to be an extremely desolate and isolated area in the district around Carlisle and, as they approach, they begin to encounter a number of curious details. There are government notices warning them off miles of apparently deserted land, roads which seem to lead nowhere and a village that has been utterly flattened. Black figures are massed on the skyline and suddenly, miles away in a valley, Quatermass sees an enormous construction which appears to resemble his own project for making the moon support life; a vast assembly of giant pressure domes. The effects are of course primitive and the sequence could easily have amounted to very little in a poor production, but Hammer is careful to preserve the spirit of Kneale’s script as far as possible. There is a real sense of landscape in Quatermass’s and Marsh’s journey, and the menacing guards who move slowly and inhumanly towards them are sinister and unstoppable. The rest of the film charts Quatermass’s desperate attempts to fathom the mystery of Wynerton Flats, and his gradual discovery that much of Britain from the House of Commons downwards has been taken over by an alien force. Unlike Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the invasion has already reached national proportions and the political allegory is consequently far more overt than in Siegel’s film. It is not long before Quatermass realises that the government (Conservative by implication though, of course, this is never stated) is being run by the invaders and that Wynerton Flats is only a prototype of the police state which will shortly spread throughout Britain. In Trafalgar Square he sees lorries carrying materials for the aliens and later in the House of Commons meets Vinnie Broadhead, a crusading Opposition MP from the north who is trying to force a public enquiry. The government, in a suitably cynical irony, has claimed that the plant is engaged in the manufacture of synthetic food for the third world, and Broadhead and Quatermass are invited to inspect it. The summit of the paranoid nightmare is reached when Quatermass returns to London – the sole survivor of the official visiting party – and approaches the Commissioner of Scotland Yard to find that he has already been taken over. The forces of humanity are now allowed to rally, but it is fascinating that Kneale effects the change of tone by developing the political allegory. Quatermass is able to ferment unrest among the workers in the village near Wynerton Flats who have been put on short time and he persuades them to revolt against the guards and break into the plant. As the workers attempt to hold out against their alien employers, they are promised every kind of benefit (higher wages, etc) if they will stop pumping oxygen into the domes. A few believe this and leave their stronghold whereupon – in an extremely potent political image – their bodies are used to block the oxygen supply, and their blood flows from the pipe.

Despite the banality of the ultimately happy ending it is still rather extraordinary that the BBC and Hammer were prepared to sanction a theme as powerfully subversive as Quatermass II, especially when one considers the major problems Siegel encountered in America with his equally impressive treatment of the subject. Nowadays the idea of a malevolent cynical authority controlling government is almost commonplace. But in the 1950s, as the community recovered from one war and uneasily prepared for another, there was still enough national coherence left for the idea to be both original and highly disturbing. Perhaps this is why Quatermass II, which Kneale himself once described as being about ‘a revolt against oppression brutally stamped out,’ though obviously now technically dated in some places, has worn so well, generating a quite exceptional paranoid intensity. The dim overcast skies (even the exterior of the House of Commons looks like a Gothic castle), the dark figures dominating each landscape, the vistas which lead away towards the enormous white domes and the unending stream of flat uncooperative officials assemble into one of British cinema’s more underrated genre achievements.

Surprisingly, director Val Guest commented to Kine Weekly before shooting: ‘We shall have to put more work in … I don’t think the second BBC television serial was as good as the first.’ Though many would strongly dispute this judgement, he certainly seems to have done what he said, aided enormously by his cinematographer Gibbs who was apparently instructed by Guest to get a harsh documentary feel and avoid anything pretty. Nigel Kneale himself is on record as disliking the film, which is hardly surprising perhaps in the light of Guest’s tactless comments about the serial (which was directed with enormous flair by Rudolph Cartier and is now available on DVD for all to see). But then Kneale, a visionary if ever England had one, was notoriously self-critical. And at least one of the TV serial’s most chilling moments would not be had by the British film censor at any price. The board had insisted, among other things, on Hammer cutting material connected to the serial’s most violent incident, in which an innocent young family are mown down in cold blood on a beach. It is surely astonishing in retrospect that the scenes suggesting this could be included in their entirety at 8 o’clock on a Saturday night on the BBC, then the only TV channel available to the entire nation (with the Corporation’s stern and moralistic founder Lord Reith still very much alive to watch it if he wished), but cut from an ‘X’ film for adults two years later.

It is, incidentally, very hard to ascertain which writer was the first to develop the subversive, and since endlessly recycled, theme of alien possession, a theme so redolent of its time and (in its original form) so richly felt and hauntingly expressed. Jack Finney’s magazine serial The Body Snatchers appeared in Collier’s magazine in the US in November/December 1954, but it is only a pale shadow of the film Don Siegel later directed in 1955. Kneale appears to have written his first outline for the new Quatermass serial around late 1954. So, it seems unlikely either project could have influenced the other. But by a strange chance another British writer was onto the theme before either of them. Charles Chilton the great radio dramatist had thrilled BBC radio audiences throughout the world with the same dark subject of alien possession as early as September 1954 with the highly sinister zombie-like Whitaker⁹ character in his classic drama series Journey Into Space, then a massive success. And that radio show was certainly in Hammer’s mind at the time for it is actually referenced by Sangster in the dialogue of X The Unknown, made just before Quatermass II!

By the time Quatermass II finished filming, in July 1956, Hammer had more or less finished plans for a complete change in their output. To appreciate the extent of the metamorphosis that followed one has only to compare the tentative production programme which had been announced at the beginning of the year with what actually happened. No less than ten projects were abandoned in 1956, including Friar Tuck, Stand and Deliver, Dance Band Story, Deer Slayer, Black Chiffon, Holiday for Simon, Brat Farrar, Chorus of Echoes and the long-planned King Charles and the Roundheads. The list, which comprises mythical historical subjects (Robin Hood and highwaymen), a musical, a play and a couple of thriller adaptations from Josephine Tey and Elleston Trevor, mirrors exactly the kind of material Hammer had been struggling to milk since the war. A few of these titles stayed on the books for a short time, but none of them were ever made, unless you count Brat Farrar’s drastic reworking as Paranoiac. Instead, after a brief interruption from the horror cycle for The Steel Bayonet, which turned out to be the least successful film from an enormously successful year, Hammer embarked on the most significant and ambitious venture so far, The Curse of Frankenstein, which went into production at Bray on 19 November.

So much has changed since 1956 that it is extremely easy to forget how big a gamble the company was taking at this stage. X the Unknown had been less successful than The Quatermass Xperiment and, though fairly successful, Quatermass II did not make as much as Hammer hoped, given its increased budget of about £100,000 (over £3 million today). The general feeling was that the science-fiction boom had come to an end. No-one, apart from Hammer, was even considering the possibility that the public might be interested in classic horror, a field which had died many years before, and the trade papers of the period are comparatively snide in their remarks about the Baron’s imminent British revival. Also it is often overlooked that throughout the 1950s, ‘X’ films were still having a difficult passage, not only with the censors and local watchdog committees, but with the circuits. The Rank circuit, for example, refused to book them altogether, because of their ‘family audience’ policy, and 1956 saw only one exception to this ruling, when Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm starring Frank Sinatra was specifically exempted from the ban by John Davis on grounds of quality. Even the more lurid science-fiction posters, which had started springing up in the same year, were subject to severe criticism, and in Nottingham the police seized some Anglo publicity for Day the World Ended and Phantom From 10,000 Leagues in an action which was generally taken to be the beginning of a major clampdown. Perhaps it is easy enough in retrospect to read the signs (the posters, for example – now valuable collectors’ items – have a vivid and dramatic energy about them which strongly suggests a kind of liberation after the dreary austerity of the post-war period). But at that time, amid endless talk of moral degeneracy, it was no simple task to see which way events would swing.

The idea of remaking Frankenstein had originally, it turns out, come from another pioneer of English cinematic horror, the American Milton Subotsky (see Chapters 4 and 6). Hammer never acknowledged this, but then it is true Subotsky’s script – a rehash of old themes from the Universal movies – was never used. Subotsky and his partner Max Rosenberg were paid off with 15 per cent of the net profits.¹⁰ Anthony Hinds then commissioned a completely new Frankenstein script from Jimmy Sangster, who had served him well on X the Unknown, and turned to Terence Fisher to direct. It was to prove a fateful decision, given that Fisher proceeded to launch Hammer’s two biggest stars and subsequently became the director most identified with the company’s house style.

There are varying accounts as to exactly why Terence Fisher was hired. Fisher himself, a modest but sharp-witted man who lived long enough to enjoy his cult following, but not long enough to see his own partial critical rehabilitation,¹¹ always enjoyed saying, ‘I was just the hack Hammer owed a picture to’, implying it was pure luck and that anyone could have been hired in his place.

Is this true? It is certainly a fact that Fisher had been the victim of the cull in Hammer’s production in 1954–5. He had been hired for The Black Opal, a title missing from most of the books because it never saw the light of day. The film had been due to shoot at Bray on 12 September 1955 but was cancelled. A letter from Fisher’s agent, John Redway, on 15 September 1955 to Michael Carreras states the terms of this settlement. His client, Fisher, would be made a first payment of £450 (around £15,000 in 2024).

Within eight weeks Fisher would be told a date: probably, the letter states optimistically, sometime in May 1956, when he was likely to be rehired and paid another £1,050 to make a total sum of £1,500 (roughly around £50,000 today). This was £500 more than Fisher would have got if the original film had gone ahead, so Hammer paid a 50 per cent bonus for the delay.

By the following April, Hammer were still optimistic they would be giving him a film. In a letter of 27 April 1956, Michael Carreras was agreeing to pay him a further £550, making a total of £1,000. But the title had again changed. ‘I will advise you by this 1 September,’ Carreras writes, ‘as to whether I am in a position to offer Mr. Fisher a feature production, possibly either Stand and Deliver or Friar Tuck.’

In the event neither of these ever came before the camera, and it was not until the following November that Fisher finally received his bonus when he was hired to make The Curse of Frankenstein, and was paid £250 (approximately £8,400 today) at the end of the first week and £250 at the end to make up the final sum owed. Fortunately for Fisher he had spent the intervening time not in unemployment but making the crime thriller Kill Me Tomorrow for Delta(one of his least interesting movies – based around a threadbare plot of blackmail and revenge in Soho’s clubland – it was most notable for the appearance of then rock star Tommy Steele, who generated most of the film’s publicity).

From the above facts it might be assumed that Fisher’s employment was as he claimed, a complete accident. However, Anthony Hinds did finally set the record straight: ‘I was rather sorry to discover that he thought that … it is not true. I asked to have him. We had worked on two shows together before and had got on so well that I knew that he would at least understand the sort of films I wanted the Hammer horror shows to be – rich-looking, slow, deliberately paced, bursting with unstated sex but with nothing overt … and he did.’¹²

The long and tortuous pre-production of The Curse of Frankenstein (chronicled in ‘James Carreras and the American Dimension’ below) comprised an agonising wait for American money and constant sabre-rattling from Universal’s lawyers. It was hardly an auspicious time. Yet even so Hammer and James Carreras backed their intuition about the move into horror by planning The Abominable Snowman and announcing an ambitious building programme for Bray which included the construction of a completely new sound stage for the summer of 1957. In the mean time they made some featurettes until finally it became clear, even before The Curse of Frankenstein was released, that its success was going to exceed even their wildest expectations. In April, a month before the London opening, the film was flown to New York to be screened for Warner’s New York executives and, within two hours of their seeing it, a print was flown on their instructions to Jack Warner on the coast. He realised that the film was a potential goldmine and his speculation was confirmed when it opened at the Warner in London on 2 May 1957 and immediately started breaking all records. Soon it was established in two West End cinemas and that summer began to play 24 hours a day across America, often breaking house records. For the British film industry, which was still suffering major setbacks, this astonishing success all over the world by a relatively inexpensive English film came as an enormous boost. In September the Daily Cinema headlined ‘Big International Deal for British Production’ which broke the news that on the strength of the film, Columbia was signing a deal with Hammer to make three pictures a year. It was the effective opening of a new channel in finance and distribution for British cinema.

The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, UK, 1957).

Now at last Universal, the same American studio which had fathered the whole horror movie tradition in Hollywood during the 1930s, with Karloff and Lugosi, opened negotiations for Hammer to film Dracula. And the final seal was set on Hammer’s new status in the summer of 1958 when Dracula began to register its enormous success all over the world. Universal announced at this point that they would turn over to Hammer the remake rights of their entire library of horror movies, and Hammer was consequently able to revive The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera, The Werewolf and others without any further copyright problem. But it remains a curious fact that none of the Universal house themes were to prove as remunerative a source of material for Hammer as Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley. Frankenstein and Dracula were revived again and again in the next decade, and the public’s appetite would not be sated until the mid-1970s. Of course, the alliteration ‘Hammer Horror’ was just a lucky accident, but it took far more than luck to turn it into a brand.

So much is history, but looking back now we have to ask how successful exactly were The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula viewed in the overall context of Hollywood. Many writers talk of their great success but few have actually got down to specifics which is, in any case, harder than it looks. The major studios in those days played figures close to their chest and massaged them too. It is widely rumoured, for example, that for years Jack Warner grossly inflated the box office figure for the 1964 My Fair Lady to suit his own and his studio’s self-image.

An examination of the rental income indicates at once both films took considerably less at the US box office than the official box office blockbusters of their time. Hammer’s Dracula, for example, had a US rental income of $1 million dollars, a handsome sum in 1958, and certainly the mark of a highly popular movie; but hardly in the league of South Pacific, which took $6.4 million, or the top thriller of that year Witness for the Prosecution, which earned $3.7 million. But now comes the point. South Pacific had a budget of $6 million dollars, while Witness For the Prosecution (though made in black-and-white by Billie Wilder in the UK) cost $3 million. In contrast, as we have seen, Dracula had a budget of £81,412 or at most $250,000. So the raw figures tell a quite remarkable story. Put as simply as possible (and stripping out promotion), Fox took home $400,000 or just over 7 per cent profit in the US for making South Pacific, United Artists took $700,000 or around 12 per cent in profit in the US for Witness for the Prosecution, while Universal landed a whopping $975,000 or 400 per cent profit for Dracula (extending to many millions in today’s money). And for Universal it was far sweeter than even that figure suggests. They had obtained world rights (excluding Japan) and they had not even had to put up the whole budget but only £48,000. And they had TV rights too. Hardly surprising that, while reluctant partners at first, after Dracula they came back hungrily for more.

We can therefore see that Hammer at its height was extraordinarily profitable, certainly among the most profitable British film companies ever, though often it must be admitted not always for themselves! And recently there has been pushback against the sloppier assumptions about Hammer’s finances, for example that their films always made money. In an article regarding The Vampire Lovers on ‘Hammer’s post-1970 Production Strategy’ the indefatigable Hammer researcher Vincent Barnett questions Hammer’s production strategy after 1970 and highlights interesting figures, showing the relatively small profits on the company’s balance sheet compared to their revenue, including some years with a small loss.¹³

This is of interest certainly but not entirely surprising. Hammer were never a particularly rich or wel-resourced company. In business school terms they were – as I have often said – very short-termist, endlessly cutting deals to keep afloat. And, as regards the questioning of their production strategy after 1970, that is easy, there was no production strategy. Anthony Hinds, the principal architect of Hammer’s entire production strategy, had left in 1969, and after that it was just a kind of free-for-all as various producers jockeyed to sell projects to Hammer (which in turn Hammer tried to sell on). Some films worked, many did not, but neither James Carreras nor his son were strategists at all in that sense, it had been Hinds’ role.

So, Carreras was, as Barnett quite correctly says, more a great salesman than a traditional business leader but it is surely going too far to conclude, as his article does, that he was an unsuccessful businessman and to call Hammer a ‘mediocre’ business operation. Richard Branson, another great brand creator, has sometimes been criticised for putting chutzpah and image before hard-headed business, such strategies have often been questioned and criticised. But nobody I think would deny Branson’s genius at building a brand. Carreras forged much the same kind of path at a very different time. ¹⁴

The Press Reaction

The Curse of Frankenstein looks today like a colourful and witty fairy story with a few dark twists which is exactly what it always was; yet at the time outraged critics fell over each other to condemn it. One suggested a new certificate ‘SO’, ‘For Sadists Only’; another reviled Hammer, ‘a sickening and nauseating way to make a living’; and C. A. Lejeune, in the Observer, put it ‘among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have ever encountered’. And for Dracula, Lejeune went further, even calling for action. ‘Can’t anything be done about it? Of course it can, if anyone in authority takes some trouble …’ The smell of a witch hunt was definitely in the air.

Tribune actually ran a headline: ‘Depressing, degrading – for all lovers of the cinema only two words describe this film.’ It is true there were a few positive and neutral notices but the clamour was still perfectly audible. It would have been difficult to believe at the time that, within only a decade or so, The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula would be the centrepiece of an enthusiastic tribute to Hammer at the National Film Theatre and that the film could be shown on television without even a murmur. Only Paul Dehn in the Daily Herald was at all prophetic in his remarks when he registered his enjoyment of the film, praised Peter Cushing’s performance and drew attention to the excellence of Fisher’s direction.

Perhaps the opposition to Hammer (which was confined largely to English critics) is best understood by looking at Derek Hill’s influential article castigating the whole horror SF cycle in the Winter 1958/59 issue of Sight and Sound. The Face of Horror is a well-written but rather sensational piece which mobilises all of the conventional cinematic arguments against Hammer’s approach and assembles them into a minor thesis about the role of horror films in the 1950s. Events have since proved the historical thesis hopelessly wrong, but the article is still worth mentioning because it is much more clearly thought out than most of the critical reactions and, like the others, it concerns itself mainly with the ‘sadistic’ content of the films. It is extraordinary that the whole argument about ‘sadism’ in British horror can still be traced back to Edmund Burke and Coleridge. When people complained of sadism in Hammer, they are only occasionally referring to sadism in its fullest sense; they mean simply that the film is showing too much, for as Burke expressed it, ‘to make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary’. The most frequently voiced cliché in all writing about horror films has been based on this assumption that things shown are necessarily less impressive than things suggested; and like all really damaging clichés it has a basis in truth. In certain kinds of horror – especially the Victorian ghost story and its cinematic offshoots, like Night of the Demon, The Innocents, or The Others – to reveal your hand is to destroy a carefully wrought effect and this is the lineage which Dr Varma in The Gothic Flame calls the ‘Radcliffian mode’. But there is another equally respectable Gothic line discussed in the last chapter, including M. G. Lewis, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and all grand guignol theatre which precisely depends upon the clear visual portrayal of every stage of the action. It was as inane to ask Hammer to ‘suggest’ Dracula draining the blood of his victims as it would have been to ask Bram Stoker to ‘suggest’ it, for in this instance both writer and filmmaker depend on the imagery for their effect. As Varma points out, Burke’s strictures are highly misleading because he ‘did not distinguish between the subtle gradations of terror and horror; he related only terror to beauty and probably did not conceive of the beauty of the horrid, the grotesque power of something ghastly too vividly imprinted on the mind and the sense’. The Schauer-Romantik school, which is the name Varma gives to the Gothic strain ignored by Burke and so many subsequent English critics, never simply consists of a catalogue of horrors, but does incorporate a much more graphic approach to its subject, which depends on colour and flamboyant detail, as well as suspense for its effect. It is curiously appropriate that England, which probably spawned more Schauer-Romantik writers than any other country, should also have been responsible for the Schauer-Romantik cinema. The critical outrage that greeted Hammer can be compared very closely to the kind of scandal caused by the publication of Lewis’s The Monk and other Gothic fiction.

Hammer and Censorship

Everybody is aware that the films of Hammer and its competitors were cut, sometimes mangled by the censor. I wrote about it in the first Heritage, but I could have had no idea then of the true extent of the censor’s opposition. This is in part because during his tenure as examiner and then Secretary of the Board of British Film Censors (BBFC) between 1951 and 1971 (and subsequently in his memoirs), John Trevelyan gave a jaunty, even positive, spin on his relations with movies in general and horror in particular. In his book What the Censor Saw, he actually wrote that horror films were ‘rarely a problem’ primarily, as he goes on, because of an arrangement with James Carreras’in which we agreed that his company’s horror films would avoid mixing sex with horror and would avoid scenes which people could regard as disgusting and revolting.’ To anyone who has actually read the troubled correspondence between Trevelyan and Hammer (not to mention other horror filmmakers) this is an absurd assertion. But Trevelyan goes even further, actually claiming this ‘agreement’ was adhered to faithfully by Hammer until his office allowed some latitude over sex in the 1970s. Trevelyan was, I believe, a good man, who genuinely tried to help Britain’s producers, but what he writes here is frankly a blatant lie. For the files of the BBFC reveal that far from being, as I naively expected, detached, urbane and objective, the British censor’s office during his tenure was, it now emerges, utterly disgusted and enraged by the British horror films, constantly waging a frantic and hysterical campaign against them, with most of the examiners secretly trying to stop them being made at all.

Some of this is admittedly comical, some of it is plainly ignorant, occasionally it is understandable. But much too is quite disturbing, massively prejudiced and oddly violent in its expression. More seriously and (for me) unexpectedly, given this was not 1930 but relatively recent post-war history, there are places where (as we shall see with The Damned) it did become quite overtly political.

The first Hammer film that seems to have occasioned real anxiety in the censor’s office is X the Unknown. And some of the comments at the outset are actually merely funny. In his written script, for example, Jimmy Sangster’s tongue-in-cheek description of the monster reads as follows:

A dark seething putrid mass writhing with corruption and hideous rottenness giving off unctuous oily bubbles ¹⁵

It sounds more like something out of the UK comic The Beano than any threat to public morality and no doubt this is what the ever-humorous Sangster intended. But the description apparently left many people at the BBFC agog. Examiner Audrey Field was for one, it seems, utterly shocked. In her report on the script of 24 November, complaining specifically about the nature of the monster, she writes: ‘Well no-one can say the customers won’t have had their money’s worth … in fact someone will almost certainly have been sick … we must have a great deal more restraint. … It is keeping on and on in the same vein that makes this script so outrageous.’¹⁶

The BBFC’s faith in Hammer’s ability to make something terrifying and morally shocking out of lots of bubbles and putrescence is touching, especially when (as is clear from the story) the monster had no human associations whatsoever. Hammer’s Anthony Hinds saw the joke and replied on 6 December 1955: ‘I only wish I thought it could look half as exciting as the scriptwriter has described it. The shot of the security guard engulfed in slime will simply be a shot of a man sprayed with chocolate blancmange …’.

But this skirmish was only the start. For not surprisingly, given her reaction to X the Unknown, The Curse of Frankenstein seems to have caused the same examiner, Audrey Field, something quite close to panic. ‘This is infinitely more disgusting than the first script,’¹⁷ she writes, ‘In fact really evil. A lip-smacking relish for mutilated corpses, repulsive dismembered hands and eyeballs removed from the head, alternates with gratuitous examples of sadism and lust …’.

These are very strong words indeed. Not even the critics, denouncing them and crying for action, actually called these films ‘evil’ (though Nina Hibbin would later use the same word to describe Peeping Tom). Field’s comments here and below seem to reflect a genuine revulsion that entertainment like this could exist. Another examiner, Frank Crofts, echoed the sentiment: ‘This is certainly a monstrous script. It is ludicrously written with a complete disrespect for history. Frankenstein and his monster were merely medical figures yet we find the former reading Darwin’s Origin of Species … the author has done his best to pile horror on horror in a way that in my opinion makes it unlikely that we should be able to pass such a film as this. … I agree with AOF’s [Audrey Field’s] suggestions but I go further and suggest we should hold out no hope of passing a film based on this script.’

Crofts’ comments are as strange as Field’s, a ‘disrespect for history’? Does he believe the Baron was a historical figure? And why is Darwin, a biological pioneer who once studied medicine, so unsuitable as reading for Frankenstein? On the contrary the book would seem highly appropriate. It was published some years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but that is hardly relevant when Hammer had brought the novel forward into the Victorian era. A third examiner (SWH) fulminated: ‘The writer of this script seems to think the X category is a depository for sewage.’

In October 1956 Anthony Hinds was presented with the resulting list of cuts by Audrey Field and a warning ‘we can give no assurance we should be able to pass a film based on the present script’. But Hinds remained remarkably unphased, writing back to the BBFC: ‘As I am setting out to make a blood-chiller I must incorporate a certain amount of visual horror as that is what the public will be paying to see.’ And so, somewhat bravely, Hammer proceeded to film the script much as it was. But they did have a trick up their sleeves. Hinds was well aware the BBFC would rarely have seen a colour horror movie and certainly never a British horror movie in colour. He therefore ensured that the BBFC’s crucial decisions on cuts were made on a black-and-white print, carefully neglecting to remind the BBFC the film was in colour. This was a master-stroke, for when matters came to a head in January 1957 – far later in the day and closer to release than the BBFC and John Trevelyan liked – Hammer could always point out that the BBFC had already been informed in writing they were dealing with a colour film. Now the BBFC realised their mistake, and you can sense the gnashing of teeth behind the Board President Arthur Watkins’ letter to Hinds on the 29 January: ‘Although reference was made as far back as the 13 June last in a letter from Colonel Carreras to the fact the film would be in colour, no step was taken to remind us of this … we are prepared to view intended colour films in a black-and-white version if we are approached and asked to do so … as regards The Curse of Frankenstein it will certainly be necessary for us to see the whole film again in colour.’

But by now it would have been extremely difficult for the BBFC to deny a certificate and they knew it. There was evidently an apoplectic reaction when the colour print was finally seen. The battle continued but after further cuts were requested, made and reviewed, The Curse of Frankenstein did finally reach certification on 8 April.

What exactly was cut from The Curse of Frankenstein? The answer is remarkably little given the circumstances. Apart from sound and – after various trade-offs involving trimming shots of severed hands, of an eye seen through a magnifying glass, and the monster’s face covered with blood – it seems by the end the censor was largely concerned about a shot of Cushing lowering a highwayman’s severed head into an acid bath. Many such cuts have been restored on DVD, and the internet is awash with eager discussion of various releases that have had their footage restored. Universal seems to have set the best example with completely uncut prints of many films in the correct ratio, including most notably Curse of the Werewolf (which as we shall see was virtually dissected by the BBFC on release to a point where its plot was almost incomprehensible).

‘The uncouth uneducated, disgusting and vulgar style of Mr. Jimmy Sangster’ was Audrey Field’s initial reaction to the script of Dracula, giving away a certain class disdain as if the problem were that Jimmy Sangster had not been to a proper public school.¹⁸

Cuts were demanded, but Hammer knew perfectly well Dracula was their chance of consolidating their position as the new purveyors of horror and they could not afford to let that chance slip away. So once again Anthony Hinds went ahead and shot substantially the script that had been submitted, delivering a print (in black-and-white of course and with six scenes missing) on 3 February 1958. But this time the BBFC was not to be fooled for they were on the alert. Audrey Field commented at once: ‘The version we saw had six scenes missing and was in black-and-white. The final version will be in colour and in addition, in our opinion, will make certain scenes intolerable. The producers have ignored the script letter and, also, have deviated from the original script.’

Now Hammer had to act. Hinds cut a shot of a vampire woman sinking her teeth in Harker’s neck in its entirety and shots of a stake being driven into a vampire’s heart, also toning down Dracula’s disintegration at the climax. But the censor still wanted more. They demanded cuts of the whole episode of the stake being driven into Lucy, anything remotely erotic between Dracula and Mina, and they were still unhappy with the disintegration of Dracula itself.

James Carreras, Hammer’s boss, was getting worried now and wrote back a long and cajoling letter on 14 February. He pointed out the film would not be seen by anyone under 16 and that this meant ‘800 cinemas … will not book the picture.’ He also added the horror audience was specialised and added a specific appeal: ‘With the very poor state our industry is in it would be a terrible thing if the horror addicts go to see horror pictures and there is no horror in them, in other words we will lose this audience. There has always been a horror audience since movies began and nobody has ever been the worse for it. … The cuts that you are asking us to make, in our opinion, are taking every thrill out of the picture. In fact, it is not as horrific as any of the past Draculas and we cannot believe that that is your intention. We have once again resubmitted the three reels that you have objected to and I am seeing you at 4.15 this afternoon to discuss the matter.’

Despite the meeting the board seemed to hold fast, especially, and most worrying for Hammer, to the fact that Hammer must eliminate any sexual suggestion and most of the shots of Dracula’s disintegration at the climax. Hammer made a few trims and then resubmitted the film in colour. The board restated the same objections. And now Hinds, who knew what was at stake if the sexual element was removed as the Board wanted, played his strongest card, based just as before on the difference between monochrome and colour:

At our meeting some weeks ago you warned me that certain shots, accepted in black-and-white, might have to be deleted when printed in colour. As a result of this meeting, I made certain alterations in the picture and then had it scored, dubbed and the matrices made from the Technicolour print. I note now that the board objects to the shot of Dracula’s face approaching Mina in reel 8 but I cannot see how his face looks more censorable in colour than it did in black-and-white. He is wearing no special make-up, there is no blood on his face, he is not wearing contact lenses … I appreciate the shot of the disintegrated hand looks different in colour from the way it did in black-and-white, but, in my opinion, it does not look worse but, if anything, less effective as the poor colouring exposes the trick much more than before … However, I am appealing against this not on grounds of logic but on those of cost … the cost of rescoring, re-engaging an orchestra and scoring-theatre and re-dubbing the reel if we are forced to do this, will be fantastic. I know you warned me this might happen but I was so sure that you would agree with me that the shot looks far less effective in colour than in black-and-white that I took a chance. I am available to come and see you about this at any time to suit your own convenience. Hoping that you can see your way to modifying your decision.

The letter was brilliantly designed to put pressure on the chief examiner, John Trevelyan, who constantly portrayed himself as a servant and facilitator to the film industry and would not therefore enjoy the prospect (or the image) of causing major costs, costs that might well be attributed to the BBFC’s own lack of clarity. Trevelyan himself wrote a note on the letter, reflecting a conversation with others (it is notable that these others did not include Hammer’s implacable opponent Audrey Field). ‘All dislike this type of pressure,’ the note reads. ‘At the same time the general opinion is that neither of these is a life and death cut. It was agreed that Mr. Hinds should be seen. The pressure should be put on him at first – but that if he has a real case the objections should be dropped – with a warning that he should not do this kind of thing again.’

There is something of the headmaster in this letter, especially the warning about bad behaviour! The meeting took place on 14 April with Trevelyan present. It appears Hinds stuck to his guns and said he had been under the impression that the Board had approved the disintegration scene and the others on 14 February. He was told they would accept the hand and, most importantly, Dracula’s approach to Mina in view of this misunderstanding, though one shot of the disintegration sequence would go (a shot that, it seems, Hinds had kept up his sleeve as a concession since it does not seem to have affected the dub).

And so, in a letter of 14 April that might be regarded in its own way as historic, the BBFC wrote to Hammer: ‘While we consider that, in the approach of Dracula to Mina, the sex element is still too prevalent, in view of the apparent misunderstanding over this and the technical difficulty of effecting further reductions, we are prepared to waive our objections to this scene.’ It had been a long struggle with quite a close finish but Hammer had triumphed. Dracula was at last returned to his true sexual roots.¹⁹

To achieve this coup James Carreras and Anthony Hinds had worked as a team, a team it may be said with more than a touch of ‘good cop/bad cop’ about it, with Carreras playing the good cop role as he argued the big picture and the difficulties the BBFC was putting in the way of the UK film business. But there was also a degree of subterfuge, using monochrome to try to lessen the impact while concessions were extracted. For Hammer’s real revolution was, as they perfectly well knew, to bring colour to horror, something incidentally that seems to have been entirely the idea of Anthony Hinds himself. Given the furious opposition of examiners like Field and Crofts, it now looks miraculous that the early Gothics were not banned at script stage (just as later Trevelyan simply vetoed Richard Matheson’s script of his novel I Am Legend). James Carreras would have then been forced to alter production plans and the British horror movie would never have happened.

By the time of Revenge of Frankenstein, though, horror could not be stopped. Success had given Hammer momentum and even examiner Audrey Field knew it. The opportunity had been missed. ‘Much as we should like to,’ she wrote of the submitted script for Revenge of Frankenstein in 1957, ‘I do not think we can refuse to allow any sequel to Frankenstein …’ But if outright banning was no longer an option, the BFFC were already absolutely determined to rein Hammer in, no doubt shaken by the fact that their earlier leniency had led to one of the most senior critics C. A. Lejeune actually screaming, ‘Can’t anything be done about it? Of course, it can, if anyone in authority takes some trouble.’ It seems many at the BFFC now felt they had been hoodwinked, and were determined to regain authority.

‘ … The makers will have to tread warily,’ continues Audrey Field, ‘in view of the reaction of many people to their first instalment … the more I look at this the less I like it.’ Crofts of course agreed: ‘This goes too far … I don’t think we can refuse a second dosing but there must be far less blood …’.

‘A second dosing’. It is a very odd phrase to use. Does it indicate he thought of these films as some kind of toxic drug for the mass audience? Hammer were sent pages of detailed cuts, with the BBFC objecting hugely to the introduction of cannibalism into the story. And this time the company was warned in no uncertain terms that if they did not heed the instructions there would be ‘serious trouble’. It is significant, too, that this time the BBFC demanded to see the revised script, something they had not done before. It seemed Hinds was now forced to work with the censor, but he felt he could improve on the script in any case. By making the element of cannibalism tragic rather than strident, he thought it would be more effective and he conceded on a few other details so that agreement was reached, at least at script level.

But battle was rejoined over a black-and-white print on 12 March. This time the censor would not be fobbed off, and wanted scenes actively deleted before they would even view it in colour. They were particularly concerned by shots of the cannibalistic Karl salivating. Hinds argued rather effectively that one of these was ‘the only really moral scene in the whole picture … in this scene the monster Karl looks to heaven appealing for God’s help in overcoming the terrible desire he is experiencing.’

He was referring to cannibalistic desire regarding a male corpse and, in reply to this defence, in a letter of 23 June, Trevelyan made a curious slip. ‘We want to have it removed,’ Trevelyan wrote ‘because this was one of the few places in the picture in which sexual impulse was evident.’ Hinds saw his chance and jumped back at once. ‘I really must be very innocent,’ he writes: ‘but I honestly cannot see where any sexual impulse arises in the scene in question.’

A somewhat shamefaced Trevelyan replied ‘to apologise for my mistake’. The reel was left as it stands. Once again Hammer had managed to fight a rearguard action, but Revenge did suffer cuts and it is clear the company were getting much less mileage out of their guerrilla campaign against the censor as time went on. This, and the 1960 debacle over Peeping Tom, which as we shall see led to a major reversal for Trevelyan and new draconian restrictions, meant that many of the earlier Hammer films look and feel more radical and more violent than the later ones. A striking example is The Stranglers of Bombay, which is generally regarded as one of Hammer’s more sadistic films and actually was given an ‘A’, in 1959, which meant little children could view it if accompanied by an adult. Yet today even the video is classified 15. We will never know exactly why or how this happened because, whether coincidence or not, this seems be the only major BBFC file involving Hammer that has completely vanished. But two key facts seem highly relevant. Firstly, Hammer had changed the movie from colour to monochrome quite late in the day, something that would have calmed the BBFC’s nerves. Also, the film was was submitted to the censor at the end of 1959 in what was a brief – but cinematically highly significant – time of leniency just before Peeping Tom the following year. Hammer’s own files on The Stranglers of Bombay show that on 6 October the BBFC asked for two cuts. A letter from James Needs, Hammer’s supervising editor, on 12 October 1959 states that they had been made. One was of a ‘red hot instrument being thrust towards men’s faces in a torture scene’; the other was of cries of pain while the victims are visible in shot. Astonishingly, in retrospect even by the standards of 1959, it seems that the scenes of the voluptuous Marie Devereux glistening with sweaty excitement as she presides over scene after scene of torture passed the censor by.

Curse of the Werewolf drew the usual adjectives from the BBFC. ‘Intolerable’ from Audrey Field. ‘Carreras should feel a bit ashamed of this obscene muck,’ echoed another examiner, Newton Branch. And by this time the scandal over Peeping Tom, described in Chapter 6, had occurred and it was clear that on this occasion there was to be absolutely no quarter given by the censor. Indeed, Hinds and director Terence Fisher were summoned to meet Trevelyan and Audrey Field on 1 September 1960 in order to craft a new start to the story which would eliminate a rape scene near the beginning. But even after this, things went from bad to worse.

Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, UK, 1961).

For when some months later the BBFC saw the film (which they had in part helped to plot!) they were utterly shocked. ‘There is a good case for rejecting this film,’ wrote Trevelyan. ‘The theme is horrible enough and it has been made despite all our warnings in a morbid and disgusting fashion.’ Pages of cuts were demanded but Hinds fought back and, as the correspondence shows, all pretence of polite manoeuvring between the two sparring partners was now well and truly over. After stating that the MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America, the American board of censorship) had passed the film intact, Hinds wrote ‘ … for the first time I feel the board has been very unfair. Many of the cuts asked for were either in the original script and passed by you or the revisions “were talked out in your office” [my italics]’. He then points out several scenes he believes had been approved at script stage. One example was ‘the scene in which little Leon was baptised and for a moment it looks as if the devil had appeared. This shot is exactly as described in the script which was passed by the Board.’

In his reply, Trevelyan did try to be more pacific and agreed to look at the film in colour but still demanded major cuts, specifically of anything sexual. As negotiations continued, he would also make it clear the Board now felt that – after the terrible year for the BBFC of 1960, discussed below – they had been much too lenient in the past. Indeed, he spelled this out in no uncertain terms: ‘ … Since we last had a horror picture from your company there has grown up a considerable criticism of this Board for passing such pictures at all … I can assure you that it would be most unwise at the present time to provide these people with ammunition which they can use not only to criticise us but to harm the industry. If you had heard the points of view expressed to me recently when I met the Magistrates in Glasgow and similar expressions of opinion at other meetings, you would realise that this is a significant and important point. If then you think we are treating your picture more roughly than we would have treated a similar picture two years ago you may have some justification but you must realise we stand between the industry and such pressures. … Frankly I am reluctant to pass a picture of this kind at all at the present moment.’ On this occasion Hinds came away with a single concession, as Trevelyan backed down on one shot at the climax of the dying werewolf.

This, alongside The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, was probably the lowest ebb in Hammer’s long struggle with the censor during the first stage of the boom. As Trevelyan makes clear in his letter, the BBFC regretted their past looseness and were making up for it by clamping down hard. Later on, it is true, as the 1960s continued and some of the moral ferment abated, Trevelyan was able to soften his stand a little, especially after the new ‘X’ certificate raised the age of entrance to 18. But there would still be a major rearguard action when Hammer moved to more explicit sexuality with The Vampire Lovers (see Chapter 9), and even the old company’s very last horror outings as late as the 1970s would suffer cuts.

Hammer and UK Horror after Frankenstein

It is more or less certain that when Hammer undertook to revive Victor Frankenstein’s monster in 1957, they were as unaware as the fictional Baron himself of the forces (in their case historical and cultural forces) that were being unleashed. But, very quick to capitalise on success, they were to reorganise in the next few years into a production company which was utterly unlike anything that the British cinema has previously known. There is a very slight echo of Ealing in the structure that emerged, but perhaps the most obvious analogy is with one of the small Hollywood studios of the 1930s and 1940s like Republic or Monogram; for almost overnight Hammer became a highly efficient factory for a series of exploitation pictures made on tight budgets with a repertory company of actors and a small, sometimes over-exposed, series of locations surrounding their tiny Buckinghamshire estate. Unlike so many other companies, they established a consistent pattern whereby the credits changed only a fraction from film to film. With this production setup and a new panache in content and exploitation, they reintroduced into Britain the cinema of action and spectacle, of imagination and myth (and also showmanship), at a time when the scene was dominated by the so-called ‘new wave’ – Woodfall were well under way by the late 1950s – and the ‘respectable’ entertainment film.

Meanwhile, Hammer’s astonishing success had led several other English companies to enter the horror field. But before this, even while Hammer was making The Curse of Frankenstein at Bray, a classic supernatural movie was being shot in England that seems to have been more or less unrelated to the new developments. Despite the machinations of its distributors, Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon was not an anticipation of the horror boom, but rather an elegant addition to the ghost story genre or ‘Radcliffian’ mode which had spawned Dead of Night and the Val Lewton RKO movies like Cat People. Indeed, the film was originally shot under the title of The Haunted, but this was hastily changed when the makers realised the way things were going.

Night of the Demon, which is a highly effective black magic thriller packed with atmosphere, is now rightly regarded as a horror classic. And we are very fortunate in that a whole book has been devoted to the making of it. Amid a wealth of fascinating detail, illustrations, interviews and stills, Tony Earnshaw’s excellent Beating the Devil (Tomahawk Press 2005) proves categorically that many of the stories about the film are false, revealing among a multitude of other things that the special-effects demon was in the script from the first and therefore not a last minute addition imposed on the director. In the first edition of Heritage I defended the effects against the innumerable critics like Carlos Clarens who have called them atrocious. But I suggested they might seem out of place in an adaptation of an M. R. James story. Now I am not sure they need any defence at all. Who would really want the film without them? The whole controversy merely reflected the wish of the time, which was to elevate the director into an artist assailed by Philistines. That might have been a necessary strategy when cinema was being ignored as a serious art form, but it is no longer a useful or tenable position, and (though the film’s producer hardly emerges in a rosy light) Earnshaw’s superb book makes it very obvious the all-seeing director is too simplistic a view. Indeed, he vindicates the words of the French critic Gerard Lenne who mounted a spirited attack on those critics who continued to praise Tourneur to the skies simply because of his condemnation of the film’s special effects: ‘This auteur’, Lenne wrote scornfully in Le Cinema Fantastique et ses Mythologies, ‘had enough good qualities without having to invent false ones which only reveal a misunderstanding of his work.’

Tourneur was later to make another fantasy in England, City under the Sea, but unfortunately it was clumsily scripted and proved no real successor to the earlier film which has rightly become established as a masterpiece of the supernatural. Since then some of the best adaptations of M. R. James have been mounted on television and are discussed in the last chapter.

It seems the first non-Hammer film to go into production as a result of Hammer’s success was Alfred Shaughnessy’s Cat Girl, which was made by Insignia Films in the late spring of 1957, while The Curse of Frankenstein was enjoying a record-breaking run at the Warner. Many of the cheaper imitations that followed (for example, Man Without a Body) are of little interest, but Cat Girl is the exception; it was the first British film with Barbara Shelley, an actress who was to become a staple ingredient in British horror, and, though a little absurd and slow in parts, it also represents an obviously transitional stage in which the British cinema was beginning to come to terms with the new themes and ideas.

Apart from a brief atmospheric opening sequence, Cat Girl begins by establishing middle-class characters and situations which are utterly conventional in terms of the British cinema of its time. The action takes place in a pub, where Nora (Barbara Shelley), accompanied by her weak, unreliable husband and treacherous girlfriend, is on the point of visiting the old house of Nora’s uncle because of a mysterious communication about a legacy. In a series of well-observed incidents, it is immediately conveyed that Nora, whose recently married husband has every intention of having an affair with the other girl, is one of those victimised suffering females, with a strong undertone of nobility and courage who had become a stock figure in British cinema during the 1940s. The form later extended more dynamically into the war film (often in the form of Virginia McKenna), but its ‘locus classicus’ remains Celia Johnson’s performance in Terence Fisher’s The Astonished Heart (1949), which represents perfectly the sort of ground on which Cat Girl and much of Fisher’s own later work was built.

In The Astonished Heart (and there are dozens of similar films), Celia Johnson – one of the truly exceptional British actresses of her time and perhaps all time – plays a kind, noble (but repressed) woman whose husband (Noël Coward) is stolen by Leonora, her scheming flirtatious girlfriend (Margaret Leighton). In the circumstances she behaves terribly well, even trying to understand the attraction, and when her husband dies as a result of his ‘obsession’ she implicitly forgives the girlfriend for what has happened. By 1957 Shaughnessy was able to take this undying English image of neurotic female altruism and systematically turn it on its head. In the early scenes, he establishes that Nora is utterly subdued and that the others exploit her self-inflicted martyrdom quite mercilessly. Later, when they reach her uncle’s house and the others are drinking downstairs, Leonora (as she now significantly begins to be called) is informed that the legacy that has been mentioned is not a sum of money but a family curse which will shortly control her actions. This supernatural element in the plot is more or less overtly lifted from the RKO Cat People series of the 1940s, involving a nightly metamorphosis into a cheetah (‘The craving for warm new flesh and blood … is your legacy’), but its psychological implications are far more interesting. Leonora’s husband and friend (who are naturally unaware of the curse) slip out into the garden later that night and make love among the trees. The girl says in a semi-ironical flirtatious fashion, ‘If Leonora could see us now, she’d kill us.’ And the remark is intended on a strictly humorous level, for, even if she found out, the strained self-sacrificing Nora at the beginning of the film would be no more likely to ‘kill’ them than any other well brought up young woman bounded by the conventions of her class in a British marital drama. But it is at this point that the ‘legacy’ begins to assert itself. It is, in a sense, the legacy of emotion and sensuality, suppressed in British film heroines over the previous 20 years, which now appears in a particularly violent and distorted form. Shaughnessy cuts to Leonora watching the couple on the grass, her eyes narrow and her mouth opens in startled joy as the ghostly cheetah, powered by all her repressed desire, begins to savage the lovers while she looks on in ecstasy. The rest of the film has dated to some extent, and cannot quite equal the intensity of this first metamorphosis which marks a crucially liberating moment in British cinema. Another genie had been released from captivity, and it is Leonora rather than Nora who reappears again and again in countless British horrors over the next 20 years. Inevitably the scourge of Hammer at the British Board of Film Censors, Audrey Field, noticed this transition and lamented it. ‘It is a pity,’ she wrote in her notes on an early draft of Cat Girl, ‘that they have chosen a woman as the central character as it makes the story rather nastier.’

Alfred Shaughnessy never made another horror film after Cat Girl, going on into TV where he created Upstairs Downstairs. But there was one other minor gem during the early years of the UK horror boom with an equally unlikely subject. This was Devil Doll, written by producer Ronald Kinnoch (under the pseudonym George Barclay) and flamboyantly directed by Canadian Lindsay Shonteff. Kinnoch was himself something of a veteran, over 54 when he wrote this (he would later write Village of the Damned), and Devil Doll – no doubt partly inspired by Dead of Night – is a remarkably acrid take on the ventriloquist’s dummy story in which the dummy seems to have supernatural powers and a horrifying quality of vengeful life. The seedy backstage ambience is beautifully realised, while the whole thing is played out in the eerie monochrome of cinematographer Gerald Gibbs who had given so much to Quatermass II and X the Unknown. The hypnotist Vorelli (played by Bryant Haliday) is a ruthless tortured cynic who is not above using his hypnotic powers to sexually dominate his jealous, semi-exhausted mistress (a painfully real Sandra Dorne), while the dummy is genuinely creepy. This is a B-feature, and not Dead of Night, but despite rough edges, it still bears comparison with Cavalcanti’s famous study of a ventriloquist’s madness, even if it offers a more directly horrific story-line. And both films were far more sinister and frightening than the only modern Hollywood take on the theme, William Goldman and Richard Attenborough’s Magic.

The two English companies which tried hardest to wrest Hammer’s supremacy in the horror field were Tigon and Amicus (whose films are discussed elsewhere in this book). And of course it should not be forgotten (though it often is) that the most blatant attempt to mount a direct imitation of Hammer came from America. Roger Corman and American International (AIP) were acutely aware of the profitability of Hammer’s combination of period decadence in colour and literary terror. They fought back hard with colour and Cinemascope and also – having seen Universal’s literary bounty of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula disappearing back across the Atlantic – the best American literary contender they could find: Edgar Allan Poe. The films were well made, harnessing some great talents, not least actor Vincent Price and screenwriter Richard Matheson. Yet because of their source they were forced to trade almost everything on atmosphere and – perhaps for this reason – many of them now appear older than they are, almost as if they were made in the 1940s, not the 1960s. Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula may admittedly be little more than a distant memory but – outside of film buffs – I would argue that Corman’s Poes lack even this level of recognition. Poe was a literary genius, but in the end he was more of a poet than he was a creator of myths, which would explain why he does not quite have the same ease of adaptation as Shelley or Stoker or Stevenson. As a result, Cushing’s Baron and Lee’s Dracula are finally iconic for cinema in a way that Price’s doomed hero in a frock coat could never quite achieve.

The Personalities of Hammer

James Carreras was a business man and a brilliant entrepreneur. He was a brilliant salesman and a brilliant showman … Michael was always living in the shadow of his father which I think was very difficult for him, because he wanted to be a producer as opposed to an executive … Michael was far more film-minded than his father and was more involved in the film itself as producer and later as director. Michael looked far more Hispanic than his father. Both Jimmy [James] Carreras’s parents were Spanish. I knew Jimmy Carreras’ mother and she didn’t speak English.

Christopher Lee on the Carreras dynasty, quoted by

Wayne Kinsey in The Bray Studio Years

He had a tremendous outgoing personality. When I was a child, I think a lot of my energy was drained by just watching my father perform. He was a great sportsman, a great cricketer, a great rugby football player – never used to stop. He also loved social occasions and was at ease in any class of society or size or group. This was illustrated very much by his activities in the Variety Club. He was an incredible extrovert …

Michael Carreras on his father James Carreras

I was actually approached by them [Hammer] and asked if they could use the character of Professor Quatermass, I said ‘No you can’t. It’s mine.’ They were funny people.

Nigel Kneale quoted in The Hammer Story

The first generation of Hammer had, as we have seen, very little to do with its post-war development except in one vital respect. In 1934 when his son James was just 25, Enrique Carreras experienced a serious bankruptcy after investing money in an ill-fated toothpaste business. The Great Depression was truly a terrible time to be a bankrupt in England and not one his son James would forget. But there was more. For, though Enrique managed to climb back into business, once again in 1937 Enrique Carreras’ fledgling film production company Hammer went bankrupt.

None of this was to be lost on Enrique’s son James. He had been born in 1909, only two years after his father arrived in England, and, perhaps in part because he was the first generation and his mother spoke no English, it seems from the outset he was intent on becoming the perfect picture of the charismatic English gentleman. Nothing, as has been said of so many great businessmen (including Rupert Murdoch), exceeds the will of a son who has seen his father fail.

Charming, energetic, humorous, sometimes mischievous – and hugely talented especially at sport – James left Manchester Grammar School in 1925 at only 16 and married Vera St. John a year later, a marriage that lasted till she died in 1986. Their son Michael was born when James was only 18 in 1927 and, though James Carreras’ pre-war years are a little sketchy, it seems he worked part of the time with a cinema chain but also as a London car salesman at Henleys off the Tottenham Court Road, reluctant it would seem to spend too much time as an employee of his own father and no doubt enjoying himself (for he was a consummate salesman) in what was one of the more raffish occupations then available. One anecdote had it that as a practical joke he once sold a car without an engine. Whether fictional or not, it was exactly how people talked of James Carreras.

True to his whole style, the Second World War seems to have suited James Carreras down to the ground. He had what is known as an ‘outstanding’ war, entering it as a mere Private in the Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest surviving regiment in the British army, and rising rapidly through the ranks so that by 1943 he was a Major in a showpiece anti-aircraft unit which was visited by many dignitaries including the king and queen. The anti-aircraft unit was so successful that it knocked out 78 flying bombs and by September 1944 James was a Lieutenant Colonel with an MBE, and known as ‘hair-trigger Jim’. Soon he and his battery had become the stars of a Gaumont-British documentary about the battle of the flying bomb. In the first sign of how he would shape his post-war life, James Carreras evidently took time out in September 1944 to visit his father in Wardour Street to publicise this film.²⁰ In 1946, after being demobbed, and no doubt the source of much familial pride, James stepped back into a key role at Exclusive, his father’s small distribution company, and soon became a director of a new Hammer revived from bankruptcy. By 1950, after his father’s death, he was running the whole show.

James Carreras, the most clubbable and persuasive of men, generally charmed those who came across him. Christopher Lee, for example, who later had plenty of reasons to feel resentment, clearly adored him and has said so on many occasions. James was a man’s man but he was also without question a ladies’ man, for he was always spotting attractive women in the newspaper or a commercial and transforming them into the latest Hammer lovely. Caroline Munro was found on a Lambs Rum poster as James Carreras took the train to Brighton. Veronica Carlson was seen in the Sunday Mirror. ‘I was on the front of the Sunday Mirror,’ she told David Miller, ‘… some photographs of me coming out of the water. Apparently, Jimmy Carreras saw one and I was called in. I had to have an audition of course but I was given a part in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. James Carreras was a lovely affable man. He took me under his wing – which was a very comforting wing. I learned that it wasn’t just me. He was a person who was magnanimous, generous and thoughtful to everybody.’²¹

Because James Carreras was very careful about his image, later becoming a knight and a major establishment figure*,²² who founded several charities, his sexual adventures have generally been only hinted at or rumoured. But in a private memoir the late Helen O’Brien, a nightclub owner and reliable source who was from time to time used by MI5, describes his energetic sex life, and how in the early 1960s he would often take one favourite showgirl, who bore a striking resemblance to Kim Novak, to a suite at a London hotel. Mike Frankovich, head of Columbia in the UK at the time, also records a drunken outing to the Savoy Hotel when Carreras and Nat Cohen, later head of EMI, were nearly thrown out when they brought two women back there from a club. Interestingly, in the story it is James Carreras who manages to use his charm to secure the suite and champagne without questions being asked. Carreras was evidently as exuberant a night bird as he was in his socialising, his sport, his deal-making and his tireless office correspondence.

‘He was the kind of man,’ one associate told me who preferred to remain anonymous, ‘who made you feel you were his top priority in the world, his close friend and ally to whom he’d promise the earth and he’d believe it too for he was no phoney. It was just that his mind moved elsewhere as soon as you were gone.’ Not, perhaps, so surprisng then, that there seems to be some evidence of a second family outside of his long official relationship.

All of this gives a sense of James Carreras’ world. Hammer was his fiefdom while his business correspondence and cables – especially the endless struggles with US distributors quoted below – reveal his remarkable business style, which had great zest as well as an extreme tenacity. James restricted his TV appearances (footage of him is rare), but in other respects what emerges from the evidence we have is someone much less like the old-style figures of the UK movie industry – a Rank or a Korda – and much more like the UK entrepreneurs of today in the mould of Richard Branson. James Carreras may have restricted his ambitions to film, he never diversified, but – though he never enjoyed the freedom of youth in the 1960s – he shared Branson’s style of swashbuckling (if sometimes ruthless) charm, combining it with an amazing knack for publicity, a deceptive light-heartedness and an obvious liking for women.

Of course, as the quote from his son at the start of this section shows, a man like this can sometimes leave little oxygen for the next generation and at worst may even trail emotional wreckage in his wake. Michael Carreras was born when his father was a teenager; Michael’s adolescence was spent with his father a dazzling young war hero. Even when Hammer hit their hot streak in the summer of 1955 James was still a comparatively youthful vigorous man in his mid-40s, while Michael was nearly 30 and no doubt wondering, as sons do, when he would get his chance (though to be fair by then – Hammer being what it was – Michael had already produced twelve second features!).

Moreover, as Christopher Lee noted in the insightful quote at the head of this section, in appearance and character the two men were poles apart. James espoused an irresistibly English ebullience, he was all things to all men. Michael, in contrast, was generally suspicious of such pretensions, not much of a salesman and far more interested in the creative aspect of filmmaking and his beloved jazz. While James would see to it he got along with anyone, Michael was not always easy; indeed he espoused a prickly persona with a dry and stringent sense of humour, which rejected flannel of any kind. The younger man’s conversation was interesting because of it though and his bluntness may have obscured a certain kindness. Perhaps at times he could even be a more loyal man than his father.

Typical of the younger (Michael) Carreras was an exchange that occurred when Milton Subotsky – the eager American head of the rival horror movie company Amicus – ran into him at a party celebrating a National Film Theatre Hammer retrospective in 1971. Michael asked what Subotsky thought of the film that marked the occasion (Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb). Subotsky replied politely it had a ‘real mythic quality’. Sir James would no doubt have been delighted and replied with fulsome thanks, but not Michael. ‘Oh yes? What does that mean?’ he came back quizzically. Subotsky later described this response as ‘really nasty’. It was certainly brusque and typical of a man who could not abide any kind of pretension, even when politely meant. Michael Carreras hated anything but straight talk, yet he could be good company and even generous when he got it.

The various rifts between Carreras father (James) and son (Michael) are part of Hammer’s history, but more as an ongoing condition than a series of open confrontations. For they tended to be passive and rarely came to any kind of head, at least as far as the outside world knew. Undoubtedly talented in his own individual (and occasionally troubled) way, and certainly passionate about his pursuits, Michael never matched the business chutzpah of his father and would die only four years after him, in 1994. The acclaimed and admired Sir James was a clubbable likeable man, remembered with some affection by many, a Variety Club award being named in his honour. But there is a debit side for he left a semi-estranged son, and grandchildren whose dealings with him had frequently been interrupted due, it seems, to faults on both sides.²³ The occasionally temperamental Michael Carreras was not nearly as clubbable as his father, nor a great family man, but he could inspire quite fierce devotion in his own way. There was a massive difference in style between the two.

The third personality at Bray, and the key member of the team as far as Hammer’s most famous product was concerned, was Anthony Hinds (son of co-founder Will Hinds). A self-effacing man, once described rather tellingly by the Daily Cinema as ‘looking like a divinity student about to sit for his final’, Hinds always preferred to keep well in the background, something which has wrong-footed many (including myself since I failed to give him his full due in the first edition of this book). For Hinds was the creative producer at Hammer. He inspired and facilitated the company’s switch into horror. And, as we have seen in what was arguably the most important creative decision in the company’s history, he also (and alone) pushed for The Curse of Frankenstein to be made in colour, the key opportunity James would probably have missed. Hinds also recognised the talents of Hammer staffer Jimmy Sangster and utilised them in the new approach, besides (as we have seen) hand-picking Terence Fisher for certain crucial assignments and, also, bringing the uniquely talented set designer Bernard Robinson into the fold, a man who amply deserves Christopher Lee’s description as the ‘real star’ of Hammer’s craft team.²⁴ Hinds was the only executive at Hammer who actually felt a deep affection for gothic horror. James was interested in what would sell. Michael Carreras is on record as saying he was never really a fan of the horror movie per se. Even Jimmy Sangster, writer of so many of the early horror movies, has confessed he was not really a devotee, preferring psychological thrillers (like Les Diaboliques) in the psychological thriller mould. It was Anthony Hinds who cared about the movies and who proved it on the screen.

We have already seen the skill with which Hinds took on the BBFC. The same talent was applied consistently and constantly to film after film at Hammer, struggling at all costs to maintain quality. It was Hinds who monitored the scripts, frequently rewriting, always battling to balance quality against cost, a process that ran on into the all-important stage of post-production when he would often concern himself with the tiniest detail, even paying 20 guineas in March 1960 to hire the chapel of St Paul’s school so he could record suitably solemn organ music for The Brides of Dracula. It was Hinds who, when Warners complained that Dracula Prince of Darkness breached their contract by being two and a half minutes short, came up with the ingenious idea of reprising the first Dracula film’s climax in a baroque mirror.²⁵ It was Hinds too who devised the peculiarly Hammerish idea of employing Bernard Robinson’s mastery of set construction to use adapted standing sets over several pictures, and in one case shot two films back to back on the same sets (The Reptile and Plague of the Zombies). In the case of the last two, the paperwork shows he rode shotgun over both productions, moving heaven and earth when they came off the floor to add effects, re-edit and re-voice until they were of a standard he thought was commensurate with the Hammer product.

It is true Michael Carreras was given to interesting experiments like The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, but it was Hinds who saw his job as maintaining the overall standard and giving the films that Hammer stamp of quality he took from Ealing. Indeed, when Hinds ceased to oversee the product and departed the company in 1969, that standard almost vanished. This may have been temporarily disguised by the sexual explicitness of The Vampire Lovers, but it became abundantly clear as soon as Hammer mounted another Dracula. I can still recall the shock of watching a preview of 1970’s The Scars of Dracula, when it was at once clearly visible on screen that all the care and detail Hinds used to put into the series had simply been discarded, so much so that even the Count’s resurrection made no sense at all. To make matters worse, Scars was from a script Hinds had himself written but which had been savagely cut, the opening sequence eliminated, while all the production values had now plummeted to that of any fifth-rate exploitation company.

Of course, Hinds was by no means infallible. He made mistakes and his writing could be uneven. Evidently, like many including Alfred Hitchcock, he disliked the rough and tumble of the set, preferring the quieter existence of post-production. But he had serious strength as a team player and here he could be inspired. We have largely Hinds to thank for the care and attention that went into one of Hammer’s (and Terence Fisher’s) real gems, The Devil Rides Out. Once again, here he battled with the censor, submitting the Richard Matheson script as early as 1965 and being given a 16-point list which ended with what appears to be a vetoing of the final sequence of the film (‘We would not at all care to see this kind of thing’). Trevelyan then stated he would only consider a screenplay ‘in a very much altered or modified form … it will be for you to decide whether it is worth your while pursuing this subject.’

Naturally Hinds did pursue it with some modifications but there were major money worries too, for in the late 1960s Hammer were having enormous problems tackling more ambitious genre subjects which called for proper budgets. In May 1965 James Carreras asked Hinds to cut down the script of The Devil Rides Out so it could be made for £180,000 (roughly £4.6 million today). Bravely Hinds refused. ‘I am unable to give you any scripts for this subject,’ he wrote to James Carreras on 27 May 1965. ‘You will appreciate that there must be fairly drastic alterations as £200,000 minus £20,000 means that it has to be made for the same budget as The Nanny – which had no special effects, no locations, and all took place inside a London flat. In fact, I doubt if the script will be recognisable!’

To James Carreras’ great credit, he did not press the matter; in fact he agreed. ‘Obviously what you suggest in script alterations will definitely ruin the whole project,’ he wrote back on the same day. ‘I would suggest therefore that you re-write whatever is to be rewritten to give it the additional punch and then have it budgeted as it is, in order that we may retain all the special effects, all the locations and in fact everything that makes the picture worthwhile making. When this has been done please let me know the amount and we will reconsider the subject then.’ Here was a classic example of Hammer working in tandem as a team. James Carreras was a businessman but he generally knew when, as here, it was worth putting money on the screen.

As a result The Devil Rides Out saw its budget rise to what was the still tiny figure, considering its subject, of £220,000 (approximately somewhere around £5 million today). Columbia (whom Hammer were trying to interest in the project) wrote to Hinds on 24 January 1966 complaining that the budget ‘without big names … came as quite a shock … If you will recall,’ they continued, ‘it had been envisioned that the script would be rewritten with a view to containing the production within a cost ceiling of around £150,000 …’. Interestingly, too, Columbia went on to complain about the budget of Quatermass and the Pit, which at £180,000 ‘we all felt was somewhat risky.’

Hinds took the point in his stride, writing back on 26 January ‘I agree with you. I think the budget is too high … but how can we reduce it without spoiling it?’ (He went on to state the same applied to Quatermass whose budget had now risen to £210,000.) Nevertheless, by the time The Devil Rides Out was finally made (though not for Columbia), the budget had risen far further to £285,000. But the film was very well received and Hinds had the satisfaction of a letter from his friendly enemy John Trevelyan who wrote to James Carreras on 23 April 1968: ‘I really must congratulate you, I think this is probably the best Hammer picture that I have ever seen and think that it should be a great commercial success.’ A gleeful Carreras immediately memoed the letter to Hinds. It was a pleasing moment.

The most unassuming of Hammer’s creators, Hinds was, it seems, also a tactful man and he needed all his tact on occasions. One such was when he had to show the distinguished historical novelist Norah Lofts a print of The Witches, based on her novel The Devil’s Own (under the pen name Peter Curtis), in the full knowledge the film had not really worked. Hinds seems to have proved so sympathetic on this occasion that, despite her gut reaction to what she saw, Norah Lofts left Hammer full of gratitude, even tacitly agreeing to write a 2,000-word article about the film. It was only later once she was back in her home at Northgate House in Bury St Edmunds that she reflected and wrote a pained letter:

‘Dear Tony, I now have the painful task of going back on my given word and this is all the harder to do because you were so nice to us and entertained us so kindly. The more I have thought over the film, the more sure I am that it would be a mistake for me to associate myself with it at this late hour; what small reputation I have has been built up over 30 years of work which, if it had nothing else, has had integrity and to talk about that film as though (a) I hadn’t seen it and (b) didn’t deplore it would be out of keeping with the behaviour of a lifetime.

It is a mark of Hinds’s charm and his own obvious (if sometimes harassed) integrity that someone like Lofts felt the burden of disappointing him. The Witches had been an unusual miss for Hammer and Hinds: Joan Fontaine brought them the novel about a primary school teacher in a village beset by witchcraft but would subsequently blame the company for ending her career. Nigel Kneale’s script, which echoes M. R. James’s classic ghost story Lost Hearts, could in principle have been a great addition to the Hammer canon yet Fontaine feels miscast in a part better suited to a young heroine while director Cyril Frankel, who never worked for the company again, seems to lose his way, especially in the unconvincing witch-dance at the climax.

Another occasion which called for all the tact and negotiating skills at Hinds’s disposal was on The Lost Continent, the batty Dennis Wheatley adaptation about a boat of unlikely passengers facing sea monsters in uncharted seas. (Uncharted Seas was, in fact, the name of the book on which it was based.) This was very much Michael Carreras’ movie. He chose the book and wrote the script under the pseudonym of Michael Nash, with Anthony Hinds keeping a watchful eye as executive producer. Like any film set largely on water, in this case a tank at Elstree, it had threatened to go wildly over budget and was already massively over when Leslie Norman left the production and was replaced as director by Michael Carreras.

Michael Carreras loved to direct and, as he often said, he could not imagine anyone not enjoying it. Consequently, he directed at Hammer on several occasions, sometimes, as here, in an emergency. However, on The Lost Continent when it turned out that Michael expected additional payment for stepping into the breach, Hinds had to raise this delicate matter in a memo to James Carreras (3 November 1967). In it, Hinds points out that although he thinks Michael was doing very well, if he had known he was going to expect additional payment for stepping in, he would never have hired him in the first place, and he had told Michael this. ‘However,’ writes Hinds, ‘in view of the fact that when Leslie Norman left the film it was £38,000 over budget and rising and in view of the fact that, since Michael took over on the floor the overage has dropped quite considerably, I would suggest that we wait … and then discuss some compensation based on what he has managed to save. Naturally I have not promised anything!’ In the end a sum of £5,000 (£96,000 today) was agreed as a salary, but the production lumbered on with Hammer terrified it would get out of control. ‘Any improvement or worse?’ scrawled James Carreras on a memo to Hinds on 23 October. The news was better, they had lowered the overage figure by £2,599. But by 15 December Hinds was writing to James Carreras: ‘I would strongly recommend that you instruct Michael that he must finish shooting by Christmas, otherwise I can see this picture going into overage that you would not believe possible.’ By 16 December James Carreras memoed his son: ‘In view of a memo I have received from our Executive Producer dated 15 December 1967, I have to inform you that all shooting on the above picture must finish on Friday 22 December.’

Matters were now very tense, even more so when in reply Michael refused to stop shooting, informing his father there were still vital sequences to be filmed. A showdown threatened, one that could easily have torn Hammer apart, and it was left to Hinds to find a compromise. He conferred with the editor James Needs, who expressed the view if they changed priorities they might be able to finish by the Friday. Needs talked to Michael who, under protest, finally agreed. The film finished on the appointed day and the standoff was averted with The Lost Continent finally coming in £60,000 (around £1 million today) over its original budget of £500,000. However, as we have seen, 80 per cent of this was incurred before Michael Carreras took over the reins. It was a fairly typical ordeal by fire for Hinds and there was no reward at the end of it either, for the film did not perform well at the box office.

As his letters, memos and general demeanour shows, there is a modesty about Hinds’ style which seems greatly appealing now. At times it must have been galling for someone like him, the son of Hammer’s founding name, to take a slightly subordinate position (albeit as a director of the company), facing as he did a charismatic boss and that boss’s son. But he wore it extremely well with both discretion and dignity. It seems obvious from all accounts of the man that Hinds had one abiding and clear belief, and that was in a quality British cinema. He had brought that belief to Hammer and it helped him engineer the extraordinary fusion of style and myth which was at the company’s core. If anything reveals his true nature, it is the fact he fully intended to leave the company for a while and go off to work for his mentor the distinguished British producer Michael Balcon, father of Ealing (and, among so many other major films, of Dead of Night). Hinds’s plans were thwarted because in those far-off days of Byzantine union regulations, he was refused permission by the Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians (ACTT) to make the change. He never forgot this mad (and now inexplicable) decision, and it was almost certainly one reason why in the end he gave up on the film business.

When Hinds finally left Hammer in 1969 at the age of 47 he would have little in the way of financial reward to show for his immense contribution to the company (though he was sufficiently wealthy through his private inheritance from his father to choose freedom). The end of the road had come after he endured a miserable time under the American producer Joan Harrison on the Hammer television series Journey to the Unknown, then Hammer’s biggest deal ever, since it involved 17 hours of television and cost £3 million (around £58 million today). James Carreras, who had failed twice with television, first on the terrible travails of the Frankenstein series for Columbia (see Chapter 4, on Frankenstein) and then on Visa to Canton, an intended espionage series which ended up as a second feature, was utterly determined to make this one work, and he did. It gave him and Hammer 26 weeks of continuing production at Elstree, the most the company ever saw on a single production. But what James could not see was the hidden cost. Anthony Hinds had put up with a lot but he felt, with some justice, this time his boss had asked too much by forcing him to surrender his rank as Hammer’s producer to an outside executive from the US who knew nothing whatsoever of the company’s ways. Hinds was always a team player but he remained convinced Hammer could only keep its identify and its standards if it stayed small. The experience of Journey to the Unknown proved to him he was fighting a losing battle. And, at the conclusion of it, quite suddenly he quit. Evidently James Carreras was stunned. It was a marker, a beginning of the end.

James Carreras and the American Dimension

No matter how badly James Carreras needed Anthony Hinds, Hammer was nothing if not a team and the reverse remains true: that Hinds could never have had a chance to achieve what he did without James Carreras. If we focus on the turning point in Hammer’s history, the year of 1956, when it suddenly transformed itself from a struggling B-feature outfit into something quite unique, it is startling to see how close the company came to chaos and bankruptcy. Little wonder James Carreras’ letters and memos from this period have such bite and passion. He had witnessed bankruptcy twice with his own father; including the demise of the original Hammer company in 1936.

By the summer of 1956 James Carreras saw that in order to capitalise on the success of his sci-fi monsters and make the leap into bigger fare, he would need more American money than he had ever had before. But at this stage the Americans were in no way keen to come into a more ambitious partnership. Why should they? They had been prepared to offer some finance on low-cost pictures but what James Carreras was proposing now was an entirely different matter. And, though SF had been successful for Hammer, nobody was betting on A-feature horror movies. That had been shown time and time again to be an American fiefdom. James Carreras needed an American partner, and finally, after much casting around, he found one.

It is impossible to understand James Carreras without understanding the Variety Club, a showbusiness charity that was also highly convenient for networking. The Club had begun in America in 1927 but its British branch was founded, with good timing for Carreras, at a Savoy Hotel dinner in October 1949 by the Chairman of the US movie company RKO, just as James was getting the new Hammer started. The Variety Club’s UK rise therefore was inextricably linked with the rise of James Carreras’ own company, and the institution could have been made for him. He loved its combination of good works, fellowship, glamour and roistering. As early as 1954 he had been made Chief Barker (their term for Chairman), later becoming a guest Chief Barker of America (the first Englishman to be accorded such an honour). By the 1960s he was travelling to America with Prince Philip and Earl Mountbatten (who had become a friend) and a huge sum of £790,000 was raised.

Nobody could therefore accuse James Carreras of timeserving with this charity. But he also made full use of the contacts it gave him to progress his business. Favours were offered to relatives of senior Variety Club people, as when a Hammer post was created for Terry O’Neill, son-in-law of one of the original Variety Club’s 12 American founders. And it was to be through the Variety Club of America that James Carreras made his fateful contact with Eliot Hyman.

The higher up you go in the executive Hollywood hierarchy of the post-war period, the more mysterious many of its key figures become. Like his former partner, the eminence grise of Columbia Ray Stark, Eliot Hyman was a highly secretive man. According to one former executive colleague he ‘shunned publicity like the plague.’ As a result, for years no researcher into Hammer knew of his existence, let alone his key relationship with the company. I still recall my amazement looking through the files of The Curse of Frankenstein in the 1980s when I discovered that in those crucial years Hammer had had a principal partner of such power and with whom its relations were so fraught.

The actor Cliff Robertson has alleged in an oral history interview with Julie Ferdon that Hyman and Stark were both Hollywood partners of the notorious organised crime figure Myer Lansky (portrayed as Hyman Roth in The Godfather II). Also, in a little-known 1968 court case, Hyman stated he was an ‘intimate associate’ of Howard Hughes, who had helped Lansky go legal by buying the Sands Casino from him. Hammer researcher Vincent Barnett, mentioned previously, has exhaustively explored this connection and published on it in Media History (Vol. 28., 2022). Through some impressive digging, Barnett has indeed established a direct link between Hyman’s company Seven Arts and Lansky via an intriguing figure, the Seven Arts board member Lou Chesler.

Chesler, apparently known as ‘the big fat money machine’, turns out to have been point-man and fixer for Lansky, helping him open the Freeport Hotel and Casino in the Bahamas after Lansky had been forced out of Cuba, following the 1959 Castro revolution. Through Chesler, Seven Arts itself had close links to this mob casino, indeed it can even be linked to Hammer, who sent the stars of its 1969 productions Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and When the Dinosaurs Ruled the Eath – including Veronica Carlson, Imogen Hassal and others – to the Freeport Film Festival promoting the Freeport casino. Was Lansky there? We don’t know, Hassal and Carlson are both gone and I have been unable to find any surviving Hammer star who was. Hyman’s notepaper, which features extensively in Hammer’s files, is often mysteriously absent of any business details other than his smart Manhattan address. Yet this man was absolutely critical to the story of Hammer, he led it to the Frankenstein idea and then came within a whisker of bankrupting the company in the process.

Born in 1905 in New York, Hyman started in his family’s tyre business, but in 1946 he brilliantly foresaw one of the great investments of the twentieth-century, namely the film and TV library. That year he brought 13 old westerns for $12,000, selling them three days later to a TV station for $89,000. Then, through his company AAP, he started buying old Warners and Paramount cartoons which were, at the time, thought to be completely worthless. Soon he was making inroads into the Warners film library. Sometime in the mid-1950s he met James Carreras at a Variety Club function. The two men became friends and subsequently discussed joint business ventures. James Carreras was well aware that Hyman had serious influence with Warner Brothers and was a far more important player than Hammer’s former American contact Robert Lippert. But Hyman would prove to be a temperamental and occasionally difficult partner, and one who was often not in the best of health. (He would die in 1980 in Westport Connecticut quite as discreetly as he had lived.)

Right at the start, it was Hyman who steered young Milton Subotsky’s notion of redoing Frankenstein in Carreras’ direction and (after the script had been rewritten) it was Hyman who was finally cajoled, flattered, induced and enticed into entering into a partnership with Hammer on the new venture. Reading the correspondence and cables gives a real sense of James Carreras’ flair and exuberance at this crucial time in his company’s fortunes. His tone is warm, positive, relentlessly optimistic and personal. Generally, it is ‘My Dear Eliot’; very rarely as when the money failed to appear it is ‘Dear Eliot’. His sign-offs to Hyman vary as to tone between ‘Sincerely Jimmy’, ‘Very Sincerely Jimmy’ or even (with The Curse of Frankenstein coining money) ‘Love Jimmy’. Hyman’s correspondence is in contrast dogged, unforthcoming and often somewhat impenetrable but his sign-off never varies: it is always (somewhat chillingly) ‘Sincerely Yours’.

Of course, James Carreras was always an ebullient correspondent. As his success grew, his exuberant letters would address most major US distributors as ‘My Dear’ (for example ‘My dear Milt’ to Milton Rackmil of Universal on 23 November 1959). Some of them may have found this a little patronising – UK business schools generally counsel against it for this reason – but in general it only seems to have oiled the wheels of Hammer’s evergrowing success. Indeed, it seems ‘My Dear’ was a business term in James Carreras’ eyes! For though some of James’s early correspondence to his son Michael is warm enough, he is always addressed merely as ‘Dear Michael’.

As the letters between James Carreras and Eliot Hyman proliferated in the earlier days of the Curse of Frankenstein deal, Carreras is remorselessly enthusiastic, always eager to please his new partner, whereas Hyman’s replies can be convoluted and gnomic in the extreme. On 28 August, for example, Hyman wrote to James Carreras, ‘I don’t believe we have discussed cast and when you use the expression “competent British cast” you must bear in mind that there are British casts and British casts. You still have not told me what the cast consists of and it is needless for me to point out to you that although the people themselves may be British, just how British are they by way of accent as the effect will be upon the acceptance of the picture in America.’

This is hard to penetrate. Was Eliot Hyman worried about regional accents or accents that were too plummy? All in the end it really seems to indicate is a general anxiety about where he was being led. And Carreras appears to have apprehended this for his reply, if reassuring, is in its own way just as baffling. ‘Reference cast, rest assured that the British cast will be absolutely first class and will have no trace whatsoever of British accent.’ Whatever this meant it seemed to satisfy Hyman, especially when James Carreras went on to point out he could have a US lead if he wanted, but it would mean an extra $18,000 on the budget. Hyman did not pursue the point.

But the problems were only just starting. By Monday 19 November Carreras was fighting the news Universal were trying to block the production on what turned out to be the wholly spurious grounds it infringed their copyright. ‘I hear that Universal International,’ he writes to Hyman, ‘have objected to the registration of the title The Curse of Frankenstein. Fight this with everything you have got, because we are advised here that being in the public domain anybody can call a film “Frankenstein”.’

Universal were trying to use their muscle to shut down Hammer’s experiment before it started, but the MPAA rejected their claim. This did not mean Hammer’s problems were at an end. For, despite this good news, they waited and waited in vain for Hyman’s (AAP’s) money to materialise. The cable traffic between Hammer and their partner (or his legal representative) becomes edgier and edgier as time goes on. ‘When you want something from us,’ James Carreras wrote in one cable, ‘you expect immediate action and cooperation stop. When we want something from you quote our share Frankenstein advance nothing happens and you don’t reply to letters or cables. Please advise latest position.’

By November 1956 there was still no sign of the money and Hammer were finally forced to start shooting Curse of Frankenstein on the 19th without it. The situation was at this point becoming really serious. If the American share did not materialise, and there were distinctly ominous signs it might not, Hammer would be liable for the whole production, and it was money they simply did not have, especially without an American distribution deal, for Hyman was delivering that too through Warners. There is no record of any contingency. And Hammer, certainly at this stage, had little in the way of reserve cash. They would presumably have shut down and it seems very possible they would have gone out of business. For James Carreras the spectre of his own father’s two bankruptcies must have loomed large. Hyman’s occasional replies to their pleas (often he did not answer at all) are extraordinary in themselves for they never or very rarely respond to any of the points James Carreras keeps raising. Often they read as if they have been written to someone else entirely, meditating on bank addresses, account numbers and a few fine contractual points as if both parties were in the midst of some rather slow and convoluted negotiation for a project far in the future, not one that was happening now and risking everything that his UK partner had.

Finally, when shooting was about to enter its third week, in what must have seemed like a miracle, Hammer got the first instalment. Hyman suggested in a letter the company were being hysterical but Carreras was having none of it. ‘Hysterical you suggest,’ he wrote on l December. ‘It’s a wonder I’m not biting lumps out of the carpet. Before the film started we wrote you five pleading letters and sent you four cables requesting your share of the budget. Stillman arrived one week after production had started with the agreement and after that was signed your share arrived. No pre-production cash from you and your share twelve days after shooting starts – what sort of 50/50 partnership is that?’

The answer of course was it was not a 50/50 partnership as Carreras actually knew quite well. He had to endure this because he was doing what no other British film producer was doing, namely getting the American to invest in all-British genre pictures at a time when such film production had never been so risky or so unlikely. Could Hyman have backed out of The Curse of Frankenstein? Of course he could, and easily. We have no way of knowing what occasioned the strange delay and lack of communication, but it seems more than likely Warners themselves were having cold feet. With no formal contract signed, it would have been breaking the spirit of the agreement if the US had pulled out but no more, and such things have happened often enough. There would have been nothing Hammer could have done and no funds for legal action even if there was. The company was on a knife-edge and James Carreras knew it.

Despite these bumps after the delivery of the money, this rather shaky partnership continued. After The Curse of Frankenstein became a record-breaking hit, one might have expected the tone to change a little. Amazingly it did not. The following July saw James Carreras in France revelling in the figures for Curse of Frankenstein, but also desperately trying to get Eliot to commit to a sequel with Warners for a £500,000 distribution advance. ‘Reply before July 22nd please’, he begs (his underlining). He was not successful, the deal was delayed then turned down; and later, as Hammer’s plans expanded in the wake of their new success, Carreras had major cause for further frustration when his partner proved as reluctant as ever to participate in any of the product being offered. Finally, Carreras had had enough. Tiring of being endlessly dangled, he announced to Hyman he would be offering the sequel to The Curse of Frankenstein not merely to the highest bidder but to one who would also take at least two other Hammer films, The Snorkel and The Camp on Blood Island. Warners were still reluctant but Columbia stepped forward and accepted the bait.

Carreras’ aggressive move was in retrospect a master-stroke and one that clearly impressed Hyman, whatever he may have felt at the time. It is one thing to be a company’s only hope and quite another when rival distributors are knocking on their door. Hyman seemed to get the message and the tone became a little easier. Soon Hyman’s son Kenneth would come to the UK to oversee Hammer productions and the two companies would be working together in a more comprehensive and slightly less one-sided way. Carreras had won the first round of the game and the game, as always in his eyes, was to ensure a steady flow of product for his studio.

It is abundantly clear from his letters that this was as far as James Carreras’ vision went. Indeed, it was one reason why he was so fascinated by the prospect of television, first with the ill-fated Frankenstein series and later with Journey to the Unknown. For television could offer a volume of product that might conceivably keep Bray and Hammer running ad infinitum. By today’s standards this notion of an endless product pipeline may seem a fairly modest aspiration. There were no Disney-type dreams of amusement parks – a Hammerland – or franchises or other spin-offs. However, in commercial terms it was still a far bigger ambition than anyone else’s in the UK film industry at the time. Most British producers, after the nightmare of financing The Curse of Frankenstein, would simply have gone all out for a quick deal on the sequel and let other films wait, possibly for ever. James Carreras may not have been a hands-on producer, and was in his way a bit of a huckster, but to his great credit he did genuinely believe in his product and in the team who made it. In his gut he felt he had something serious to sell. And his second big bet, following Curse, would not only prove among the most lucrative of all but also give him his dream and keep him in product for the rest of his working life, more than can be said for any other English film mogul of the time. This was Dracula.

The profitability of Dracula enabled the first phase of James Carreras’ vision, for it allowed him to be in business with all of the American majors. Hardly surprising then that, in the years that followed, his relentless enthusiasm never seems to have failed him. Indeed, he took it in his stride, laying out his stall of titles each year with infectious, almost childlike excitement. And even towards the end of his decade and a half of glory, as the appetite for Hammer’s wares faded, Carreras always continued to fight back. Take, for example, the film Slave Girls (US: Prehistoric Women) in 1966, made at Elstree on the set of One Million Years B.C. in an attempt to offset the cost of the Raquel Welch film. Typically, James’ creative yet sometimes quixotic son Michael can lay claim to credit for the highly successful Welch film and blame for the disastrous spin-off (a blame, incidentally, Michael Carreras himself always cheerfully accepted).

Prehistoric Women or Slave Girls was an outrageous extravaganza (though the extravagance had nothing to do with its budget) directed by Michael Carreras himself, in which Martine Beswick played the cool, imperious leader of a tribe of voluptuous Amazonian women who imprisons the hero and forces him to serve her. By this time the American distributors, in this case Seymour Poe of Fox, were becoming increasingly impatient with the product Hammer was laying off on them and they were not shy to say so. A cable from Poe to James Carreras on 24 June 1968 reads as follows:

SCREENED PREHISTORIC WOMEN TODAY AND REGRET ADVISE YOU THAT CONSENSUS IS IT EXCEEDINGLY SLOW DRAGGY AND BORING STOP DIRECTION IS VERY POOR AND PRINCIPALS NOT VERY ACTIVE STOP WHILE PRODUCTION IS WELL MOUNTED PREDICT THIS WILL BE VERY DIFFIULT PICTURE TO GET BIG GROSS FROM STOP OBVIOUS EFFORT HAS BEEN MADE DRAG ACTION OUT TO CONFORM TELEVISION TIME MINIMUM STOP SORRY TO SOUND THIS DISCORDANT NOTE BUT CERTAIN YOU WANT HONEST OPINION BEST REGARDS SEYMOUR

What would the ebullient Carreras do, faced with such a cable and concerning a film directed by his son? Would he bluff it out? That would have been pointless and unlikely to sway the Americans. Yet he would never concede defeat and he didn’t.

Prehistoric Women or Slave Girls: James Carreras fought a spirited rearguard action to release his son’s film in the US

Here is the reply of the same date:

REFERENCE PREHISTORIC WOMEN REGRET WE HAVE TO AGREE WITH YOU STOP HOWEVER ABC HAVE DECIDED TO PUT THE PICTURE OUT WITH FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN EXPECTING SIMILAR GROSSES TO DRACULA/ZOMBIES PROGRAMME STOP TO ENABLE US TO DO THIS WE HAVE TAKEN TWELVE MINUTES OUT OF PREHSTORIC WOMEN RETAINING FULL LENGTH VERSION FOR ULTIMATE TV SALE STOP SHALL BE GLAD TO HAVE YOUR OBSERVATION

WHETHER THIS SOLUTION IS OK FOR JOE SUGAR BUT STILL FEEL IN THE MORONIC RAPHEL TERRITORIES CAN STLL PLAY THE PICTURE THEATRICALLY STOP WILL RING YOU MONDAY AS ARRANGED REGARDS JIM CARRERAS

It was a great try (what on earth were the ‘moronic’ Raphel territories?) and Fox must have marvelled at it, for their next cable asks him somewhat mischievously (in a reference that was probably alien to James Carreras though the 1967 hippie summer of love was just around the corner) if he could ‘PLEASE SEND A SUPPLY OF WHATEVER ABC ARE SMOKING!’ Subsequently, in January 1967, Fox did their best to release Prehistoric Women, but the writing was very much on the wall and their dealings with Hammer were more or less at an end.

James Carreras’ style as a salesman might give the impression he lacked steel, but in fact he was extremely tough when he wanted. Hinds and Michael Carreras knew this well enough – Michael frequently complained his father liked to do the talking – but Hammer’s stars knew it too. More than once, Christopher Lee was forced into the breach by James Carreras, using blackmail, personal ties and something very like plain bullying. And Peter Cushing too felt the lash. When in September 1958 the latter dropped out of The Man Who Could Cheat Death because he was exhausted after the long and extremely tiring shoot of The Hound of the Baskervilles (which had finished only days before The Man Who Could Cheat Death was due to start), Hammer were placed in a very embarrassing position with their American distributor. To make matters worse it was Hammer’s first picture with Paramount, who had come rather late to the table and been forced to take one of the lesser titles without any obvious exploitation hooks. Paramount naturally enough saw the presence of Peter Cushing as one of their only selling points. Consequently, they raised hell when they were told he had pulled out.

However, Anton Diffring was procured as a replacement and Hammer finally persuaded Paramount to go along with it, so the production survived. In the circumstances you might expect James Carreras to reflect that their primary star (who had already shot the all-important Revenge of Frankenstein for them earlier that year) might be entitled to a little TLC. But the letter Hammer’s lawyer, instructed by James Carreras, wrote to Cushing’s agent on 12 November 1958 is merciless.

My clients have instructed me to write and point out to you the terrible position in which your Client has placed them by reason of his last minute refusal to appear in the above film only six days before commencement of shooting. Your Client approved the subject and has had meetings with the Director and Producer over many months discussing the script. Your Client’s unwarranted refusal goes to the root of the proposed Agreement which you were negotiating for your Client to appear in five pictures. If it had not been for the fact that that there were one or two important terms of the proposed Contract still to be settled, and there had been a binding Contract, they would have had no hesitation in instituting proceedings against your Client. In the circumstances my Clients are not prepared to continue the negotiations for the proposed five picture Contract. If they should decide that they would like your Client’s services in any picture in the future they will see that they have a Contract with your Client well before the commencement of shooting so that he is not able to leave them in the extremely difficult position they are now in.

In the circumstances this is an amazing letter. For Hammer surely needed Peter Cushing (alias Baron Frankenstein and Van Helsing and vampire hunter) a good deal more at this point than he needed them. Having received such a letter, many stars could well have given up on the company there and then. But Cushing was a gentle man. And, having shown his teeth, James Carreras switched back to a charm offensive. A mere two months later Cushing was back prepping The Mummy.

Perhaps a tactic like the above was risky but there is no question Hammer needed James Carreras’s toughness, for it is all too easy at this distance to forget the rough ride they were having in the press. Faced with a widespread denunciation of his product and constant calls for it to be banned, many other executives would have buckled, like Anglo did after they released Peeping Tom. Yet, although James Carreras took care with his own public image, he had broad shoulders when it came to the attacks on his company – if anything, these attacks seem to have spurred him on. According to Terence Fisher, all James Carreras (who in the early days liked to be known as The Colonel) would do on his rare visits to the set of the films was to tell the director with a cheery smile ‘Put more blood in it!’.

It is indeed arguable that Hammer’s creative team needed and depended on Carreras as a shield in exactly the same way another Colonel shielded Elvis Presley, who was then contemporaneously shaking American popular music to the roots. We may lament the damage Colonel Tom Parker did to Elvis Presley, but without Parker’s tough support could the (then) sensitive young man possibly have survived the acrimonious storm of protest and the cries for censorship his music aroused. By the same token (and at exactly the same cultural moment) it seems doubtful that – without James Carreras – the rest of the Hammer team could have persevered. James Carreras led them and protected them even while he infuriated.

And, if James Carreras was tough, he was never abrasive. Like any good businessman with a selling bent, most of the time he was in the business of agreeing with people wherever he could. For tactical reasons he would even agree sagely with the censor about the desired tone of his latest venture, intimating his filmmakers would never go too far and insisting earnestly Hammer would never have anything to do with a tasteless mingling of sex and horror. And then of course, as soon as certification was agreed, the BBFC would be horrified to see a jubilant James Carreras all over the trades extolling his latest ‘sex and horror show’.

Bray Studios

The golden period at Bray after The Curse of Frankenstein proved the third and perhaps most spectacular stage in Hammer’s development. During the boom years of the 1960s American money was pouring into Hammer and, when they pulled out, the company found it at once necessary to fix up deals with British, as opposed to American, companies. Distribution in America was still guaranteed, but in return the British companies, who were themselves in trouble, began to insist that Hammer use their own studios’ space, rather than Bray, to make the films. Consequently, after much deliberation, Hammer were forced to abandon Bray, and, in November 1966, they moved to Elstree – a final sale taking place in 1970 for £65,000. In the new century it seemed it would be redeveloped for housing, but renewed demand for studio space has meant a reprieve, and Bray is back as a working studio, albeit much changed.

Visiting Bray today makes the achievement of Hammer over these intense 15 years or so seem all the more amazing. Much has been written about the lot, from the ice-cold sound stages on a winter morning to Mrs Thompson’s delicious cooking. The place has not changed so very radically even now, though certain aspects of it have been spoiled and much land sold off. But it became clear to me, even when I first saw it not so long after Hammer’s departure, that Bray was just a shell within and around which Bernard Robinson, the art director, and his assistants were able to exercise what can only be described as a kind of genius. If Hammer’s films did in some cases suffer from being made elsewhere, it is not so much because of a loss of any Gothic atmosphere (for though it was picturesquely situated Bray had little), as because the site was a wonderful marshalling place for a team who could work in harmonious and friendly conditions utilising every square inch of the interiors and surroundings.

Some may sneer at the idea of standing sets, duplicated for Rasputin, Dracula Prince of Darkness, Plague of the Zombies and more besides to bring down costs. Alfred Hitchcock did not. In an article he wrote in the 1930s for Picturegoer, he said that if he were ever to be head of a production company, the first thing he would ask for would be ‘space to build permanent sets … and I mean permanent … it’s amply justified by results. Hollywood has proved the value of this beyond possibility of doubt.’

And once the sets had gone what was left? On my very first visit I recall recognising the small bit of woodland where Frankenstein’s monster was shot, the windows of Rasputin’s Moscow palace and a tank which was originally the moat of Dracula’s castle, as well of course as the views of nearby Oakley Court which Hammer used so often, not least for some exteriors in Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile.

Of course, so far as the actors were concerned, the Hammer team was almost a repertory company in the sense that it included a permanent pool of actors who became familiar throughout the films. In the smaller semi-comic parts as inn-keepers, cab-drivers, policemen or undertakers, you could usually recognise George Woodbridge, Michael Ripper or even Miles Malleson, while the troupe also included discoveries like Oliver Reed. But the two men who did as much to build Hammer as anyone else (indeed it is difficult to imagine the company without them) remain Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. It is remarkable that both were discovered and used for the first time together in the key breakthrough picture Curse of Frankenstein. For, as the years went by and despite repeated attempts, Hammer were never able to find another actor to match either of them, let alone two at once. Both Lee and Cushing have the presence which is the rare but indispensable gift of great film acting and both showed remarkable resilience against the endless attacks on the films. For a combination of reasons, the rich mix of personalities who contributed to Hammer films originated a kind of semi-revolutionary popular art; and in some ways it demands just as much courage for a creative artist to persevere in this kind of revolution, accepted by much of the public but despised by ‘serious’ critics, as in its opposite.

1.Quoted in All Our Yesterdays, p. 14 (BFI, 1986)

2.Enrique Carreras died suddenly in 1950, while Will Hinds (who it seems had absolutely no interest in films but was racing bicycles well into his sixties!) was killed in a freak cycling accident six years later.

3.Michael Carreras in taped conversation with the author.

4.This was only the twelfth film to receive the certificate since its birth in January 1951. The first was, of all things, an obscure and pretentious French documentary called Life Begins Tomorrow, featuring texts from Picasso. Sartre, Gide and others. More predictably the first British X certificate was Women of Twilight from Romulus Flms in November 1952 with the come-on: ‘The Shame By Shame Story’.

5.There was a fourth Quatermass, The Quatermass Conclusion on ITV, but this finally appeared in 1979 long after Kneale wrote it, and nearly two decades after the previous series had ended. Disconnected from the 1960s hippie movement that inspired it, this dystopian prophecy seemed slightly incongruous by the time it aired though it contained moments indicating what might have been.

6.After spells of poverty and alcoholism, Marks died in 1997.

7.Hammer had already used Losey on the short Man on the Beach and would later repay the debt by hiring him for The Damned. James Carreras had little interest in ideology other than a belief in the free market and (unlike some other UK film bosses of the time) took no notice of the blacklist unless he was compelled to.

8.If you were trying to define the chemistry that made Hammer such a strange cultural phenomenon it is surely in the interaction of the three people at its top with such contrasting qualities: Sangster’s cheek, Hinds’s serious channeling of Ealing’s (and Michael Balcon’s) storytelling skills fronted by James Carreras’s ebullient salesmanship.

9.Whitaker was a key part of Charles Chilton’s opening episodes of The Red Planet. Alongside the more familiar space adventures, this section is so surreal and haunting that even today it can give children nightmares (and oddly the Whitaker episodes in the series, unlike others, are currently not available at BBC online). Chilton himself certainly deserves a place in the origins of UK horror and told me in an interview before he died, the theme came to him because of the idea of enemy ‘brainwashing’ popularised during the Korean war.

10.There is some dispute about the accuracy of this percentage, but Hammer certainly made a deal, even though they had no intention of using any of the work and Shelley’s novel was in public domain. On the whole, they seemed to be more honourable in such things than many exploitation movie companies.

11.Even Michael Powell was not truly rehabilitated from critical acrimony until the early 1980s. Roughly the same age as Powell, Fisher died a decade earlier on 18 June 1980.

12.Hinds’ formulation of the Hammer formula, here, is fascinating and proves how deliberate it was, and also how he and Fisher (and Sangster) were its co-creators: ‘rich-looking, slow … bursting with unstated sex’. That is exactly the Hammer tone: the tension between glittering surface and the repressed within – which at times bursts out.

13.Journal of British Film and Television, November 2021.

14.Barnett also asserts that James Carreras made bad business decisions, (quite true at times) but cites as an example the deal with the BBC for The Quatermass Experiment where Carreras offered the corporation 50 per cent of profit plus an upfront payment. By present standards this was indeed a very generous offer but Barnett fails to take on board the detailed circumstances (unearthed by Denis Meikle and others). Although Hammer did have a relationship with the BBC, having optioned radio serials, it now emerges the company very nearly didn’t succeed in landing the deal at all. Certainly, Hinds contacted the BBC two days after the first episode aired but at least one BBC executive is reported to have declared Hammer quite unsuitable while Kneale himself was not keen and tried elsewhere. The BBC decided they wanted a partner with more kudos so they went to the Boulting Brothers who flirted with the project. Therefore, it is simply not true that the BBC jumped on Hammer’s offer. On the contrary Carreras had to offer a deal he knew they couldn’t refuse. And, indeed, when you consider the outcome, it is hard to see how you could in any way define it as a bad deal. James Carreras may have paid over the odds but the film launched his brand.

15.The noted horror writer Ramsey Campbell has pointed out to me that Sangster actually lifted most of this description from Arthur Machen’s The Novel of the White Powder. It’s the fate of Francis Leicester who ends as ‘a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness neither liquid nor rotten but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch.’

16.Although I made my own trip to the BBFC, I would flag the work of Wayne Kinsey here for his terrific book Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years. As far as I know he was the first to discover the astonishing material within their files for which he deserves great credit. It spurred me to go further and examine their non-Hammer files as well, which are equally revealing.

17.She had already read the Milton Subotsky script, a comparatively old-fashioned effort that incorporated material from Universal’s Bride of Frankenstein.

18.In fact, Jimmy Sangster did go to boarding school – Ewell Castle, in Surrey.

19.To show this is no exaggeration we have a remarkable quote from Terence Fisher on precisely how he directed this moment, with Melissa Stribling playing Mina. ‘I told her, “Listen, you should imagine you have had one whale of a sexual night. The one of your whole sexual experience. Give me that in your face.” And she did of course.’

20.For much of this detail, I am indebted to Denis Meikle’s illuminating A History of Horrors, recently updated as Hammer Films: The Whole Story.

21.Interview with David Miller on the Hammer website (Hammerfilms.com)

22.He was even, it turns out now, on a notorious list drawn up by his friend Earl Mountbatten and the right-wing newspaper proprietor Cecil King to help run the country in the treacherous antidemocratic coup that was planned against Harold Wilson (see History Extra, November 2019, ‘Lord Mountbatten: Coup against Harold Wilson’s government?’).

23.To give some indication of the awkwardness, it has been said that James would pay money to Michael and his wife, in return for visits by their grandchildren.

24.Robinson had been working on much bigger quality movies like The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954) and Reach For the Sky (1956) before Hinds persuaded him to come over to Hammer.

25.The mirror was necessary because the two films were in different ratios, but repeating the music from the earlier film created major copyright headaches with Universal.

3

The World of Terence Fisher

To speak any of their names is to evoke a self-contained world with its own laws and landscapes.

Andrew Sarris defining the auteur in The American Cinema

Scene 18 – Close Shot. MARIE: She looks off-screen right

RICHLEAU: As long as it is Light, it may be possible. (MARIE looks towards camera)

Cut to Scene 19 – Close Shot.

RICHLEAU: But once the Darkness begins to fall.

Excerpt from cutting continuity of The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher).

An examination of even the most hostile early English reviews of Hammer’s work reveals an odd inconsistency in the basic critical attitude towards Terence Fisher. To begin with at least, Fisher was often accused of emphasising every horrific situation in his films at the expense of their other ingredients, and his direction came under attack for being crudely sensational and excessive. Gradually, as the shocked reaction to Hammer’s material began to die down, this stylistic appraisal was quietly dropped and a marginally more accurate, but equally prejudiced one replaced it. In total contradiction to the earlier view, Fisher’s direction was now dismissed as ‘dull’ or ‘flat’ or ‘pedestrian’, and it is this second opinion which has, to some extent, survived. For, whatever Fisher is, he is not sensational: in fact, his films are marked by a persistent refusal to sacrifice continuity for strong dramatic emphasis. The Devil Rides Out (American title: The Devil’s Bride), which illustrates his style at its peak of technical precision, has a tiny handful of close-ups and less than 200 close shots out of nearly a thousand camera set-ups. It could hardly be the work of a filmmaker who trades on impact and shock effects.

The second charge, that Fisher’s direction is ‘dull’, has rarely been elaborated at length and is consequently harder to pin down. But, to some extent, it would seem to derive from a basic misunderstanding of the British tradition in which his art is rooted, as well as an over-protective attitude, at least by many of his earlier critics, towards the Universal approach to horror. Fisher is not essentially an expressionist filmmaker and he remains virtually unconnected from either the Universal approach or the German dream-tales of the 1920s. Instead, as characterised by his measured cinematic style and the lucid metaphysicality of his themes, he emerges as a rational eccentric in the fundamentally English tradition of Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins or Conan Doyle. As with these, and other English artists and writers who have been taken up by the Surrealists, his work is not Freudian in a strict sense, but it remains a haven for Freudian interpretation. His solemn, almost pedantic, style is that of the nineteenth-century storyteller; anything flashier or less solid would be unsuited to his material. Despite occasional complexities, Fisher is always at pains to preserve the inner coherence of his films; they contain few flashbacks, virtually no dream sequences, no self-parody and no great psychological insight. Instead, they have a quality of robustness, a peculiarly bizarre and English form of logic within fantasy and a powerful atmosphere augmented by an underlying sexuality. The formula is certainly comparable to that of the best Gothic novelists.

Indeed, once one begins to look at Fisher’s films closely, it becomes clear that, like few other directors who worked in the now long-lost post-war world of British commercial cinema, they appear to embody a recognisable and coherent universe. Of course, he shares this with his collaborators, particularly Anthony Hinds, but Fisher embraced it more than anyone. The world in which most of his films are set is strictly dualistic, divided rigidly between ultimate Good and ultimate Evil, Light and Darkness, Spirit and Matter, while the opposition is most often expressed in images of bourgeois splendour juxtaposed with those of madness, decay and death. The two sides fight out their battles as macrocosmic chess games in which human pawns are lured from one side to the other, and the heroes are Renaissance scholars, scientists and doctors whose weapons are items of occult knowledge and power: ritual formulae, books, crucifixes, etc. The agents of evil are vampires, werewolves, gorgons, mummies, apparitions and monsters of all kinds, but there are also corrupt sadistic noblemen, Fatal Women, sinister foreigners and English gentlemen. In Fisher’s work evil is usually highly attractive on the surface and is never reflected by human deformity which rather reflects suffering and goodness (Christina in Frankenstein Created Woman, Hans in The Revenge of Frankenstein, etc). At times, as in the Frankenstein series or in Dr Jekyll, the two opposing forces clash in one man and the result is highly ambiguous but usually ultimately destructive.

The dualism that is an unbroken feature throughout all Fisher’s films naturally results in a vividly moralistic attitude towards sex which is demonstrated even as far back as a short road safety film called To the Public Danger (very loosely based on a Patrick Hamilton book), which he made for Highbury in 1947, about a languid, sensual woman who rejects her upright sensible fiancé for a reckless relationship with a drunken lecher, and the pair promptly get killed in a car accident. Another manifestation of the same theme appears in The Astonished Heart, a glossy Gainsborough movie dating from 1949, in which a psychiatrist is seduced from his wife by a sexy opportunist and the affair ends in exhaustion and death. The raw sexual attractiveness of evil was to reach its peak in the vampire movies where overt sexuality becomes synonymous with decay and death. The Fisher heroines who manage to come through their ordeal are those recognising their physical appetite without denying (or overindulging) it. Mina Holmwood (Melissa Stribling) in Dracula is transformed by the Count’s activities from matronly plainness to rabid sensuality, but she manages to overcome the latter and finally reaches a state of grace. On the other hand, Helen (Barbara Shelley) in Dracula: Prince of Darkness is too stiff and prudish to be able to withstand the eruption of libidinal energy which Dracula initiates. A further extension appears with Angela Roberts (Jane Merrow), in Night of the Big Heat, who purges her sex obsession in a violent rainstorm (it also saves the earth from alien invasion). Perhaps the most balanced of all Fisher’s heroines is Isobel Banning (Yvonne Furneaux) in The Mummy, who finds catharsis for her sensuality by acting out the part of an Egyptian princess; she lets her hair down and assumes a cruel, voluptuous appearance in order to prevent her husband’s death. Like so many popular American filmmakers, Fisher has occasionally been accused of reactionary tendencies and the social structures in his films are almost invariably class-ridden and hierarchical, just as his gaze is primarily male, but the struggle that is waged throughout by the two opposing forces often cuts across the more obvious divisions. Despite De Richleau in The Devil Rides Out, the nobility is in fact more often associated with sadism and brutality than with anything positive, while the knockabout comic characterisation of publicans and undertakers in the myth-cycles frequently tends to ‘place’ the more pompous of the heroes (for example, Miles Malleson’s undertaker in Dracula). Like a great deal of this kind of English art from the Morality Plays onwards, one suspects that much of its didactic power is ultimately derived from the way it permits the audience to enjoy virtue in principle and vice in practice.

Terence Fisher, who was born in London in 1904, had started work in the film industry in the 1930s after a spell in the Merchant Navy. In 1933 he became an assistant editor to Ian Dalrymple, and later worked on various films of the 1940s for Warner’s like The Wicked Lady and The Master of Bankdam, before making his first feature Colonel Bogey in 1947 for Highbury Films. From then until his last Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell in 1972, Fisher made 49 films. He followed his three Highbury films by some glossy romances for Gainsborough and made The Last Page, his first for Hammer, in 1951. From this point on, apart from a few patches of other work (for example, for Anglo in 1954–5 and Planet in 1965), Fisher was to work almost exclusively for Hammer, inaugurating the entire horror cycle with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1956. It was an amazing thing to happen to a jobbing director at a time of life when most filmmakers are lucky to see another movie. Fisher’s major work actually began when he was 53 (an older age in the late 1950s than now) and he was still working as he neared 70. It would prove an extraordinary Indian summer.

When I wrote about Terence Fisher for the first edition of this book, I was lucky to be able to see all that I did, but much was missing. Now, with a little difficulty, most (if not all) of his early work for Hammer is accessible and I have been somewhat amazed how closely it prefigures the more famous titles of his later years. Stolen Face is a weird Pygmalion-like story, partly written it seems by Anthony Hinds, about a plastic surgeon (Paul Henreid) who falls in love with a woman (Elizabeth Scott, the US star carrying the film), only to discover she is engaged to another man. Subsequently, unable to forget her, the surgeon recreates and grafts the face of his beloved onto a deformed woman criminal, hoping to prove she is merely the victim of her appearance. But in keeping with Fisher’s usual themes, the now beautiful criminal is transformed outwardly but not inwardly and drags him down. Stolen Face starts quite well as Fisher handles the romance deftly but the film loses itself badly after the operation, with Scott floundering in her attempt to sound like a London cockney until the plot is crudely wrapped up in a train disaster climax. Indeed, the script bears all the hallmarks of several writers (four are credited) struggling to accommodate conflicting demands.

Three other low-budget Fishers, from just before his horror debut, have recently reemerged and should be quickly noted. Two, are fairly standard early Hammer noir quota quckies with American leads from the Robert Lippert deal, both released in 1954. Blackout (also known as Murder By Proxy) has an interesting hard-boiled premise with American (Dane Clark) down on his luck in a London bar where a mysterious blonde (Belinda Lee) offers him a lot of money to marry her that night, Subsequently he wakes up alone with the money and a blood-splattered coat, soon discovering her father has been murdered. Fisher directs effectively enough but, as ever, the unwinding is much less intriguing than the premise.

The not dissimilar Face the Music (also known as The Black Glove) has jet-lagged American musician Alex Nicol meeting a beautiful singer in a London club who then gets murdered the same night. In one early scene with a jazz band the film’s producer Michael Carreras, then 27, can be seen blowing his heart out on a trumpet.

The third film made by Fisher a year later and released in autumn 1955, is equally modest but more unusual. The Flaw, starring John Bentley and Donald Houston, concerns a perfectly planned murder which goes dramatically wrong in a way you really don’t expect and involves a surprising resurrection.. The preamble is slow in places and the budget is clearly very low but the film has a real energy that suggests Fisher was gaining confidence in his handling of these mundane assignments and only a few months later he would be shooting The Curse of Frankenstein.

The real discovery among the early films though, both of Fisher and Hammer, is Four-Sided Triangle, which on paper sounded like a minor piece of science fiction and was not well received in its time. In fact, it is a substantial piece of work, with Fisher making a rare collaboration on the screenplay, steering it away from science fiction (in which he was not very interested) into romance, fable, horror, philosophical (doppelgänger) thriller, and a sophisticated, somewhat sexual variation on Frankenstein.

The film also seems to have a higher budget than much of Hammer’s work around this time, being made over five weeks in the autumn of 1952 and set over a period of years, mainly in an idyllic English village. Based on a novel by William F. Temple, it is told from the point of view of the village’s doctor (James Hayter), who observes the friendship between two brilliant young men of the village, Bill (an excellent Stephen Murray) and Robin (John Van Eyssen), who have a mutual childhood sweetheart in Lena (Barbara Peyton). The boys grow up and return from university to become engaged in a pet project which is to build a machine that can transport molecular matter. This idea may well have been the source of George Langelaan’s short story The Fly, written a couple of years later, which used an exactly similar machine in a more predictable way, namely to produce a monster. As a result, The Fly became a movie franchise, something which Hammer must have kicked themselves they missed. However, in Four-Sided Triangle the story that follows is (potentially at least) far more interesting. Lena returns to the village and both men want to marry her, but she chooses Robin. Driven by despair (and unknown to Robin), Bill now insists on duplicating her so he can attain happiness.

Unlike Stolen Face, where the operation is perfunctory, Fisher’s highly atmospheric direction of the laboratory in Four-Sided Triangle is fresh and exciting. Indeed, its sheer detail, which surprised some critics at the time, ¹ is similar in some notable respects to the Frankenstein laboratory of his later films, making it easy now to see why Hinds insisted on using him for Curse of Frankenstein. It is refreshing too that for once this idea of recreating life, of a ‘clone’ (for there is an odd topicality about the film), is not merely an excuse for some terrible mistake and a resulting deformity. In fact the operation works and a duplicate Lena is successfully created until the philosophical and psychological problems begin to emerge. Admittedly some of the motivation around this is absurd; the film never adequately explains why James Hayter – the decent and sensible doctor – helps Bill in his mad quest. But the clone’s dawning sadness is beautifully done, as is Bill’s growing desperation to have a version of Lena who will have no memories at all. Though clumsy in places, in its last act, The Four-Sided Triangle has started to enter really interesting moral territory before it stops short. But its theme remains provocative and relevant, more so than Universal’s Bride of Frankenstein. Fisher would return to it in Frankenstein Created Woman.

Even Fisher’s much earlier pre-Hammer films from Highbury and Gainsborough relate strikingly and unexpectedly to his later work. So Long at the Fair (Gainsborough, 1949), for example, demonstrates against all the odds that every major component of Fisher’s world was already expressed on film before he even entered horror. In this instance the heroine is Vicky Barton (Jean Simmons), a respectable and innocent young English girl visiting Paris with her brother Johnny at the time of the World Fair. Fisher goes to some trouble to illustrate the enticing seductive atmosphere of the city, emphasising in one sweeping shot the lush flamboyant décor of their hotel, but there are hints both in the dialogue and the mise-en-scène that this bright exterior disguises an inner corruption and decay. Vicky is presented as being highly ingenuous and vulnerable while her brother is better equipped to separate the appearance of Paris from the reality. To her eager question ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to dine in Montmartre?’ Johnny replies dryly ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to be poisoned?’ and there are other jocular English references to foreign menace and deceit (like ‘You never know with foreigners’ and ‘We shall all be stabbed in the back’), which have a distinctly nervous undertone. These remarks gain a little weight when the pair visit the Folies Bergères, whose raw physicality, as portrayed by Fisher, brings the contrast between the two worlds nearer the surface.

The next day, when Vicky goes to wake her brother, both he and the room in which he is staying have completely disappeared. The camera tracks behind her as she comes up against a blank wall where the door had been, and soon she is becoming hysterical with the hotel staff, who deny her brother’s existence. Their icy malevolent charm now comes nearer to the surface and Fisher inserts one remarkably vampiresque composition of Jean Simmons, pale and crying on her bed in the foreground, being menaced by the black predatory figure of Madame Hervé, the maîtresse (Cathleen Nesbitt), standing directly behind her.

From this point, the plot rapidly develops into an allegorical but explicit struggle between rationality and benevolence on the one hand, and alien hypocrisy and evil on the other. To overcome the latter, the girl has to reject her own self-denying ‘propriety’ and enlist the help of George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), an artist working in Paris; together they break into the sealed chamber from an adjoining bedroom, and then force their way through the bricked-up door out into the hall. This smashing of the attractive exterior of the Parisian hotel effectively shatters the seductive veneer of Paris as surely as the stake entering the vampire. Together with an English doctor, they are now taken to a monastery on the outskirts of the city where the enigma is resolved. Johnny is found to have contracted bubonic plague; it is the final revelation of the putrescence which lies beneath the glittering surface. The Commissioner of Police explains that the secrecy was unavoidable, but the girl remains quite unimpressed by his explanations and apologies. The last shot shows George and Vicky walking away down the corridor of the monastery, and presumably away from France. In fact, So Long at the Fair could easily have been re-shot, sequence for sequence, as a vampire movie without making any difference to its basic mechanics, for the same dualistic structure pervades every frame. Presumably the film would then end with the staking of the brother to purify and purge the alien ‘infection’ to which he has succumbed.²

These films reveal that Fisher’s place at the centre of the cinematic horror revival in the late 1950s – as Antony Hinds has now confirmed – was very far from being an accident. While other mainstream filmmakers like Cass or Crabtree took to horror diffidently or even reluctantly, Fisher saw it from the first as a kind of liberation, and he was easily able to extend the kind of structure he had elaborated for So Long at the Fair into Hammer’s major myth-cycles. The new subjects also enabled him to add ambiguity to the whole schema (as in his earliest Frankenstein movies). But some of the most completely successful of Fisher’s films are those in which the lines are drawn with absolute clarity.

This is aptly demonstrated by a film like The Hound of the Baskervilles (1958), where he and writer Peter Bryan and Anthony Hinds use Conan Doyle’s plot to establish a stylish dialectic between Holmes’s nominally rational milieu and the dark fabulous cruelty behind the Baskerville legend. The opposition is expressed within the first ten minutes of the film when he moves from the ‘legend’ with its strong connotations of the Hellfire Club and Francis Dashwood (the demonic noblemen torment a young girl) to the rational eccentricities of Baker Street. Holmes is indeed the perfect Fisher hero, the Renaissance scholar with strong mystical undertones who, like Van Helsing (he was created at nearly the same time), marks a brief nostalgic liaison between orthodox religion and the ‘science’ of detection. Naturally, Fisher and his collaborators exploited this aspect as much as they could, giving Holmes lines like: ‘There is more evil around us here than I have ever encountered before’ or ‘I am fighting evil, fighting it as surely as you do’ to underline the mystical orientation. It is also absolutely fitting that, at the heart of the opposition, the detective uncovers not a calculating villain, but Cecile, a dark sadistic Fatal Woman, sapping the blood of a noble family. ‘He died screaming’ she says, with proud disdain, of her former victim, before being engulfed in the marshes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is crammed with a multitude of details which instantly evoke Fisher’s world (Miles Malleson’s Frankland is another), and to compare it with the ugly and banal A Study in Terror (1965), another Holmes movie a few years later, is to appreciate at once Fisher’s involvement with the theme; photographed by Jack Asher in muted evocative Technicolor, with Peter Cushing giving one of his most effective performances as Holmes, it is both locally and generally one of his most successful films. But regrettably it was not one of the most profitable for Hammer. The idea of the film had come from Eliot Hyman’s son Kenneth and the rights position proved very tough to unravel since all Doyle’s rights were at this stage supervised by Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Sir Arthur. In the end Adrian had to be hired as a technical consultant by Hammer and flown first class to London from New York as part of what proved quite an expensive package. By this time the budget had risen to £109,968 (around £4.3 million today), making it considerably more expensive than Dracula.

Left: André Morrell and Peter Cushing in The Hound of the Baskervilles (Terence Fisher, UK, 1959).

Right: Christopher Lee as The Mummy (Terence Fisher, UK, 1959).

The major themes and preoccupations of Fisher’s films are so ripe for verbal analysis that it is easy to underestimate their visual characteristics. Yet some of the earlier work for Hammer has a pictorial sensuality which completely dominates all its other components, and here we should never forget the amazing contributions to his style by art director Bernard Robinson and cinematographer Jack Asher. In the case of The Mummy, which is the most extreme example of the process, the image of Christopher Lee – a shimmering black giant rising out of the bubbling greenness of the marsh – has a power which defies analysis: it is the texture of the image which lingers in the memory long after one has forgotten what it may or may not represent. It is notable too that the long flashback in the film (a rare phenomenon in Fisher’s work) is actually more clear-cut and prosaic than the rest of the action. This is in absolute contrast to Universal, who filmed their flashbacks to ancient Egypt in their 1932 version of The Mummy in a dreamy occult fashion before returning to ‘reality’; by inverting the device, Fisher was able to make his interpretation almost into a kind of formal experiment: a full-length dream sequence.

Gary Parfitt, in an article on Fisher in the Hammer periodical Little Shoppe of Horrors, a publication which has contributed enormously to Hammer research, has a fascinating quote from the director about the lengths he was prepared to go to get the colour as he liked it. Speaking of The Curse of Frankenstein, Fisher said: ‘I can remember painting leaves or twigs red because I wanted in the foreground a suggestion of red. If people were conscious of it I don’t know. The red leaves indicating danger and blood as the little boy went away and disappeared and you were left there staring at that little foreground of foliage with little blotches of red …’. Anthony Hinds too was well aware of what Fisher was doing with colour on Curse. Even at the time he talked of how the team ‘got together to use colour effects that literally scarify in themselves. Weird blues, greens, mauves and yellows for example. And the difference in the macabre effect of the creature’s make-up, between colour and black-and-white, has to be seen to be believed.’

In sharp contrast a much less abstract side of Fisher’s work is demonstrated by The Stranglers of Bombay, a sombre account of the Thuggee atrocities in 1820s India, originally scheduled for colour and changed late in the day to monochrome. The structure of the film is similar to that adopted for The Hound of the Baskervilles (though here it is much less stylised). The theme, which is no doubt a bastardised and Anglicised version of Indian mythology,³ begins with the legend of Kali, the great mother, and shows her influence spreading into the present in the form of mass murder and mutilation. In order to incarnate the thugee evil physically rather than just in legend, Fisher employs Marie Devereux to play her hand maiden, a beautiful and enticing girl whose only function is to be seen relishing every one of the multiple cruelties which the film contains. She presides over the severing of limbs, the cutting out of tongues and, by implication at least, several castrations: the effect is all the more appalling in that we never hear her speak or have any contact with her as a person. Of course, today, many will find this unacceptable, arguing that it perpetuates a stereotype sexist fantasy and they have a point. I have never been able to discover why it is there. Did the character have lines that were cut? Or, as is perfectly possible, was it inserted at the behest of James Carreras? If so, he would have been quite happy that it greatly increased the film’s notoriety.

As indicated earlier, the most complex Fisher films often examine his kind of dualism within a single individual. One example is The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (US Title: House of Fright), where Jekyll is transformed not into ugliness but into smooth seductive charm, but the film’s ambiguous theme was undermined by major censorship problems. It was to be taken up again the following year in The Curse of the Werewolf (1960). The legend of a man who changes into a wolf when the moon is full becomes for Fisher and Hinds the story of a man who is a battleground between the universe’s two opposing forces. They therefore concern themselves almost exaggeratedly with the details of Leon’s (the werewolf’s) conception and it was here, more than anywhere else, that they ran into the censorship problems outlined earlier. The world of the film is once again strictly good and evil, while its story is remarkably symmetrical, beginning and ending with the church bell ringing, first for a wedding, finally for Leon’s destruction. This is a fairy-tale universe of light and dark shadow, no doubt simplistic if you are looking for a psychological dimension or ambiguity, but unusually elaborate too and making the censor’s objections all the odder. Perhaps one reason he was so worried was because the whole thing is also in some ways put together as a biblical parody; Leon’s birth is preceded by a mock visitation to his mother, the dumb servant girl, while his foster-parents regard his appearance as a miracle. His birth on Christmas Day, the parallel with the Madonna, the bubbling of the font and the prenatal ‘baptism’ of his mother, all inevitably evoke Christian associations. To some extent the film sacrifices dramatic expediency for this elaborate structure and it is not as compelling on a straight narrative level as Fisher’s best work, but it remains an indication of the versatility of his approach.

The Devil Rides Out (1967) presents Fisher’s vision in its most refined and potent form, while at the time it also seemed to rediscover aspects of English myth which for some reason even horror cinema had overlooked. Until this point Hammer had had little success with witchcraft and black magic. The Witches (The Devil’s Own), a project brought to them by the ageing Hollywood star Joan Fontaine in 1966, was more or less, as we have seen, an unequivocal disaster. Fontaine, the star, made life extremely difficult for Hammer, complaining to whomever would listen that they were unprofessional, the production amateurish and subsequently blaming them for having ended her career.

So, The Devil Rides Out was nothing if not a risk. But Dennis Wheatley’s original novel is the least turgid and most exciting of all his black magic romances, packed with Wheatley’s quite interesting if occasionally eccentric (and unreliable) research.⁴ It was therefore the best hope for a movie from Wheatley’s work and in the hands of Fisher and his expert scriptwriter, Richard Matheson, the story is transformed. All its various superfluities are eliminated and the plot is now tailored to express the sort of flawless symmetry we associate with the better and less didactic (or official) kind of religious art.⁵

Made on what by modern (non-digital) standards is still a comparatively tiny budget, it remains an excellent example of the kind of thing that can happen when melodrama is achieved so completely and so imaginatively that it ceases to be melodrama at all and becomes closer to an allegorical vision. Despite a resolutely linear framework and some prosaic moments, there is a dream-like quality about the film which is attained partly by the way in which every moment seems to echo something that has already happened, or is about to happen, and partly by its use of temporal/spatial dislocation. The plot contains very little violence or horror in the Selwynian sense and it revolves visually, symbolically and dramatically around the opposing forces, represented by the Duke De Richleau (Christopher Lee) and Mocata (Charles Gray).

The film begins with the Duke’s discovery that his friend Simon is participating in a black magic coven and continues through a sabbat on Salisbury Plain and a night spent in a pentacle to a final ritual in Mocata’s cellar. Much of the imagery is similar to that of the Dracula movies, but there it was never so cunningly manipulated, and the balance had always tended to fall in Dracula’s favour. Here, on the other hand, the balance is perfectly equal, and remains so largely as a result of Fisher’s classical technique.

It is instructive to examine the sequence where Mocata calls unexpectedly on Marie Eaton who is helping De Richleau to guard his friends Simon and Tanith from Mocata’s influence. In Wheatley’s version it is a banal encounter between an ugly and unimpressive villain and a resourceful heroine, but Fisher transforms Mocata from a hideous foreigner to a dapper and charming English gentleman of the old school with a red carnation in his buttonhole, in sharp contrast to the pale and haggard De Richleau who has left the house a few minutes earlier. Mocata begins by announcing with absolute assurance that he is on an errand of goodwill and, as they pursue a conversation in the library where he tries to pressure Marie into submission, Fisher mirrors the struggle traditionally but flawlessly in his camera set-ups and editing. He opens with an establishing long shot of the library where Marie and Mocata sit down opposite each other (and Marie absent-mindedly picks up her child’s doll from the seat, playing with it nervously throughout the scene). As the exchange begins, Fisher cuts to a medium shot of Marie over Mocata and, in the initial parrying of their conversation, he allows exactly three medium shots of each before the tone of the meeting changes. Then Marie attempts to rise and Fisher cuts to a sinister close-up of Mocata exercising all his will, and saying ‘Please hear me out, dear lady’, with an almost subliminal close-up of Marie just after the ‘out’. Now the pace of the editing begins to change, indicating Mocata’s increasing dominance, though it is still finely balanced in terms of actual shots. (The whole sequence, before Mocata gains control, contains 13 shots facing Mocata and 13 facing Marie – an example of Fisher’s precision as a director which clearly reflects his long apprenticeship as an editor.) The shots of Marie become longer and are punctuated by slightly closer and more oppressive views of Mocata as his voice drones on. (‘The sinister reputation attaching to magic is entirely groundless and is based on superstition rather than objective observation.’) While listening to this background monologue we are looking mainly at Marie, who is fascinated, and the camera moves almost imperceptibly in towards her to suggest her gradual acquiescence – the whole effect being very far from the usual Svengali stereotypes associated with occult power in melodrama. Finally, after 26 set ups, when Mocata is completely dominant, and both are finally in close-shot, the sequence is interrupted by a high angle shot of Mocata and the extension of his influence throughout the house. Fisher cuts to Tanith who is about to stab her lover, and Simon who is strangling his friend Richard; but suddenly, as the tension builds, the spell disintegrates when Marie’s daughter bursts into the library and interrupts her trance: in a series of brief sharp cuts, Tanith’s dagger falls to the ground and Simon lets go of Richard while Marie staggers to her feet and asks Mocata to leave.

It is the kind of sequence where the cinema, through its ability to juxtapose events in space and time, can achieve a syntactic directness that is denied to any other medium, and Fisher’s handling of it shows that he is completely aware of this. So many directors would have patronised their material (and their actors) by over-loading it with flashy zooms or a continuous series of close-ups, but Fisher instead relies completely on the editing, the performances and some finely judged camera movements to attain the effect he requires. While his dramatic construction is immaculate, he absolutely resists the temptation to underline one of the key points of the scene: namely that Marie owes her rescue to Peggy’s doll. The contrast between the child’s toy with its positive associations of innocence and affection and Mocata’s devotion to cruelty and power is implicit in the scene (later Mocata will attempt to sacrifice the child), but Fisher never once alludes to it directly, nor does the script until Peggy enters in search of it.

Discussion of this sequence which, like so many other sequences in the film, has a mirror image (in this case when De Richleau hypnotises Marie in the same room) reveals only one aspect of the narrative and visual panache which the director brings to his unusual subject matter. The grand sabbat on Salisbury Plain, for example, in which Simon and Tanith are saved from their Devil’s baptism, has dated inevitably but it still has some intensity thanks in part to the haunting performance of Nike Arrighi as Tanith. Apparently, Fisher had to fight to cast the part in this way and to convey Tanith as a genuinely low-key ethereal beauty rather than an ordinarily glamorous lead. This decision helped to transform the film, for Tanith is one of its strangest and most compelling features. The image of her at the sabbat standing wide-eyed like a sacrificial lamb before Mocata, with her face and white dress splattered with blood, beautifully expresses the plot’s basic tension and leads directly into the powerfully incongruous sequence in which De Richleau and Rex career down into the centre of the Satanists in their car with De Richleau quoting from the Psalms (‘Who so dwelleth under the defence of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.’).

The climax of The Devil Rides Out is effectively the prolonged night spent within the Pentacle, in which the four agents of good are assailed by every possible kind of evil manifestation and apparition. This is the final full-scale collision of good and evil in Fisher’s work, and it has the same kind of urgency as Dracula and Van Helsing’s great encounter in the throne-room of Dracula’s castle or the monster’s eruption into the smart society ball in The Revenge of Frankenstein. It is also more subtle than either, for the forces of evil mobilise an epic series of cinematic temptations in which the key factor is the ability to discriminate between illusion and reality; they play systematically on scepticism, doubt, panic, curiosity, greed, jealousy and finally – worst of all – the fear of death. The sequence’s spatial possibilities are immense and Fisher allows his camera to prowl through the vast deserted library, maintaining an almost neutral position between the two sides by means of the lordly perspective his camera adopts, neither inside nor outside the circle. The scene begins with Richard’s sudden attack of bigotry and scepticism. ‘Frankly I think we are behaving like a pack of idiots,’ he says, and to his fury De Richleau replies: ‘It begins.’ It continues with counterfeit people (a human replica of Peggy and Rex) and various other elaborate trials until the final sound of hoofbeats outside the door heralds the Angel of Death; one of the film’s most perfectly conceived moments. In some respects, the whole sequence with its

The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride, Terence Fisher, UK, 1968).

highly ritualised structure might be regarded as a kind of medieval allegory and, indeed, this final most extraordinary visitation, in which the shimmering horse and rider crash through the oak door into the room and rear over the terrified humans cowering in the circle, to remind them of their mortality, irresistibly recalls the Green Knight ‘hailing in at the halle door’ of Camelot. It is only matched by the last shot of The Devil Rides Out which admirably sums up the classical serenity of Fisher’s whole philosophy. The threat is now temporarily over and Simon says ‘Thank God’, whereupon Fisher cuts to a well composed long shot of all those arrayed on the side of good as De Richleau bends down to pick up Peggy and says ‘Yes, Simon, He is the one we must thank.’ The dialogue would be complacent if the sweeping camera movement did not suggest that the battle which is waged continually throughout Fisher’s universe has simply moved for the moment to a higher plane.

Postscript 2007

It remains a pity that The Devil Rides Out is now always seen on the small screen because spatially it needs a bigger image to be fully effective, especially the pentacle sequence which often suffers from frame cropping. The film’s deliberately epic quality (framed by Fisher and Bernard Robinson so that we never feel too close to the actors) works better with distance, as do the performances.

And the special effects? Firstly, we need to be aware that even a relatively small witchcraft picture of later years like The Craft, set in a modern US high school, without any of the expense of period, cost at least three times what this film cost, allowing for inflation. Some of the effects of The Devil Rides Out are highly visual, others are tacky. Even the driving shots during the car chase are in places all too evidently back projection. Terence Fisher had a great sense of frame and colour but he was certainly not a special effects man; his skills lay in entirely different areas, and he was always dependent on the Hammer’s team in this respect But, there is an odd and unreported background to the uneven special effects in The Devil Rides Out which, as many have noted, are credited to Michael Stainer-Hutchins, a name to be found on no other Hammer film.

It turns out Stainer-Hutchins (and his then partner Peter Daw) co-owned the rights to the book. In a letter of 1 November 1965 James Carreras complains that though ‘Stainer-Hutchins is willing to sell his interest in the picture, … he is quite determined to do the special effects. We are told that this could be very costly to us and that he is not really capable of carrying out the high standards of special effects required for Hammer pictures … we want to get out of any commitment to Stainer-Hutchins even if it costs us money.’

But Hammer could not get out of it and by November 1966 it was causing Anthony Hinds enough problems that he was thinking of dropping the project altogether, as he says in an inter-office memo. After complaining about the demands of Daw and Stainer-Hutchins, he concludes: ‘I would suggest that – unless the whole thing is a great embarrassment – we drop it!’

However, an agreement was finally reached and Stainer-Hutchins did receive his special effects credit, though it is not clear how much of the effects are his. What is clear is that, when Anthony Hinds saw the rough cut of the film, he was shocked, as was writer Richard Matheson. Matheson complained in particular about the spider effect in the pentacle scene but Hinds had other technical concerns as well, revoicing Leon Greene (whose voice it seems can still be heard on the American trailer). Were some of the effects reworked? It is hard to discover but one thing is sure. A key member of the Hammer team, the brilliant yet sweetly modest Les Bowie, whom I met shortly before his death in 1979 (and who worked on at least 21 Hammer movies from his creation of their first ‘thing’ in The Quatermass Xperiment to their last in 1975’s To The Devil a Daughter), though entirely uncredited, was certainly responsible for the best and most climactic effect in The Devil Rides Out, the ‘Angel of Death’. Many of the old Hammer stalwarts used to refer to it as ‘Les’s horse!’

Postscript 2024

Some of the effects, including the ‘Angel of Death’, have now been slightly (in some cases controversially) cleaned up for DVD and Blu-Ray release. But for the reasons outlined above – not the special effects but the distance Fisher frequently utilised in the film – it is still preferably seen on a big screen.

As to the legacy of this Hammer classic, the fact is almost nobody has ever tried to imitate it, perhaps because it is so hard to render Satanism convincingly for a modern audience. Rosemary’s Baby succeeded triumphantly but there the theme was held back right to the end. Hammer’s final Wheatley adaptation, To the Devil a Daughter (discussed later) is updated to the present and feels more post-Exorcist than anything else, with none of Devil’s romantic verve. In fact, the only really worthy successor to Fisher’s film in Britain is Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (discussed later), a dark and powerful contemporary thriller about a Satanic-style cult, but it is utterly different and far more pessimistic. There was one anomalous British adventure fantasy called Revelation made in 2002 by Stuart Urban, starring Terence Stamp, which foreshadowed The Da Vinci Code in its story of a frantic and violent hunt by secret religious cults and a Satanic Vatican to find a relic with Jesus’s DNA. The film was shot in Malta, France and the UK for what was then an amazingly high budget of US$10 million ((nearly four times what Hammer’s film cost, taking inflation into account). But the storyline feels incredible, as well as ungrounded, and it seems to have had limited release.

The Devil Rides Out turned out to be only a marginal commercial hit worldwide and was poorly handled in the US, but it was widely admired and still holds a big and lasting reputation among horror fans. I suspect one of the reasons for its uniqueness, apart from Matheson’s and Wheatley’s great plotting and Fisher’s direction, was the bold decision to set it in 1929, around the time Wheatley was writing the novel (published in 1934). This was far enough back in time to help the audience suspend disbelief but not so far back – at least when originally released – to seem like a work of pure historical fiction for there are cars and electricity and telephones. In this context too the Satanic stuff stands out starkly, and rather pleasingly, against a more ordered conservative society

1.‘ … a welter of retorts, alembics, rheostats and plain, old neon tubing’, New York Times review, 16 May 1953.

2.And strangely So Long at the Fair did become the unofficial basis for a vampire script, though not one created by Fisher. It was Kiss of the Vampire directed by Don Sharp for Hammer in 1963.

3.Although some have claimed in the past that the film is historically accurate, I do not think this can be upheld in the light of recent historical research in what is an extremely contested area. See Thuggee by K. Wagner (Cambridge University Press).

4.The book seems to be partly inspired by John Buchan’s Witch Wood, a tale of Satanism taking over an English border village, published only seven years before. Though much more a serious historical study of an isolated seventeenth-century community, there are many similarities, including a shock discovery of a Satanic orgy in the woods.

5.Despite dark, pessimistic and brilliant books such as I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson was a quietly religious man, who once collaborated with the equally religious and famous physicist Fred Hoyle on an unmade movie adaptation of Hoyle’s novel Ossian’s Ride.

4

Approaches to Frankenstein: Fisher, Francis, Sangster and others

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of his muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was of a lustrous black and flowing. His teeth of a pearly whiteness. But these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818

In short, the man I once loved is dead. This is a vampire.

Harriet Shelley in a letter to Catherine Nugent 1814

The summer house-party which took place in 1816 at Diodati, Lord Byron’s villa by Lake Geneva, has been justly celebrated as a key moment in the history of English Romantic art. Together with Shelley and Byron were Mary Godwin (later to become Mary Shelley), Dr Polidori, Byron’s personal Italian physician, and Claire (formerly Jane) Clairmont, Mary’s hysterical and beautiful stepsister.

But, for many years, accounts of what happened at Diodati were bowdlerised, originally even by Mary Shelley herself, so that it always emerged as if it was some jolly gathering where the guests held an amusing ghost story competition because it was wet. Even the dreadful prologue of James Whale’s Universal film The Bride of Frankenstein continued to perpetuate the myth, showing a charming and decorous gathering of turn-of-the-century elegance where Mary startles and amuses her guests with the latest product of her imagination.

In fact, Diodati was an emotional whirlpool of such complexity that even Shelley’s most brilliant biographer, the aptly named Richard Holmes, has never completely unravelled it. What is certain is this. Shelley was in a state of economic and psychological desperation, having left his wife to elope from England with two women, the half-sisters Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Clairmont – both young teenagers – two years earlier. Moreover, by this time Claire had also embarked on a turbulent sexual affair with Byron and considerable animosity was developing between her and Mary, while Byron himself was accompanied by a violently possessive male companion, the physician John Polidori.

It would be hard to construct a more potentially explosive ensemble. Shelley had been a devotee of horrific literature since his youth, terrorising his sisters with tales of vampires. The setting of Diodati is spectacularly eerie even today, with clumps of trees and grass sloping away to the icy ethereal stillness of Lake Geneva spread out below it. Only a few miles away by boat lies the astonishing medieval castle of Chillon with some of the most forbidding dungeons in the world, where Byron sardonically carved his name. In the circumstances, given this setting and the personal emotions of the party, it does not seem so surprising that Diodati brought to fruition both the central Gothic literary myths – the man-made monster and the vampire – that were later utilised by the cinema. (Polidori’s enormously influential short story The Vampire was the first prose account of vampirism in English and undoubtedly supplied primary source material for Bram Stoker some 78 years later.)

But Mary Shelley’s own account of it, in her much-quoted preface to the novel (written ten years after Shelley’s death), is tactful, or, to put it more bluntly, censored. A better understanding of the milieu in which Frankenstein was created may be derived from Shelley’s own diary. The pages of the diary for Diodati were suggestively torn out, possibly by Mary, but 18 months earlier he had written this long but not untypical account of a night spent with Jane and Mary in London, which gives an excellent idea of the way in which he was prone to conduct these nightly sessions:

Friday, October 7th:

Mary goes to bed at half past eight; Shelley sits up with Jane. At one o’clock Shelley observes that it is the witching hour of night: he enquires soon after if it is not horrible to feel the silence of night tingling in our ears; in half an hour the question is repeated in a different form; at two they retire awestruck and hardly dare to breathe. Shelley says to Jane ‘Good Night’; his hand leaning on the table; he is conscious of an expression in his countenance which he cannot repress. Jane hesitates. ‘Good Night’ again. She still hesitates. ‘Did you ever read the tragedy of Orra?’ said Shelley. ‘Yes. How horribly you look! –Turn your eyes off.’ ‘Good Night’, again, and Jane runs to her room. Shelley unable to sleep kisses Mary, and prepares to sit beside her and read till morning when rapid footsteps descend the stairs. Jane was there; her countenance was distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay – it beamed with a whiteness that seemed almost like light; her lips and cheeks were of one deadly hue; the skin of her face and forehead was drawn into innumerable wrinkles – the lineaments of terror which could not be contained; her hair came prominent and erect; her eyes were wide and staring drawn almost from the sockets by the convulsion of the muscles; the eyelids were forced in, and the eyeballs, without any relief, seemed as if they had been newly inserted, in ghastly sport, in the sockets of a lifeless head. This frightful spectacle endured but for a few moments – it was displaced by terror and confusion, violent indeed, and full of dismay, but human. She asked me if I had touched her pillow (her tone was that of dreadful alarm). I said ‘No, no! If you will come into the room I will tell you’. I informed her of Mary’s pregnancy; this seemed to check her violence. She told me that a pillow placed upon her bed had moved, in the moment that she turned her eyes away to a chair at some distance, and evidently by no human power. She was positive as to the facts of her self-possession and calmness. Her manner convinced me that she was not deceived. We continued to sit by the fire, at intervals indulging in awful conversation relative to the nature of these mysteries. I read parts of ‘Alexy’; I repeated one of my own poems. Our conversation, although intentionally directed to other topics, irresistibly recurred to these. Our candles burned low; we feared they would not last until daylight. Just as the dawn was struggling with moonlight, Jane remarked in me that unutterable expression which had affected her with so much horror before; she described it as expressing a mixture of deep sadness and conscious power over her. I covered my face with my hands and spoke to her in the most studied gentleness. It was ineffectual; her horror and agony increased even to the most dreadful convulsions. She shrieked and writhed on the floor. I ran to Mary; I communicated in a few words the state of Jane. I brought her to Mary. The convulsions gradually ceased and she slept. At daybreak we examined her apartment and found her pillow on the chair.

This passage sums up admirably the kind of charged hyper-emotional atmosphere in which the Shelley ménage (especially when it included Jane) existed day after day; and as we have seen Diodati had all kinds of added tensions. As if Shelley’s own influence was not enough, Mary Shelley had recently lost a child and was now struggling to nurture a six-month-old baby. The ideas of creation and of death were close at hand. Indeed, much of the power and durability of the Frankenstein myth would seem to lie in the fact that it depicts in cruel symbolic images the basic processes of human reproduction followed by the inevitable struggle between father and son, in which the father is always destined to be destroyed.

Shelley built her story around a man who creates an innocent and intelligent but ugly creature, which is shunned by humanity and gradually becomes its creator’s doppelgänger. Kenneth Branagh (with Francis Coppola producing) is the only filmmaker who ever tried to follow this epic narrative faithfully and his 1997 movie, though admirable in places, proved a commercial flop. Robert de Niro is a great actor and there are moving moments but even he could not really make Shelley’s ‘noble savage’ monster, who reads Paradise Lost and expounds moral principles, completely persuasive. In order to make the Frankenstein story believable and give it a poignant dramatic arc, filmmakers have almost always had to dispense with the more intellectual aspects of Shelley’s creature.

Mary Shelley’s novel was first properly adapted for the screen in 1931, and one of the minor alterations that Universal made was to elevate its leading character to the nobility. Perhaps they wished to be certain of repeating their success of a year earlier with the aristocratic Count Dracula, but this almost accidental alteration was to have far-reaching implications when it was taken up by Hammer 25 years later. In the meantime, the Henry Frankenstein character as Universal portrayed him, together with certain aspects of the script, greatly weakened James Whale’s otherwise remarkable film. In the part, Colin Clive alternates unconvincingly between extravagant monomania and stiff riding-booted heroics, while Robert Florey’s ridiculous idea of giving the monster an accidental ‘criminal brain’ renders much of the story pointless and seriously undermines Karloff’s magnificent performance. Even so, in spite of these blunders, the overall effect of Whale’s stunning expressionist photography and Karloff’s interpretation of the monster remains extremely potent. Most of the Universal horror films (in particular Browning’s somewhat overrated and tedious Dracula) cannot compare with the robust consistency of Terence Fisher’s work, but Whale’s Frankenstein is the exception. It remains a magnificent example, not of the Gothic, but of a particular baroque form of American expressionism, and it has dated very little over the years.

The significance of the critical outrage which greeted Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein when it appeared in 1957 has already been discussed. As we have seen, Mary Shelley’s book was in the public domain but the original monster make-up was copyright, forcing Hammer to mount an entirely new conception of the whole myth; and yet, whatever else may be said about The Curse of Frankenstein, the physical appearance of the monster conforms closely, not admittedly to Karloff, but to Mary Shelley’s original description: ‘ … his yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was of a lustrous black and flowing. But these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.’

What Hammer did substantially alter was the weakest aspect of the Universal series: the character of the Baron himself. Rejecting the bland and self-pitying martyr of fate, whom Mary Shelley originally envisaged, Terence Fisher and his collaborators transformed the Baron into a magnificently arrogant rebel, in the direct Byronic tradition, who never relinquishes his explorations for one moment, even reviving the monster after it has been killed once, and conducting himself throughout with an utterly unscrupulous and authoritative elegance: he dresses with an extravagant attention to detail, enjoys food, wine and sexual conquest, pursues studies in countless diverse fields and even sings softly in the laboratory as he works. But his will at the same time remains absolutely inflexible. In fact, as one examines the minutiae of Peter Cushing’s performance, it is scarcely possible to resist the impression that this is Frankenstein as he would have been seen through the eyes of Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. For Cushing conforms almost exactly to Baudelaire’s complex definition of the ‘dandy’:

The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, UK, 1957).

Above all else it is the burning need to create an originality for oneself, a need contained within the exterior limit of convention … It is the pleasure of astonishing and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished … they all participate in the same characteristics of opposition and revolt; they are all representative of what is best in human pride, in that need which is too rare in the men of today, of opposing and demolishing triviality.

Baudelaire’s ‘dandy’, as his account suggests, is an extravagant rebel who alternates between defiance and detached cruelty. He is authoritarian, diligent and creative, but also utterly single-minded and unscrupulous. And Cushing’s portrayal of the Baron, in precisely this mould, was nicely complemented by Fisher’s colourful and precise direction. Quite correctly in the circumstances, Fisher brings no expressionism to the piece at all, but instead uses all the resources at his disposal to depict the extravagant contrasts which punctuate the Baron’s world. His direction (greatly helped by the genius of Hammer’s art director Bernard Robinson) continually juxtaposes the elegant, shiny décor of the Victorian drawing-room, full of polished mahogany and over-dressed women, with the grisly appendages of the laboratory, and we watch Cushing glide easily from one to the other, sitting down to an excellent breakfast, for example, shortly after he has seen his monster commit murder. Fisher also goes to enormous trouble in his use of the technique – so popular in Gothic novels – of contrasting beautiful natural scenery with human depravity and corruption. The monster’s slaughter of an old man, and its first destruction, takes place by the side of an autumnal wood in a series of compositions which employ green and gold to maximum effect and it is now known Fisher and Robinson had the leaves painted red to add to the effect.

Perhaps the most spectacular scene of all in Hammer’s first Frankenstein is the birth of the monster. As a general rule, the laboratories of Fisher’s Frankenstein films are an aesthetic delight, full of bizarre colour effects and mysterious noises, so that it is often as though Cushing was conducting some kind of elaborate symphony in sound and light as he moves delicately back and forth through the rows of equipment. In The Curse of Frankenstein, he is forced at the last moment to leave the laboratory for help, and as he runs back Fisher tracks through the door to reveal with terrible suddenness in mid–long shot an enormously grotesque figure, swathed in white bandages, staggering forward towards him. Christopher Lee’s monster, which comes into the world so abruptly, late in the film, and attempts to strangle its creator as soon as it is born, is certainly one of the most brutal and depraved in any Frankenstein film. Yet Lee still somehow contrives to make it seem pitiful and wretched, so that he is one of the tiny number of actors who can be said to have given the part depth and subtlety, despite the fact that the monster’s appearances are extremely brief. His performance may be ultimately less moving than Karloff’s, but it is no less brilliant or disturbing, with its jerky, kinetic, puppet-like walk, which suggests a deformed animal in pain.

The change of emphasis that Hammer had made in the Frankenstein myth – making the Baron, rather than the monster, its central character – turned out to be fully justified in box-office terms, for just as public demand forced Universal to revive the Frankenstein monster, in Hammer’s version it was his creator who had conquered audiences. Cushing was in fact the hero (or anti-hero) of the film (just as Karloff had been the hero of the first Frankenstein), and it was thus necessary to save him from the oddly incongruous execution that he had suffered at its climax. (The Baron’s plea for mercy at the end of The Curse of Frankenstein is the single jarring note in any part of the characterisation and perhaps reflects a slight uncertainty on Hammer’s part about public reaction.) The Revenge of Frankenstein, which followed, contains no such hesitation and the tone of the Frankenstein character was by now completely and unfalteringly established. The film begins with his execution but, as is soon made clear, Frankenstein’s henchmen have complied with their master’s satanically humorous instructions by guillotining the priest instead. Shortly afterwards the flamboyant and brilliant Doctor Stein, an alias of Frankenstein, begins to practise in Carlsbruck and outrages the stuffy local doctors by his generosity and his skill.

Several of Fisher’s heroes thrive on ambiguity, but none more so than the Baron Frankenstein, and the central ambiguity in his character is most fully elaborated in The Revenge of Frankenstein. Here the Baron works diligently and mercifully at the local poor hospital in Carlsbruck, but is at the same time using it as a means of augmenting his supply of human limbs, not in order to create an independent entity, but simply to give his crippled hunch-back assistant Hans a new body and so cure him of his suffering. The sadistic and noble elements in his character thus exist side by side and, as in The Curse of Frankenstein, the operation is finally frustrated, not by an arbitrary mechanism (Universal’s ‘criminal brain’), but by the contempt and fear in which his activities are held by the populace, including the bourgeois local doctors and the ignorant patients in his own hospital. It is in this respect that the character comes closest to being a victimised scientific pioneer in the tradition of Galileo or Freud, for there can be no doubt that by the time the patients of his hospital turn on him (in an extraordinary scene strongly reminiscent of Marat-Sade), he has begun to take on the role not only of a hero but of a martyr. One of the other most impressive elements in the film is exemplified by the scene in which Frankenstein’s hated identity is revealed to the society of Carlsbruck. Hans, who has been given his new body, is desperately in need of help after being beaten up by a brutal janitor (George Woodbridge). His form is beginning to twist and turn with gruesome realism into its original deformity as he stumbles across the grass towards the large house where Frankenstein is attending a ball with the local gentry. Windows have an importance in Fisher’s work as the means by which chaos and dream overtake reality (cf. Dracula), and in this particular instance the French windows of the house become a focus for the mutual collision of two opposite worlds, one of superficial politeness and opulence and grace, the other of death and insanity and ugliness. As the Baron is engaged in some polite conversation with his hostess, Hans crashes through the French Windows – his body further disfigured by glass and mud – and careers into the terrified guests shouting ‘Frankenstein, help me!’. In no specific political sense is it remotely possible to call Fisher’s work revolutionary, but it does have revolutionary moments and this astonishing image of the forces of chaos and disorder erupting into a repressive community is certainly one of them.

The Revenge of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, UK, 1958).

Both The Curse of Frankenstein and The Revenge of Frankenstein represent imaginative extensions of the schema I have already analysed in Fisher’s work. Frankenstein’s complex and ambiguous character becomes a host for two distinct forces, the one of generosity, self-sacrifice and exploration, the other of greed, cruelty and blasphemy. Fisher even contrives to exemplify this tension through his camera movements, as in one of the confrontations between Victor and his assistant Paul in The Curse shortly after the monster has come to life. Frankenstein says: ‘That’s the brain, when you attacked me, it was damaged. That makes it your fault Paul.’ And, as he says it, the camera tracks forwards to a mid-long shot of Paul, underlining the truth of his words. As in practically all Fisher’s movies, it is to a large extent outside interference that prevents Frankenstein from succeeding. But on the other hand, this view does not take into account the other side of the Baron’s character; and in order to show this, Fisher closes the sequence by tracking in ominously to hold a close two-shot of Victor alone with his grotesque creation, which explicitly identifies him with it. The identification reaches its ultimate imaginative extension in the extraordinary climax of The Revenge, where the baron actually inhabits the body he has created and literally becomes his own creation.

The first two Frankenstein films also contain comic characterisations, which gives them their slight Dickensian flavour (in this instance Paul Hardtmuth and Lionel Jeffries) and the strictly linear handling of narrative which we have come to expect. But unfortunately, at this point Fisher’s Frankenstein series was interrupted for nearly ten years. The Revenge of Frankenstein was not as successful as its forerunner and it would not be until 1963 that Hammer decided to make another in the series.

In the meantime, Hammer’s first Frankenstein movie had triggered one truly blatant imitation from another producer. Paradoxically, and quite erroneously, this was called Blood of the Vampire, an odd one-off of a film commissioned by Regal International from Jimmy Sangster and directed by Henry Cass, another seasoned veteran then approaching 60.¹ Shot in colour, it is an unmistakable helping of Sangster’s lurid brand of Victoriana, starting in a dank cemetery and moving, via a tavern and some other business, to a fog-bound prison for the criminally insane with a gruesome laboratory in its basement. Films often imitate other films, but this must be one of the most brazen stylistic copies of all, even down to tiny details of Robinson’s laboratory like the elevated doorway (though the whole thing badly misses Robinson’s props and his eye for composition). Donald Wolfit, as the mad surgeon, does a reasonable job in the circumstances, strutting about wearing a rust-coloured leather apron smeared in unnameable secretions, but Victor Maddern’s effective performance as his deformed hunchback assistant is undermined by an almost comical make-up job that would never have got past Hammer’s Phil Leakey. Indeed, in the end the film falls between two stools, lacking Hammer’s gusto and grace and never quite replacing it with the vulgar energy of the later copies.

One other imitation from this period is worth a brief mention, namely Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1960), undoubtedly inspired by the Hammer Frankenstein movies, but also one of the very earliest British colour horror movies, set in the present day.²

Often dismissed, the film has some interesting features not least the fact that – unusually for its time – much of it is shot on spectacular Cornish locations, lending it now, in restored form, considerable historical interest and also generating quite a haunting atmosphere. Its Canadian director Sidney Furie, who went on to make The Ipcess File, added some flourish to an uneven script which copied Hammer by making the young lead (Kieron Moore) a troubled and slightly schizoid medical genius who thinks he can conquer death by injecting corpses with the drug curare! The spectacle of a respectable Cornish doctor creating zombies in such a haunting setting makes the film highly memorable and Furie also poached Hazel Court, from Hammer’s movies, as the doctor’s nurse. As always, Court approaches her role with commendable seriousness and soon she would be taken up by Roger Corman for the American Poe series, cementing her position as one of the great women horror stars of the time.

The Frankenstein Television Series

Shortly after The Curse of Frankenstein started its record-breaking run, Hammer began an abortive struggle to create a Frankenstein television series in Hollywood, a talismanic deal that James Carreras was constantly trying to crack since it would grant his company hours and hours of precious production time. On 12 November 1957 Michael Carreras had flown to Los Angeles to supervise the production of the promised pilot for Columbia, and was staggered by what he found. Not only had no preparatory work been done but, contrary to what Hammer thought was agreed, the script for the pilot – Jimmy Sangster’s The Single-Minded Blackmailer – was, they now said, unacceptable: ‘BIG MISUNDERSTANDING’, Michael cabled to his father on 14 November 1957 from the Beverly Hills Hotel:

AS BLACKMAILER SCRIPT HAS NOT BEEN ACCEPTED AS PILOT STOP THEY EXPECTED ME TO BRING A SELECTION OF SCRIPTS STOP NO PREPARATORY WORK HAS BEEN DONE AT ALL THEREFORE WE HAVE TO START FROM SCRATCH TOMORROW MORNING STOP ALL VERY DEPRESSING AND ANNOYING. MICHAEL.

James Carreras’ cable replying the same day is interesting, showing among other things some affection for his son despite all the later rifts:

IN NO WAY SURPRISED YOUR CABLE FRANCOVICH AND STARR BOTH CONFIRM THEIR UNDERSTANDING BLACKMAILER SCRIPT WAS PILOT STOP DON’T FORGET YOU ARE DEALING WITH LUNATICS SO TREAT THEM GENTLY REMEMBERING HOW IMPORTANT THIS DEAL IS TO US ALL STOP IF PHOENIX³ EVER GETS MADE YOU KNOW I SHALL BE THE MOST SURPRISED MAN IN THE WORLD ENJOY THE CALIFORNIA SUNSHINE DON’T WORK TOO HARD LOVE JIM

Despite James’ sunny tone he was genuinely concerned and at once fired off a letter to Mike Francovich at Columbia. ‘I am sure you will agree,’ he writes, ‘that Michael is right. You, Irving Starr, Michael and I were convinced that they had accepted the script …’.

The script in question, The Single-Minded Blackmailer by Jimmy Sangster, though not among his very best, had all the style and amorality of the early Hammer movies: in it the Baron co-opted the brain of a blackmailing youth. Sangster had also done a lot of other work in planning the series, and his overall concept for it was both ingenious and pleasing. The show was to be narrated by a modern heir of the Baron in his ancestral laboratory as he goes through his great-great-grandfather’s notes and stories. ‘I have tried to make a museum of this place, a shrine if you like …’ he tells the audience in the preamble. ‘These notes and diaries show the stages of his work … from the first almost fumbling experiments with dead animals … to the later more intricate ones … on which he didn’t use animals.’

Sangster had even worked out a story arc for three series of 13 episodes each. The first six of the series would deal with early experiments. In the seventh the Baron would create the monster, from eight to 12 the monster would be an active participant, while in the 13th and final episode the monster escapes and Frankenstein appears to die. The second series opens with the monster retrieving Frankenstein’s body and restoring it. Then a female monster is created and series two would end with a battle to the death between the two monsters! In the third series the subject matter would expand to show the Baron’s experiments in vampirism, zombies, voodoo, black magic, suspended animation and human pain among much else. Sangster even had lists of titles like ‘The Slime’, ‘The Black Inquisitor’, ‘The Child of Terror’, ‘The Living Dead’, ‘The Maggot’ and many others. It was an impressive pitch, probably well ahead of its time given the timidity of the American networks.

Since Michael Carreras was arriving with all this, as well as a carefully worked-out schedule – including even notes from Hammer’s make-up wizard Phil Leakey on how he would achieve Sangster’s effects – he was shocked and disappointed to discover that Hammer’s partners had no interest in any of it. But worse was to come. Michael telephoned his father a few weeks later with news there was now an attempt to squeeze Hammer out of the deal altogether except as a kind of servicing company. It is worth quoting James Carreras’ shocked response of 13 December 1957 in full, for it shows exactly the kind of obstacles Hammer faced in the US.

Dear Michael,

Irving Starr will be in Hollywood on the 18th and he will sort out the startling information which you gave me on the telephone, which I believe is as follows.

(a) You have been informed by Mr. Bernard Swartz, who is the lawyer of Mr. Briney Foy that there has been in existence for some considerable time a signed contract between Screen Gems and a company owned by Mr. Joe Shenk for the production of a series of Tales of Frankenstein – half-hour subjects for TV.

(b) That you were informed that it was only because of the relationship between Mr. Shenk and Mr. Eliot Hyman that we are being allowed to make any Frankenstein TV films whatsoever and that the ones it is intended we should make over here will be under licence from Mr. Shenk’s company.

I cannot believe the information that you have given me, because never have we been told by Mr. Ralph Cohn, either in England or in New York that a signed contract exists and I categorically refuse to be licensed by anyone to make this Frankenstein series other than under a direct contract between Screen Gems and ourselves.

I should say that Mr. Bernard Swartz and one or two other gentlemen are trying to pull a fast one. However take this up with Irving Starr and Ralph Cohn if you should see him.

Looking forward to seeing you again on the 23rd.

Sincerely, Jim

It would seem this was indeed a try on which did not succeed, but Hammer still could not get their way with the pilot. In the end a plodding Universal-style script called Face in the Tombstone Mirror was shot with a story by its director Curt Siodmak (who had worked on some of the Universal horror movies) and a pilot script from Catherine and Henry Kuttner. Unlike Sangster’s original approach, Face in the Tombstone Mirror retreated into sub-Universal territory with almost indecent haste and the lumbering monster is reborn in entirely traditional fashion within five minutes. Predictably the series never happened.

Hammer had found themselves the victim of a very familiar pattern, so familiar in fact you could call it Hollywood in default mode. A studio becomes excited by the success of some new approach to traditional material and invites the innovators to the table. If by luck they encounter someone within the studio, who genuinely appreciates and understands the breakthrough they have made, the newcomers have a chance. Otherwise, they will find the system on auto-pilot and soon, with a terrible inevitability it will simply steer them away from their innovation and down familiar old Hollywood paths that have long ago petered out (just what happened in this case). Finally it will pronounce and punish their failure. Little wonder Hammer were furious.

The Later Hammer Frankenstein Movies

As we have seen, it would be six years before Hammer attempted another Frankenstein film, not initially with Fisher but with Freddie Francis, a distinguished cinematographer and visual stylist who is on record as saying he did not like horror movies. And The Evil of Frankenstein, written by John Elder (Anthony Hinds), rather than Sangster as before, turned out, by the standards of the earlier films, to be disappointing, indicating how great Fisher’s contribution to the series had been. With Universal distributing, having signed over all their monster movies to Hammer for reworking, Anthony Hinds decided – mistakenly perhaps – to give some elements of the story a revamped Universal feel. Of course, he had no intention of abandoning the essential points of Peter Cushing’s characterisation of the Baron, so instead the production concentrates on a somewhat futile effort to make Kiwi Kingston look like Boris Karloff. Meanwhile the Baron’s laboratory, which had reached a peak of abstract colour perfection in The Revenge, was reduced to a sorry remnant of wires and lightning conductors, while the plot turns out to be a repetitive and tedious accumulation of accidents involving a hypnotist who uses the lumbering monster for his own ends. The film has its admirers but there was much better to come in 1966, when Fisher again took up the reins of a Frankenstein film in Frankenstein Created Woman.

If the Evil of Frankenstein had unsuccessfully plagiarised the Universal approach, Frankenstein Created Woman, also scripted by Anthony Hinds, succeeds because it takes us just about as far away from anything Universal could have concocted as it is possible to go. Once again here, the preoccupation of the script and direction lie to some extent with the Baron, who appears as a kind of philosophical explorer, but on this occasion he is less in evidence than before and the strong undercurrent of sexual imagery which runs through so much of Fisher’s and Hammer’s work is dominant. The film rapidly develops into an extravagant fairy tale full of decadent imagery, with Fisher using the spurious scientific contrivance of soul transplants to take the recurrent nineteenth-century image of the Fatal Women to its logical conclusion. In retrospect, bearing in mind the discussion in the chapter on Fisher, it seems inevitable that Frankenstein’s female creation should, in Fisher’s world, turn out to be not some fiend, but instead a deadly seductress. The monster in Frankenstein Created Woman is the soul of a man imprisoned in the outer physical shell of a woman’s body, and (as in Fisher’s subsequent Frankenstein, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed) it is precisely this tension between matter and mind (or spirit) that causes the final destruction.

The central character of the film is Christina, a pretty girl who is seriously deformed on one side of her face and body. The ‘Beauty of the Medusa’ theme is fully indulged here when, for example, Christina’s lover Hans touches her scar admiringly while the camera lingers, and mischievously Fisher even juxtaposes their love-making with Frankenstein’s magical (and phallic) energy machine (‘You see the energy … the force trapped in cells being released’). The scene is thus set for the miraculous series of sexual events which are to occur: in a succession of incidents, for which three young men are responsible, both Christina and Hans are killed, and Frankenstein, unashamedly in the role of an enchanter on the side of justice, employs his energy machine to merge the two of them into Christina’s healed body. Now given an utterly sensual and perverse rejuvenation, Christina sets about seducing and murdering the men who previously killed her father and had Hans hanged. Like Keats’ Lamia, she is the illusory incarnation of female beauty who has only recently been transformed from her true hideous shape, and in fact some of the lines Keats uses in Lamia are perfectly appropriate here, just as the images with which Fisher mounts the whole thing have a strong echo of Keats’ highly fanciful medievalism:

A virgin purest lipp’d yet in the lore

Of love deep learned to the red heart’s core:

Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain

To unperplex bliss from its neighbour, pain;

In scene after scene of cloying beauty, Christina stalks and lures her victims with a kind of vampiric power, continually acting out the fears of all sexual fantasy by metamorphosing into a vengeful beast at the moment of intercourse. Finally, Christina and her third victim, Johann, go for a picnic, and the situation is more ambiguous in that Johann is the nicest and least culpable of the men responsible (indirectly) for her death. The scene is constructed with some beauty in a setting of grass and trees, and Johann’s green suit matches the landscape while Christina, in a black and purple cape, violates it like some aggressive animal. The mythological associations are immediately obvious. Meanwhile Frankenstein, who has realised what has been happening and is searching for her, finally stumbles on the clearing to find (in a shot that has been put together with tremendous care) that Johann is already

Susan Denberg as Christina before and after Frankenstein’s operation in Frankenstein Created Woman (Terence Fisher, UK, 1967).

Christina’s victim and she is holding Hans’s head in her hands, talking to it in Hans’s voice. The head replies in her own voice, thus the confusion and intermingling of her spiritual identity with his is complete whereupon she drowns herself so that she can be free of the imprisoning body. It should be emphasised that what could have so easily degenerated into cheap sensationalism becomes in Fisher’s hands a fusion of myth and nightmare. As this account clearly indicates, the plot of Frankenstein Created Woman is, on any thematic level, absurd, but then that can be said of a great many works which generate considerable force within their dream-like atmosphere. It is not as satisfying as Fisher’s two earlier Frankenstein films, but in one respect – the sheer beauty and poetry of its images – it excels them.

Following Frankenstein Created Woman, there is a three-year lull until Fisher’s next Frankenstein film. Made in 1969 and written by Bert Batt, a Hammer staff assistant director, it marked a further departure from the simple ‘monster’ theme, and again concerned a conflict between spirit and body via the – by 1969 – topical subject of brain transplantation. Peter Cushing began by recalling the full flexibility and ambiguity that he had first introduced to the character in 1956, for this second-last performance isolates some of its cruellest and most unscrupulous components in way that compares interestingly with the most equivocal of nineteenth-century antiheroes.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed begins with the Baron murdering a passer-by in order to procure material for his experiments and, after a spirited fight with a burglar amid the ghoulish apparatus of his secret laboratory (which is utterly wrecked in the process), he is forced to blackmail a young couple into assisting him with his experiments. In all these early scenes, Fisher is at pains to juxtapose the Baron’s deft courtesy and elegance with his brutality, exemplified in symbolic terms by a shock cut from the bourgeois drawing-room milieu (‘You will find it very quiet in here’) to a lunatic screaming in his cell. On another occasion he closely follows a shot of the Baron buying a flower for his buttonhole in the market with the sudden bursting of a water-pipe in his garden which causes one of his victim’s bodies to jet up through the mud. In due course the Baron and his new assistants abduct his former colleague, Brandt, from an insane asylum in order to obtain information from him and, when he dies of a heart attack, Frankenstein transplants his brain into the body of the distinguished Professor Richter. Then in a moment of superb irony and cruelty, Brandt’s wife, who has no way of knowing about the transformation Frankenstein has initiated, is taken on her own insistence to see her husband who is wrapped in bandages. The horror of this scene, in which the wife ecstatically recognises her now sane husband from his whispered words, is amplified, not only because Fisher cuts almost directly from it to the macabre spectacle of Brandt in a carriage at night being fed through a tube, but also because the audience is again being forced to make a moral judgement about Frankenstein’s character and actions. He has performed a grotesque operation on his colleague and yet we know that he has also saved his life and his sanity. Beyond this, the situation is immediately relevant to Fisher’s dualism. Brandt’s brain is now in another body, and consequently inhabits a kind of limbo, sealed off from communication by a shell of alien matter. Finally, in a scene of agonising romantic significance (which echoes the scene in The Revenge in which Hans crashes for help through the drawing-room window), Brandt’s pathetic half-disintegrated form returns to walk silently through his former home and mounts the stairs to cry as he watches his wife sleeping. When she wakes up, he tries to explain from behind a screen what has happened, but she completely fails to understand or believe him and there is no way in which his brain can make contact with her or pierce the shell in which it is contained. He is a lost soul, in the most graphic sense. Finally, Frankenstein tracks Brandt to the house where he finds an agonised monster who is concerned only with destroying him. In a protracted struggle the house is set on fire and the last image shows the monster carrying his master through the door of the house back into the inferno which rages within.

So, for what was to prove for several years his last film in the series, Fisher had reserved a marvellous surprise. Always a Romantic in the fullest sense, he and his writer Batt contrived to make Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed into a positively inspired essay on the whole theme of change and nostalgia, using the science-fiction element as a mere pretext to create, with the help of Freddie Jones (an actor Fisher had cast deliberately), one of the most overtly sympathetic and moving Frankenstein monsters in the history of cinema. It is completely fitting that this particular creation was the only one of Fisher’s monsters to finally threaten and destroy its maker in the traditional fashion; for it represents a degree of emotional complexity with which even Cushing’s Baron could not compete. And fitting too that this quintessential Hammer film should be the final movie of a man who contributed as much to the studio’s look as anyone. Art director Bernard Robinson, the genius behind Hammer’s graceful sets, died some months after its release.

Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (Terence Fisher, UK, 1969).

There was one potentially jarring note in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, a rape scene involving the Baron and the Anna character (Veronica Carlson), but it was largely cut on theatrical release, reappearing in the DVD version. And this seems to be a rare case where Fisher was on the censor’s side. Resisted both by director and cast, it was insisted upon by James Carreras quite at the last minute even though the rest of the script and even the performances take place as if it never happened. Why? James Carreras rarely intervened so directly in this way and I have seen no paperwork to explain it. But it would seem likely the US distributor, Warner, who were handling a Hammer Frankenstein in the US for the first time since the glory days of The Curse of Frankenstein, were hoping for a return to the incredible box office of the earlier film when the Baron was, by the standards of the day, an amoral and strongly sexual figure. Warner’s US advertising, unlike the UK, relies on the notion that the Baron ‘runs amok.’ So James Carreras’ sudden intervention was probably a desperate attempt to revitalise the formula and please a potentially important distribution partner. But, if so, it was wildly mistaken. Time had moved on, there was no way the old impact could be captured in quite the same way and certinaly not by something as crude as this. In any case the whole episode is so out of keeping with everything else it has no real weight in the film at all. Warners would never release another Hammer Frankenstein movie.

It was not until 1970 that Hammer chose to mount another in the Frankenstein series, but this was the fatal year after Anthony Hinds’s departure from the company when all the films took a notable dip in quality. With Hinds gone and James’s son Michael Carreras producing Creatures the World Forgot in South Africa, James Carreras desperately needed someone to take up the new film. He induced Jimmy Sangster to return from America with an offer of not merely writing (which Sangster had declined), but writing, producing and directing.

Sangster was invited to rewrite a script (by the actor Jeremy Burnham) which intended to return to the roots of the series and show the Baron’s boyhood and his first monster. Once again it seems Hammer were hoping to recapture the market for the franchise they had once had, in this case by using a younger actor to re-energise the Baron. Although Sangster had no high opinion of what he read, the story seems to have prompted him into rewriting part of his first Frankenstein film as a black comedy with Ralph Bates, a talented newcomer to the Hammer ranks, as the new Baron.

The results, as it happened, were disastrous but revealing. Sangster (who played a major part in many of Hammer’s greatest films including the first two Frankensteins) clearly missed the guiding hand of Anthony Hinds and also miscalculated the tone: the early Hammer movies already contained a strong element of black humour, so adding more of it risked, not merely boredom and disbelief, but the whole fragile structure. And sequence by sequence, The Horror of Frankenstein proceeded to obliterate every nuance and subtlety of its original, even returning to Universal’s worst ideas like the clumsy ‘assistant’. As the Baron, Ralph Bates, normally an excellent actor, floundered helplessly in the wake of Cushing, caricaturing the Byronic prose to the point where it loses any weight at all, while David Prowse as the monster remained hopelessly unconvincing. All of those involved would go on to much better work, but the ugliness and self-parody of The Horror of Frankenstein remains an absolute testament to the grace and conviction that Fisher (and Hinds) had previously brought to the series. Meanwhile Fisher was to have one final crack at it with his last film, Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell, in 1973.

Everything had, of course, changed by the time Fisher and Peter Cushing collaborated for the last time on Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell, a reworking of an old Frankenstein script by Anthony Hinds. James Carreras was gone, having sold Hammer to his son Michael (a fraught episode discussed in Chapter 9), and the company was desperately struggling. Bernard Robinson was dead and, though it seems Michael asked Anthony Hinds to return to Hammer around this time, he declined. Michael Carreras only just succeeded in persuading Paramount to fund the film and deserves plaudits for giving Fisher this last project. The younger Carreras seems to have seen it in some respects as a debt of honour and to his credit he was not one to neglect such things. A few months earlier he had sat in the Hammer head office and told some journalists, ‘I know it’s terrible that I’m sitting here and Terence Fisher isn’t. I’m aware of that.’

The Horror of Frankenstein (Jimmy Sangster, UK, 1970).

It was not just Hammer that had changed. Fisher himself, around 70, had now won some critical recognition, not merely in the UK but also in France and elsewhere. Somewhat to his amazement this modest man found himself the subject of National Film Theatre retrospectives, as well as a guest at film festivals. Consequently, he went back to directing with a new pleasure and seemed to enjoy every minute of it. At the time, he said he felt as he had when he made the original Dracula. Visiting the set, it was a pleasure to see him getting one last run at the job he loved. Given Hammer’s budgets, we can be fairly sure it never made him rich.⁴

It would be nice therefore if Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell had all the quality of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. Unfortunately, movies rarely conform to that kind of symmetry. Its story has certain features of interest, like the typically gothic touch of the lunatic asylum where the Baron is pursuing his investigations with a young doctor (Shane Briant). Peter Cushing, too, gives the part much of his old spirit and verve, making a magnificent entrance dressed in black from top to toe. But finally, the script does not develop in any interesting way: it is just a string of situations without resonance and the production obviously lacked resources, being incredibly limited in scope. What finally capsizes it though is the creature, a hairy muscle-bound apeman (played by David Prowse) who has little menace to offer and certainly no poignancy. Evidently Fisher protested, but Paramount insisted and Hammer agreed. The director said later to interviewer Sam Irvin. ‘I disagreed with them from the start … I could not make him human.’ It was a small failure in a long career of success.

British Frankenstein Films In the New Century

Unexpectedly, perhaps, since the last edition of New Heritage was published, and despite the huge boom in horror, there have been almost no new British Frankenstein movies at all, other than Victor Frankenstein (2015) which barely qualifies – falling more, as Mark Kermode and other reviewers observed, into the Guy Ritchie action format.

But, in 2023, came Poor Things – technically a British co-production, although director Yorgos Lanthimos is Greek and writer Tony McNamara an Australian. The film is adapted from Alasdair Gray’s ambitious 1992 novel, a feminist Frankenstein story set in a nineteenth-century Scottish medical world, which links strongly to writers like Stevenson and Conan Doyle. The novel purports to be a memoir, chronicling the secret transplantation of a baby’s brain into a grown woman’s body, so that she eventually morphs into a very strange societal and sexual rebel. The overall tone is witty and, in the end, Gray even teasingly suggests the whole conceit may just be the troubled imaginings of a husband, who has been left behind by his radical wife.

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/UK/US, 2023).

The movie jettisons this ending, as well as the whole Scottish medical setting in favour of a fantastical (if very handsomely realised) steampunk neverworld. It also inflates the book’s wry humour into a rompingly crude, absurdist farce, somewhat similar to its director’s Oscar-winning The Favourite. Not all of these changes have been welcomed, but universal acclaim has certainly greeted the performance of Emma Stone as the attractive child-woman creation Bella, who spiritedly exposes the illogicality and madness of so many human foibles, especially sexual ones.

Stone has said of the role: ‘the idea that you could start anew as a woman, as this body that’s already formed, and see everything for the first time and try to understand the nature of sexuality, or power, or money or choice, the ability to make choices and live by your own rules and not society’s – I thought that was a really fascinating world to go into.’ And of course much of the process she describes, and the issues it raises, lie right at the heart of the original Mary Shelley novel. Some of Poor Things is knockabout slapstick – the worst of which reminded me of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (reportedly an influence). But the film’s best element – Stone’s Oscar-winning creation of Bella Baxter as an alien, yet sympathetic, creature of brazen logic, cruel innocence and strange discordant speech patterns – is unforgettable, vying for a place as one of the screen’s great Frankenstein creatures. Though, whether Poor Things will achieve classic status, or fade from memory, as Oscar novelties quite often do, remains an open question.

1.Following this sudden career shift from comedies like Castle in the Air and Two Grooms for a Bride to horror films like Blood of the Vampire and The Hand (a very threadbare effort in which a mad killer severs the hands off his victims), Cass left commercial movies forever, becoming a convert to the anti-permissive movement known as Moral Re-Armament, which had certain similarities to the anti-woke movement of today.

2.The Anglo movies discussed in Chapter 6, Circus of Horrors and Horrors of the Black Museum, were released a few months earlier, but feel less gothic in tone.

3.Phoenix, a film about bomb disposal in post-war Berlin Michael was developing would become Ten Seconds to Hell, and was made only a few months later so Michael did have the pleasure of surprising his father even if the film was not successful.

4.At the time of their biggest success in 1959. Terence Fisher was being paid £4,000 to make The Mummy, a sum equating to around £77,000 today. By The Devil Rides Out nearly a decade later it had risen only marginally to £5,500 (£83,000).

5

Approaches to Dracula

Blessington reports, in Conversations, that Byron had a mild prepossession for worms and special predilection towards vampires. ‘Do you know’, said Byron, ‘that when I have looked on some face that I love, imagination has often figured the changes that death must one day produce in it – the worm rioting on lips now smiling, the features and hues of health changed to the livid and ghastly tints of putrefaction … this is one of my pleasures of imagination.

Dr D. P. Varma, Gothic Distributaries: The Residuary Influences.

And the moral shudder that the very name of Byron sends through bourgeois homes would be intensified by our acclamation. Byron is not, in any obvious degree, a surrealist poet; but he is a surrealist personality. He is the only English poet who might conceivably occupy, in our hierarchy, the position held in France by the Marquis de Sade.

Herbert Read, Surrealism and the Romantic Principle.

Many of the Gothic prototypes discussed in this book have commanded considerable success since their original composition, but the popularity of Dracula and its various offshoots goes beyond everything else – including Frankenstein – by a very long way. Bram Stoker’s novel has scarcely ever been out of print since it was first published in May 1897, running through innumerable editions both here and in America, while even as a play it turned out to be one of the most successful theatrical productions of the 1920s and 1930s, breaking record after record in England and France. Most profitable of all in cinema and TV, it has generally been named the most adapted novel of all time with at least 62 versions (A Christmas Carol and Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories are also cited). And, for the original Hammer, of all the monsters they tried – including Frankenstein, the Werewolf, the Gorgon, the Mummy and many others – Dracula proved by far the most acceptable in terms of box-office receipts and continued audience response.

Appropriately, with the exception of one rather vague reference in Southey’s Thalaba (1801), it was Lord Byron who was responsible for the assimilation of the vampire into the English consciousness. What is even more important, the character of Byron determined precisely the form which the legend would take in England; in The Giaour, published in 1813, Byron made the first major literary reference to vampires in the language (Southey in Thalaba used the word fairly loosely as an adjective) and three years later Byron’s mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb, published her notorious novel Glenarvon in which Byron is portrayed as the fatal Ruthven Glenarvon, who preys on his mistresses and is finally claimed by the devil. In this context it is instructive to quote, as Mario Praz does, a description of Byron by his grandson: ‘He had a fancy for some oriental legends of pre-existence, and in his conversation and poetry took up the part of a fallen or exiled being, expelled from Heaven or sentenced to a new avatar on earth for some crime; existing under a curse, pre-doomed to a fate … which he seemed determined to fulfil.’

This description, which could be matched by countless others both in and out of Byron’s own writing, indicates that the outline of Dracula is already becoming discernible and this is without even considering the direct literary evidence. In 1816, Byron’s gathering at Geneva had taken place with his Italian physician John Polidori, besides the Shelley ménage, and in that atmosphere the poet began a tale of terror dealing with vampirism. Later Polidori adapted this fragment, together with the more Byronic aspects of Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon, into a story called The Vampire which was published under Byron’s name in The New Monthly Magazine in 1819. The result was an immediate sensation and it was quickly translated into French and German, and adapted for the stage. Despite Byron’s somewhat naïve protestations, his name was invariably connected with the piece, and in the circumstances this is scarcely surprising, for Polidori’s story is about a gaunt nobleman, Lord Ruthven, with piercing eyes and a highly unusual appearance who travels throughout Europe feeding on the blood of young girls in order to prolong his existence. The plot sets out quite clearly and unmistakably all the basic elements that Stoker was to incorporate into Dracula so many years later, but it also represents, with almost embarrassing clarity, Byron’s own image of himself which he in turn passed on to the public. In the circumstances, The Vampire reveals the link between Byron and Dracula to be so close that it is impossible not to regard them as literary cousins; for Stoker’s novel brought to a temporary fruition the strain of the Fatal Nobleman with piercing eyes and deadly ambitions which Byron had earlier lifted from the pages of Mrs Radcliffe and turned into a major character cult.

For this reason alone, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was for years, despite all its popularity, an extraordinary and at first largely unrecognised achievement – though in 2024 the book’s status is far greater than it was. The text is presented to the reader in the form of a dossier, a technique borrowed by Stoker from Wilkie Collins, which adds something to its pseudoscientific air of authenticity and to the novel’s uncanny impression we are reading a true (if alternative) history. Harker’s journals, which constitute the novel’s ingenious opening section, centre upon the chronicler’s gradually dawning realisation that he is confronted with a man – Count Dracula – and a world – Dracula’s domain in Transylvania – that his prim Victorian common sense is at a loss to comprehend.

Harker is a solicitor’s agent on a business mission in a far-flung corner of the world to service a mysterious and wealthy client. From the beginning the lawyer’s somewhat mundane fears and preoccupations contrast pitifully with the bizarre nexus of other-worldly ideas and associations surrounding him. Yet when Dracula chooses to meet Harker on his own legalistic ground, even here the Count proves to be superior. Harker has to admit his opponent ‘would have made a wonderful solicitor’ and is completely outwitted when he tries to smuggle some letters out of the castle.

But, as the atmosphere of terror in the first section reaches a climax, with Harker climbing down the walls of the castle in a desperate attempt to escape its evil, the novel shifts and Stoker deliberately submerges us in a sumptuous Victorian comedy of manners and romance as we return to England to follow the apparently trivial concerns of two marriage-obsessed Victorian girls, Harker’s fiancée Mina and her friend Lucy. This is all part of the genius of Dracula’s conception. For a time we are forced to pursue the indiscriminate trivia of dinner parties and afternoon walks and trousseaux. But suddenly, like a sumptuous colour film, shredding and emulsifying in the projector gate, the images before us start to jar and shudder, the colours bleach and the whole smooth façade begins to dissolve. Lucy, the most hearty and frivolous of the two girls, becomes morbid and obsessive; the weather changes to a gloomy turbulence. (‘Everything is grey,’ Mina writes, ‘grey rock … grey clouds … grey sea … the horizon is lost in a grey mist.’) A mysterious ship lands in Whitby with a dead man lashed to the mast. Lucy is locked in her room at night but scrambles to get out. She grows weak and hysterical, betraying all the skeletal symptoms that today we would associate with an eating disorder. Finally, as she is dying and begging her fiancé Arthur for a final kiss, Van Helsing, the ambiguous doctor who has been brought in, catches Arthur by the neck and hurls him across the room with both hands. And this grotesque parody of a Dickensian death scene is only the beginning. For the hapless Arthur is forced by Van Helsing to track his love to her unquiet grave ‘where she seemed like a nightmare of Lucy … the pointed teeth … the bloodstained voluptuous mouth … the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance.’ Arthur is compelled to drive in the stake ‘deeper and deeper … whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it …’, at the climax of what has become a monstrous inversion of the Victorian courtship.

The whole novel is constructed with a remarkable skill which ensures (among other things) that the force of the Count’s presence is by no means diminished in the course of the action. Stoker characterises the Count himself with superb economy in the opening section and then allows him to become a menacing background presence which permeates all the narrative but never really materialises again; and the point about Dracula’s character as it is presented in the Harker journals at the beginning of the novel is not, as Universal seemed to think, his strange exotic foreignness but, on the contrary, his charm, his cruel aristocratic civility, his alluring sexual omnivorousness and, on a more philosophical level, his insolent revolt against the accepted norms of society including religion and conventional procreation. It is ironic that the book should have been published in 1897, the year of the Victorian Diamond Jubilee and the height of the Empire, for in some respects it represented the very forces that would ultimately disrupt and destroy the Victorian ideal. Dracula survives – artistically at any rate – long after the Empire has been dismembered and, on a symbolic level, he can be seen as the great submerged force of Victorian libido breaking out to punish the repressive society which had imprisoned it; one of the more appalling things that Dracula does to the matronly women of his Victorian enemies (in the novel as in the film) is to make them sensual.

The Count’s personality also has much affinity in the first section of Dracula with Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (Collins being a major influence on Stoker), but it is surprising that the seductive charm with which he is endowed was never really cinematically acknowledged until Christopher Lee interpreted the role so brilliantly for Hammer in 1957. The various eulogies of Lugosi’s 1931 portrayal of Dracula compared with Lee’s (as in Carlos Clarens’ book) never seemed willing to take into account the evidence of the original novel. There Stoker goes to enormous trouble to stress the Count’s anglophile charm in his characterisation: he ‘speaks excellent English’, has ‘a charming smile’, refers warmly to ‘my de+ar new country of England’ and is described at one stage ‘lying on the sofa reading, of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s guide.’ Even when Dracula is on the point of throwing Harker to the wolves, he speaks ‘with a sweet courtesy which made me rub my eyes it seemed so real.’ This anglophile aspect of Dracula is used by the author to invoke all the associations of aristocratic decadence with which his audience would already have been familiar and yet it is precisely these elements that the modern reader may overlook.

For the fact is that Stoker was well aware of the danger of making Count Dracula into a ludicrous and stagy caricature but Browning and Lugosi were not. The Dracula they invoked is simply a cardboard villain who, by virtue of the new technical resources of the cinema, and Lugosi’s unusual qualities as a personality, was able to make an enormous impact on the picture-going public. But in doing so they sacrificed the one quality which Stoker had consciously or unconsciously sweated to instil into his creation: ambiguity. For Lugosi’s Dracula announces his glowering brutishness from the first time he opens his mouth.

This does not mean of course that Lugosi did not exude a memorable and venomous power as a screen presence. His greatest gift as performer was his energy. He would channel the same excessive intensity of evil into every role he played. And the results were always the same: highly distinctive yet quite one-dimensional. There is something sadly inevitable about his career subsequent to Dracula. His decline into a living screen caricature and finally even a stooge for such comedians as Abbott and Costello and Arthur Lucan has been the subject of much lament, but really it is difficult to see his screen persona heading any

Christopher Lee’s first appearance as Dracula (Terence Fisher, UK, 1958).

other way. Lugosi’s style left no room for development. A sexual element was implicit but it was a heavy-handed and superficial sexuality, given more credibility by the vampiric associations of the film than it actually deserved. Consequently, there was no direction it could take except that of self-parody. Lugosi often protested that he was trapped by the role, but it is hard to imagine how he would ever have been able to exist as an actor without it. His florid approach was technically out-of-place by the late 1920s and his difficulties with English limited him still further. Unlike Karloff, who had all the range of a modern actor, Lugosi was frozen in a striking bravura posture, the living tableau of a silent stage actor trapped in modern sound movies. It is indeed precisely because he was an anachronism allowed to flourish by an accident of genre history, that he still retains some fascination. His exaggerated gestures and diction stand out with a dazzling clarity from the pale and more modern shadows with which he was surrounded, making that looming malevolent shape into the ultimate stereotype of all heavies. As a personality, as a phenomenon, he was remarkable. As an influence on the emergent horror film, struggling for freedom from stage melodrama, he was disastrous.

This was partly why Christopher Lee in the role seemed so refreshing. And so far as the physical description of Dracula is concerned, the Hammer version is also more accurate: neither Lugosi nor Lee used the long white moustache¹ which seems a discordant detail in Stoker’s description of the Count, but Lugosi’s face was far too round and heavy for the part, while his shape was incongruously bulky. Universal also confined their 1931 production to an almost carbon copy of the Broadway stage play (in which Lugosi had formerly played the lead) and the result was an endless round of drawing-room dialogue with even the destruction of Dracula taking place offscreen. In terms of authenticity there seems to be no comparison with the meticulous Hammer production of 1957.

To some extent, the accuracy of Hammer’s approach to Dracula was not so surprising. The novel had, after all, been written by someone in much the same milieu – that of the commercial London showbusiness world – as Hammer and its author was as concerned as any producer to ensure that the book contained box-office ingredients. But Anthony Hinds and Jimmy Sangster both saw huge opportunities in the book and its dualist theme gave Terence Fisher an opportunity to show his Romantic and ornamental, yet disciplined, approach to filmmaking. Christopher Lee has since stated that he had not even seen Lugosi’s Dracula when he played the part for the first time, but instead read the book again and again in an attempt to master the subtleties of Stoker’s characterisation. Meanwhile, Fisher concentrated on maintaining the strictly linear aspects of the narrative so that it remained, from the opening sequence, a dashing metaphysical detective story with a strong diagrammatic structure in terms of image, colour and landscape.

The production also marked the first occasion on which widescreen and colour were used to convey the visual sensuality of Dracula and his effect on his victims, helped of course by Bernard Robinson’s sets. The sequence in which Lucy waits for the vampire to appear in her window, with the autumn leaves swirling behind him, is remarkable for its evocative beauty. It also incidentally proved that Fisher was perfectly capable of employing the power of suggestion when he wished (or was constrained) to do so; Lucy’s two visits from Dracula are both conveyed without our even seeing the Count, by an allusive juxtaposition of shots which weave a dreamlike, magical aura around the large French windows in her bedroom. On the first occasion, Fisher cuts from a long shot of Lucy lying on the bed expectantly to a medium shot of the windows and then back to a close shot of Lucy excitedly fingering the two marks on her neck. There is a final shot of the window (which Lucy has opened), as the autumn wind whips up the leaves more violently than ever, before the scene changes. It is edited precisely to convey her mounting sexual excitement and in the second visit, which causes her death, Fisher cuts from a close shot of Lucy to the window and then to the full moon, before dissolving to Lucy’s body drained of life the next morning.

But the film is perhaps typified by the classical opening sequence in which Lee appears, a menacing shadow between pillars at the top of a staircase who then glides down the stairs in a prolonged take, which merges long shot and close-up, to reveal, not the grotesque figure that Lugosi portrayed bu,t on the contrary, a crisply charming aristocrat ‘with pale face and unforgettable eyes’ (‘Mr Harker I am glad that you have arrived safely’). The overall impression is that Dracula has at last returned to the tradition in which he was created – the tradition of English (as opposed to European) Gothic; the villain again becomes what he always meant to be, the charming intelligent and irresistible host who is on the point of turning the cosy Victorian world upside down by transforming its women into ravening sexual animals. At the same time the hero, Van Helsing (played superbly by Peter Cushing), takes up the familiar stance of the Renaissance mastermind, and represents for a fleeting and nostalgic moment the union of scientific exploration with religion.

The economic and practical considerations, which forced screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and Terence Fisher to cut many things, were sad but forgivable. Firstly, Dracula was robbed of the power to change his form while, in order to narrow its scope, the action takes place in the immediate environment of Dracula’s castle which is supposed to be somewhere in northern Europe, but in fact suggests (like all Hammer’s nineteenth-century locales) a slightly caricatured Victorian England. Indeed, given the proximity of Harker’s home to Castle Dracula, it might seem rather surprising nobody has ever heard of him. But then this is the world of the fairy tale and in fairy tales, as in the minds of children, the next town away can be a vast distance.

In addition, Sangster found it necessary to have Harker killed while he was lingering with dreamy terror over Dracula’s coffin and to eliminate the lunatic asylum and Renfield. These are major changes, but practically everything that remains in the film derives from Stoker’s novel. Even the comic characters, like Miles Malleson’s splendid undertaker, capture much of the spirit of Stoker’s similarly grim humour (Mr Swales, etc), while important minor details, like the blood transfusions and the stigmata caused by the crucifix, remain to great effect. The colour and panache reflected Stoker’s highly developed sense of theatre, and the production was particularly apposite in the way it shows the hero’s world being undermined from the inside, as Arthur’s wife, Mina, comes more and more under Dracula’s influence (he has his coffin stored in Arthur’s own cellar). This gives rise to a scene of forceful and almost comic irony where Holmwood and Van Helsing are outside grimly guarding the home from intruders while Dracula, in his role as the indigenous domestic parasite, is inside rampaging through its women. Finally, the well-orchestrated climax condenses into a tiny space of time much of the suspense and excitement of Stoker’s frantic dash across Europe. It is the only moment of Hammer’s Dracula series where Van Helsing and Dracula stand face to face in the throne room of his own castle, and – in what was for its time impressive effects work – the vampire is reduced to a pile of dust which is scattered carelessly by the wind as the credits roll.

In his excellent book Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years, Wayne Kinsey unearths the intriguing fact that Hammer were so shocked by the originality of Bernard Robinson’s sets for Dracula, he was nearly dismissed. They had expected cobwebs and shadows and got instead Robinson’s particularly haunting brand of angular menace. His castle is no creaking haunted house but a mythic baronial castle with curling pillars and gleaming fireplaces, surely inspired by the great English architect Edwin Lutyens. Robinson’s wife Margaret is quoted by Kinsey on this: ‘When he designed the first Dracula sets, he found out later that there had been a discussion as to whether or not to pay him off and get another art director because those sets were so different from anything they expected. They were scared of them and then, I suppose, thrift got the better of them and they decided to risk it and go ahead and keep the sets he’d designed. I must say I found these sets a bit puzzling myself. I said “Bernard there were no cobwebs. Who did the cleaning?” I told Bernard that it didn’t seem very logical. “Of course it is,” he said. “Magic!”’ In fact, Robinson had got it exactly right, aware that the Byronic villain demands a scrupulously groomed mansion (no doubt with discreet servants), not a filthy hovel.

A typically atmospheric use of props by Bernard Robinson for Dracula’s castle in Dracula (Terence Fisher, UK, 1958).

True to movie tradition, Hammer realised shortly after the release of Dracula that they had killed off the Count rather hastily and, on this occasion, they were to find it particularly difficult to bring him back. For Christopher Lee (who proved over the next decade to be an actor of great versatility) had seen the danger of being typecast, particularly in a role which had such a disastrous effect on its last major exponent, Lugosi. Consequently, in a move which helped to secure his position as a film actor of major international standing, Lee categorically refused to play the part of Dracula for nearly ten years; and with the sound of cash registers ringing up receipts for the film all over the world, Hammer had to find some way of making a Dracula movie without Dracula.

They found it in a triple-authored script called The Brides of Dracula, which Fisher consented to direct for them at the beginning of 1960. This had started out as Disciple of Dracula from Jimmy Sangster. Then Anthony Hinds asked Peter Bryan (who had written Hound of the Baskervilles) to rewrite it, losing Count Dracula altogether. Subsequently it seems Peter Cushing insisted on a further polish from Edward Percy (though little was changed beyond period detail) and the film went into production in January 1960.

Strictly speaking, it has no place in this chapter for it concerns the exploits of a sub-Dracula vampire called Baron Meinster (David Peel), but, in a determined effort to justify the rather misleading title, Hammer included Dr Van Helsing in the film and set it in Transylvania after Dracula’s death. This could not altogether make up for the Count’s absence, but the results still contained some excellent moments and, as in the sequel to Frankenstein, a greater assurance in dealing with the paraphernalia of the myth (silver chains, holy water, etc). In one palpably Freudian sequence an aged sorceress (Freda Jackson) claws the earth over the vampire’s grave, urging it to break out (‘I know it’s dark my dear, but you must try’). The spirited climax sees Van Helsing in danger of succumbing after being bitten until, in a moment of puritanical strength, he purges the wound with a red-hot iron and then uses the blades of an old windmill to make a moonlight cross which destroys the vampire. Sadly, this was the last appearance of Van Helsing in Hammer’s repertoire for some time, but the figure of the scholar/scientist/poet/priest whose weapons are books and ritual formulae is never absent from Fisher’s work for very long (next appearing as Professor Meister in The Gorgon) and owes much to Stoker’s Dutch hero. He in turn was based on a real and somewhat fascinating figure, Arminius Vambery, a Professor of Oriental languages at the old university of Budapest whom Stoker met in 1890.

It was not until 1964 that Christopher Lee finally consented to play Dracula again since he was by now better established in the public’s mind as a star in his own right and had less to fear from the role.

The story’s conception had begun with a memo from Anthony Hinds to James Carreras on 11 December 1964.

I have written a new Dracula story which I think will work. Jimmy Sangster is free to write the screenplay if he can start right away (before he becomes involved in The Nanny again). He is asking £3,000 [around £77,000 today] which is as much as we can afford for these back-to-back subjects. Shall I tell him to go ahead?

James Carreras agreed and Sangster began. The reference to ‘back-to-back subjects’ is interesting. Hammer were constantly aware that their gothic subjects could only make money if the costs were kept in check. The ill-fated The Gorgon a year earlier had actually lost them money. It was Hinds who came up with the notion of cutting costs by utilising Bernard Robinson’s genius for set construction and adapting his standing sets over several pictures. 1965 was the year when they put it into practice: Dracula Prince of Darkness would get first crack at the sets. Its budget was £102,669 (around £2.7 million in 2024) and the production went another £5,914 (around £160,000) over. Christopher Neame, in his book Rungs on a Ladder: Hammer Films, describes Terence Fisher coming on the set for the first shot on the first day of Dracula Prince of Darkness, consulting the script and starting to laugh until there were tears in his eyes. The reason? The schedule called for a wide shot of the entrance to Dracula’s castle. Such a shot was totally impossible given the set’s limitations.

But this despairing laughter is not reflected on the screen, where his direction is superbly confident. As we have seen, the lengthy pre-credits flashback, which recapitulated the denouement of the earlier film with Lee, was an inspired intervention by Anthony Hinds after he discovered the final cut was some minutes short of its contracted length. Following it, Dracula: Prince of Darkness begins extremely well, and sustains the tensions admirably for its enormously protracted opening preamble, with the film taking some trouble to analyse the psychology of the victims long before they are delivered into the hands of Dracula. By a judicious use of close-ups for emphasis it is very quickly established that of the two English couples holidaying in the Carpathians, Alan and Helen (Charles Tingwell and Barbara Shelley) are repressed and prudish, while Charles and Diana (Francis Matthews and Suzan Farmer) are more relaxed and sensual. Helen complains bitterly about the moral laxity of the peasants and is outraged by the minor indulgence of a priest whom they meet in an inn. Her stiff Victorian morality, and the mild pomposity of her husband, mark them out immediately as victims for Dracula and accordingly it is Helen who is increasingly and justifiably afraid when the four are stranded in the forest.

Seeking refuge in Dracula’s castle, the couples encounter (in a set typical of Bernard Robinson at his best) a huge baronial chamber which is laid for a feast and yet deserted, in itself a key romantic image of considerable significance and beauty. Diana, the coquette, who wears a crucifix, is eager to meet the master of the house, but the terrified Helen is scarcely reassured by the appearance of Klove – Dracula’s servant – who informs them in a particularly apt reference back to Stoker’s novel, ‘My Master’s hospitality is renowned’. After the couples have accepted this offer of shelter and retired to their rooms, Fisher allows his camera to prowl around the deserted castle in a series of movements which evoke with a poetic grandeur the unseen presence of the absent host. Then Dracula’s spirit begins to work on Helen, and Klove lures Alan down to the cellar where he cold-bloodedly uses him as the basis of an elaborate and gruesome ritual to resuscitate his master. The English critics were particularly harsh about this sequence when the film appeared, seeing it as needlessly vicious, but their objections were perhaps based on a misunderstanding of the whole Dracula myth.

The detailed portrayal of Dracula’s re-birth in Dracula: Prince of Darkness is a precise observation of a religious (or anti-religious) ritual and, on this basis, it might be easily compared on a stylistic/thematic level with, say, the mass in Bergman’s Winter Light. Its function is to stress, just as Stoker had done, that Dracula was an invented image of Christ and that Klove was performing a kind of symbolic crucifixion/resurrection; indeed, so many great popular myths are based on this kind of theme that it seems odd there should be any need to defend it, especially since Fisher goes on to give the whole episode a specific irony in terms of his characters. Alan’s blood gives life to Dracula and so, in a mystical sense, Alan becomes Dracula; the mild pompous Victorian is transformed into the wildly sensual voracious anti-hero who immediately claims Alan’s wife Helen as his first victim. Thus, as the long opening section of the film ends, the repressed Victorian couple are metamorphosed, in an image of unforgettable symbolic power, into the sensual and chaotic energy which the other characters will have to destroy. It should also be noted that after the opening section of Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Fisher changes the stylistic approach of his film. The audience, who have witnessed the occult ritual of Dracula’s resurrection, may well feel implicated in what they have seen for, when Charles returns to the castle to look for Alan and Helen, the camera remains inside looking out at him, in complete contrast to the subjective shots of the night before. Shots from the vampire’s point of view proliferate as the film continues, culminating in the scene where Dracula is trying to gain access to a monastery, and we watch Renfield the lunatic through a window from the outside.

The appearance of Renfield in Dracula: Prince of Darkness is a belated and fragmented interpolation from Stoker’s novel, and scarcely does justice to the original conception but, although the monastery scenes in the film represent a slight reduction of intensity, they do contain the extraordinary image of Helen’s purification. Barbara Shelley has never achieved a more perfect incarnation of the demonic physicality of the vampire than in this sequence where the monks hold down her writhing and screaming body until they finally manage to stake her: it is a precise, expressive metaphor for the subjugation of the flesh and it is enormously augmented by our memory of Helen as she was, the prim straitlaced Englishwoman. Despite such touches, Dracula: Prince of Darkness is slightly weakened by the fact that the Count himself has been reduced to a one-dimensional character. Lee was still able to convey a magnificent presence in his comparatively brief appearances, but without dialogue it was impossible for him to do much more. Consequently, he was reduced to the fiery, hissing animality of one of his own victims and the film also lacked the balancing force of Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing. Even so, Fisher, Hinds and Sangster were careful to compensate by giving an adequate hearing to Father Sandor (Andrew Keir), and the film with its picturesque climax still ranks as one of the best of the Dracula films; in atmosphere and theme it reflects something of the spirit which had fired the last half of Stoker’s novel, in which the Count becomes more of a sinister background force.

Barbara Shelley and Francis Matthews in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (Terence Fisher, UK, 1966).

Sadly, Hammer now proceeded to hand over the Dracula series to a succession of directors, with the result that the stylistic consistency of Fisher’s work in this genre was lost; none of the subsequent films can quite compare with his. In 1968 another instalment was mounted with the significantly biblical title Dracula Has Risen From The Grave.

Freddie Francis, who had made The Evil of Frankenstein in 1963, was hired to direct (he is the only director other than Fisher who worked on both of the old Hammer’s main series) from a screenplay by Anthony Hinds; Veronica Carlson – at the time one of Hammer’s favourite actresses – took the female lead. Francis’ work as a director in British horror films was variable as anyone who has sat through The Evil of Frankenstein or, far worse, The Deadly Bees, will admit. But there is no doubt that at his best (The Skull) he is capable of powerful work. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave is somewhere between these two poles. Francis’ sense of atmosphere serves him well in the early stages of the film as, at the height of a storm, two priests struggle towards Dracula’s castle in a futile attempt to exorcise it; Lee’s presence is as sombrely powerful as ever, with a few meagre lines of dialogue adding marginally to the characterisation. But where Francis and many other directors trying to follow Fisher (including even Don Sharp in Kiss of the Vampire) have failed – though I concede the scripts are equally to blame – is in their inability to relate the atmosphere and poetry of vampirism to the rest of the plot. Francis is able to communicate the sensuality of Dracula and his victims well enough (in France the picture was re-titled Dracula et les Femmes), but Zena’s (Barbara Ewing) overt lust for the Count is finally much less powerful than the subtle aura of sensuality that Fisher had woven around Barbara Shelley in the earlier film. What is worse, even the erotic aspects of Dracula Has Risen From The Grave have a purely arbitrary aspect. The banal hero and heroine are linked to Dracula only by the most tedious of plot contrivances, and the positive element represented by the Monsignor (Rupert Davies) is underplayed and unconvincing. Stripped of a truly compelling through-line, the film has its share of moments but is finally reduced to an inconsequential splurge of arbitrary religious and sexual motifs.

Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (Freddie Francis, UK, 1968).

There is no denying though, the film, which has its admirers, worked for Hammer and ensured another in the series would follow. This was Taste the Blood of Dracula, written by Anthony Hinds, which went into production just over a year later, on 27 October 1969. In quite a bold move for Hammer it was the first feature film to be directed in this country by Peter Sasdy, a Hungarian who had previously done some exceptional work for BBC television (including a version of Wuthering Heights). Hinds and Sasdy between them concocted a strange hybrid of a film which was, in certain respects, almost as close to Bram Stoker’s novel as Fisher’s first venture in the series. This is not to claim that on a basic narrative level Taste the Blood of Dracula bears any relation at all to Stoker. Despite the fact that the Count is, by a masterly series of contrivances, finally and officially brought to Victorian London (the pre-credits sequence ranks among Hammer’s best work), his presence and the people he encounters are all quite new.

Where Sasdy remains close to the original is in the way he uses the spectre of Dracula to break open the façade of Victorian society or, to be more exact, the façade of the Victorian family. It is no accident that in the original novel Van Helsing repeatedly alludes to the ‘family’ constellation of all those who were helping to oppose Dracula: this link between them is exemplified in symbolic terms by the frequent inter-family blood transfusions that Dracula’s activities necessitate. Sasdy and Hinds took this cue from the novel, together perhaps with a certain amount of theorising at the time about the schizophrenogenic family², to mount a film in which Dracula presides over the disintegration of the nineteenth-century family structure. Taste the Blood of Dracula begins with the hypocritical fathers of three Victorian families going to an East End brothel in search of extra-marital excitement. Losing interest in this, they begin to dabble in Satanism and, after a protracted ceremony in a lonely church, Dracula is revived. The fathers have by this time returned in some disarray to their homes where they exert a despotic tyranny over their meek and insipid children who, in the first section of the film, appear nauseatingly lifeless and wooden (Sasdy himself describes the effect he wanted as ‘bloodless’). Dracula now begins to visit the children and becomes the new ‘authority’ figure, the antifather and anti-Christ, replacing the corruption and impotence of the old. Under his spell they are suddenly endowed with a vigorous and destructive life; Alice Hargood (Linda Hayden), at first a mawkish teenager, turns on her repulsive father with an axe before languishing over Dracula’s coffin. Meanwhile, Lucy (Isla Blair) kills her own father and, in a frenzy of affection for her new one, is sucked dry of blood, leaving only one of the children, Paul (Anthony Higgins), unaffected. He finally manages to extricate Alice from Dracula’s spell, but not before all the fathers are dead and the families decimated.

Taste the Blood of Dracula (Peter Sasdy, UK, 1970): Linda Hayden.

Even by Hammer’s standards this is an extraordinarily overt Freudian allegory, but fortunately Sasdy is able to incorporate much of it into the imagery of the film rather than alluding to it in the dialogue (with the result that at the time many people missed it altogether). Though by the end the story has become somewhat repetitious, Sasdy also proved that he understood almost as well as Fisher the religious aspect of the Dracula myth, for the rituals and relics in the film are as intriguing as those is Dracula: Prince of Darkness, while Arthur Grant’s elegant photography adds enormously to the overall atmosphere. Sasdy was to make one more foray into a kind of vampire territory for Hammer with Countess Dracula (1970), which charted the unbelievably sadistic practices of the Hungarian Countess, Erzsébet Báthory, who supposedly slaughtered hundreds of virgins in her castle in the early sixteenth century. Based on Valentine Penrose’s chilling study The Bloody Countess, this was a crudely ‘magical’ reading of the legend though the murders were carried out with a remarkable relish. But perhaps the most notable thing about Countess Dracula was that it continued Sasdy’s preoccupation with the themes and ideas of Taste the Blood of Dracula, and again chronicled the symbolic disintegration of a family, with Bathory, a nightmarish mother, finally turning on her own daughter for the blood that she needs to preserve her youth. Sasdy’s final work for Hammer, Hands of the Ripper, showed the same Freudian preoccupations as his earlier films, being an Edwardian story, somewhat reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Marnie. Angharad Rees plays the daughter of Jack the Ripper whose mind and memories are being explored by the Freudian Dr Pritchard (Eric Porter). It is quite a striking variation on Hammer’s usual themes, but too quickly moves into a predictable arc despite a strong performance by Angharad Rees.

At this stage it is relevant to note that since 1968 Hammer had been making a Dracula film every year, whereas earlier there had been much longer gaps. And, as we have seen, now that Anthony Hinds had left the company, The Scars of Dracula proved something of a fiasco. It seems to have been an early draft of a script Hinds was tinkering with, in case Lee left the series, but now in any case Hinds was no longer around to shepherd it. Roy Ward Baker, an industry veteran responsible for movies like A Night To Remember (who had added the Ward to his name sometime in the 1960s to avoid confusion with a sound editor), had done good work but horror was never his forte and the film has virtually nothing to recommend it. Even the normally powerful resurrection sequence is dealt with hastily and unintelligibly before the credits (with the Count apparently revived by a bolt of lightning striking a coffin!), while most of the action is reduced to an utterly pointless series of incidents concerning the various young leads. There are a few minor flashes, as when the film briefly returned Lee to his proper role as the icily charming host and later when he scales the wall of his own castle as in the novel. But these tantalising fragments did little to redeem a script of unmitigated dullness which at one point (in Hammer’s most unforgivable blunder) actually called for Dracula to stab and whip a victim!

However, even at this low ebb, in what was to be the last of the period Hammer Dracula movies, it remains surprising, when you examine the whole cycle, how much of Byron’s original personality cult continues to pervade them. Even in The Scars of Dracula the Count is still recognisably a swashbuckling, arrogant aristocrat in purple lined cloak with all the trappings of decadent nobility. The attention is still focused on his eyes above all other physical characteristics (just as in Polidori’s story) while his power is still strongest over women. The whole syndrome seems to have a durability which is remarkable in the circumstances even if its Romantic origins remained for decades largely unrecognised. And The Scars of Dracula would not mark the end of Hammer’s long and remunerative liaison with Stoker’s character.

Two years later Hammer decided to revive him in a film with the inevitably eye-catching (yet soon obsolescent) title Dracula A.D. 1972. It would be the first time Cushing and Lee had worked together as Van Helsing and the Count since the original. And the concept at its vaguest was surely right. By the 1970s, the time had come for a modern interpretation of Dracula. In fact, several short stories had speculated on just this possibility, and Rosemary’s Baby had brilliantly managed to re-imagine witchcraft and devil worship in modern New York. Given careful handling the idea might have succeeded, perhaps even inaugurated a new series.

But Hammer ploughed into the field with a late entry to the Swinging London movies of the 1960s which invited derision at every possible juncture. After a preamble involving Van Helsing and Dracula in their final nineteenth-century conflict, Dracula’s ashes are buried in a churchyard; 100 years later a demonic teenager called Johnny Alucard (a feeble anagram first employed by Universal in Son of Dracula) persuades his teenage gang to hold a black magic ceremony in the deconsecrated church where the Count is buried and Dracula is revived. But one of the girls who visited the church is Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham), niece of Lorrimer Van Helsing, a descendant of the original vampire hunter, and soon all his suspicions are alerted. Subsequently, without moving from the old church, Dracula succeeds in establishing a little colony of teenage vampires though his main target is Jessica. Aided by the police, her grandfather succeeds in destroying the vampires and finally saves Jessica, confronting and destroying Dracula in the church.

As will be clear from the synopsis, the makers of Dracula A.D. 1972 – writer Don Houghton and director Alan Gibson – did not even attempt to come to terms with the opening problem of any modern Dracula: namely how to relate the vampire figure to contemporary society. Stoker, in fact, did this marvellously well. His Dracula was set in the present and he did everything in his book’s opening section to emphasise this formidable gentleman was equipped to deal with legal matters, railway timetables and other aspects of the Victorian urban world. This made him more, not less, frightening. And it enabled his readers to imagine the Count’s subtle infiltration of London society.

Peter Cushing as Van Helsing in Dracula A.D. 1972 (Alan Gibson, UK, 1972).

The makers of Dracula A.D. 1972 do exactly the opposite. They bring Dracula to modern London in the first few minutes but then do everything in their power to confine him, making it crystal clear this snarling and anachronistic dandy would be quite incapable of putting one foot outside the church without attracting the attention of the entire metropolis. As a result, most of the action has to be spent on (of all things) some tired police procedure. Lee does his best, managing a residual power within the confines of the script, while Peter Cushing has a more interesting role as the anthropologist Lorrimer Van Helsing who lives with his granddaughter (Beacham). In fact the first scene between the two of them, with Van Helsing voicing his anxieties about his granddaughter, manages to be quite touching and is probably the best thing in the film. Mostly, though, the young leads have a miserable time, which is hardly surprising when they are expected to say lines like ‘A little sing-in with a little love-in on the side,’ or ‘Are you taking me for a twit? It was a tired scene!’ Christopher Neame (not to be confused with Hammer’s assistant director Christopher Neame quoted elsewhere) played Johnny Alucard at a time when this actor was tentatively being considered as a successor to Christopher Lee.

Yet it was becoming obvious by now Hammer never would find anyone to rival Cushing and Lee. The discovery of these two stars in the same movie a quarter of a century earlier had proved to be one of those great accidental jackpots which occur all too rarely in the history of cinema. And, it should be noted, even by this point, Lee was scarcely older than Lugosi had been in the original Universal production.

The same team fared only slightly better for Hammer the following year in The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Christopher Lee’s farewell to the part. Here Professor Van Helsing is summoned by the London police after the discovery of a black magic circle involving government ministers. He discovers a secret research centre that seems to be concerned with a mysterious plague virus and then several girl vampires in a cellar. Concluding that Dracula must be involved, he visits an office block that has been built on the church where the Count’s remains were buried. Here, in the film’s one real imaginative coup, Van Helsing finds that the property millionaire D. D. Denham is Dracula himself. Finally, after Van Helsing and his granddaughter Jessica (played this time by Joanna Lumley) are imprisoned, someone manages to turn the sprinklers on and, in the film’s thoroughly enfeebled climax, the Count is impaled on a hawthorn bush.

It was an ignominious and quite illegitimate last exit, but at least the rest of the film marked some improvement on its predecessor and some have championed it. There are moments suggesting how effective a modern transposition of the Dracula myth could have been if handled with a sufficiently subversive zeal. What better role for a modern vampire in London at that time than a city dealer or (as here) a property speculator? But the film is betrayed by its tired sub-Avengers style, by a sub-jazz score and by a script which frequently takes the easy way out. The silver bullets may be forgiven but, even at his most desperate, Anthony Hinds would surely have resisted the temptation to have the Count protected by heavies in afghan coats on motorcycles.

In the years that followed Hammer’s final Dracula, Hollywood returned to the original twice. John Badham and Frank Langella’s Dracula of 1979 drew its origins from Langella’s hugely successful spell as the Count in a reworking of the play on Broadway. Later Francis Ford Coppola’s more faithful (and at times highly erotic) 1992 adaptation with Gary Oldman, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, boasted a budget Hammer could never have matched and won big audiences. Both these new versions played obsessively on the Count as a tragic figure, driven by an obsession with his lost love. This has always seemed a very strange reading of Stoker’s novel with only the most marginal support in the text, and one that also risks reducing the Count – a figure whom Bram Stoker quite explicitly identified with the devil – to a dull and conventional tragic hero. Indeed, it risks rendering Dracula as feeble as one of the Mummy films, which often feature the reincarnation of lost loves. Some critics have called the notion Byronic – perhaps because of Byron’s infatuation with his cousin – yet there is little evidence the poet’s behaviour or manner was ever governed by such a conventional love-quest. And it is fair to say, I think, that despite the commercial success of the Coppola movie, neither of the more recent Hollywood Draculas has had the cultural impact of Lugosi or Lee – something admittedly that may now be impossible.

Any discussion of Dracula on film should end with a word on Christopher Lee. There is a moment near the beginning of his often-enlightening book on Hammer when Christopher Neame, who was assistant director on many of the films, describes the first time he ever saw Lee on the set. Neame and his camera mates are hanging around on the first day of shooting of Dracula Prince of Darkness when Albert, a large affable man on the crew, nudges the others and announces: ‘Dad-Drac is among us,’ nodding towards the stage door. Neame gazes where he is pointing and spies Christopher Lee looking magnificent in robe, shirt, trousers, boots, fangs, not to mention black and red lenses, wandering discreetly onto the sound stage.

The image of this entrance stays with me. Because you cannot help reflecting that, for Lee, this would be the start of what must have always felt a very long and, at times, lonely vigil. Anyone who has ever been on a film set knows the sheer agonised boredom it can entail. Donald Sutherland once observed that the process is ‘like trying to observe a watchmaker who disappears to the toilet every minute.’ Making exactly the same point, screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr (creator of Three Days of the Condor and many other great scripts), once described to me how he enjoyed taking friends onto the most lavish star-studded film set he could find, just so he could amuse himself by counting down the minutes until they were screaming to be let out. Sets can be energising if you are utterly engaged at every moment but few people are, other than the director and camera team, and for most of the time they are stupefyingly dull, with nothing to do but wait and look and chat inconsequentially and then wait some more.

Now think of enduring this in an uncomfortable and painful costume and then imagine too that, during these long periods of mind-numbing boredom, quite suddenly someone will demand that you step forward and focus all the energy at your disposal to the utmost of your ability for a few minutes with the entire production wholly dependent on your degree of concentration. Indeed, during those moments you are the production (never more so than in the case of Lee and Dracula). And all the time that you are waiting for this call you are constantly and acutely aware if you do not perform at once, on cue and to the maximum, then the whole venture will be dead in the water. To be able to give all that again and again is star quality and something most people find hard to imagine, let alone achieve. Yet he did it every time.

1.Lee did later use it in the Jess Franco Count Dracula in 1970, a stylish if very low-budget film which emphasised the spookier aspects of the story but completely ignored the Count’s initial charm.

2.R. D. Laing’s theories that the family as an institution might in certain cases induce schizophrenia in children, though now widely challenged, were a major subject of media discussion at the time.

6

Other Approaches to Horror

Jack the Ripper (avec Flesh and the Fiends, Circus of Horrors et Horrors of the Black Museum) représente un des plus hauts degrés de l’Horreur pure. Film d’exception, d’une sexualité délirante, parfait manuel des perversions sexuelles, Jack the Ripper est un des plus grands films de ‘L’Horrifique’ cinema Anglo Saxon.

Alain Lebris, Midi-Minuit Fantastique, No. 2

Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist as in a fairytale of Hauff’s, feet which dance by themselves, as in the book by Schaeffer which I mentioned above – all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them. As we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex.

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (Works XVII)

SADIAN MOVIES

As we have seen, the puritanical climate of Britain in the late 1950s determined that the critics seized on one factor (and one factor alone) in Hammer’s new style horror movies: an SO, ‘Sadists Only’, certificate was suggested, even though the love of violent spectacle had been a major constituent of English art for several hundred years. The letters would certainly have been more apt if they had stood for ‘Selwynists Only’, simply because Selwynism, in its role as the less clinical, philosophical and sophisticated version of Sadism, is much more evident in Hammer’s films. But one paradoxical aspect of the critical obsession with ‘Sadism’ was that various other producers, with considerably less intuition and originality than Hammer, did subsequently make a concerted attempt to mount movies that came much closer to De Sade than would otherwise have been conceivable. On 20 October 1958, while Hammer were shooting The Hound of the Baskervilles (which was passed without cuts as an ‘A’ certificate), a Gainsborough veteran, with 13 features behind him, called Arthur Crabtree, inaugurated this particular cycle with a glossy catalogue of tortures called Horrors of the Black Museum.

This film, which was released in Britain in April 1959, is so far as I can see the first UK colour horror movie with a contemporary setting. Like most of the films in this bracket it delighted the French and Belgian avant-garde and is the first of a trilogy of truly Sadian films made under the auspices of Anglo-Amalgamated. The other two, Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers) and Peeping Tom (Michael Powell) followed in 1959, and all three are curiously similar, aesthetically and thematically (if not in quality), though they were made by different directors in different studios (Merton Park, Beaconsfield and Pinewood respectively). Their visual inspiration is 1950s pornography, while their central preoccupation is with the British public’s insatiable appetite for crimes of violence: Black Museum is about a crime reporter who commits murder so that he can satisfy his readers’ enormous demands for gruesome detail. Circus of Horrors concerns a circus owner/surgeon who arranges a series of ghoulish accidents for troublesome performers and consequently packs in the crowds. Peeping Tom – undoubtedly the summation of the genre and its masterpiece – involves a pornographer/movie cameraman who is obsessed with photographing his victims in the moment of death.

Horrors of the Black Museum (Arthur Crabtree, UK/US, 1959).

All three films are shot in lurid 1950s Eastmancolor which instantly captures the tatty world of cheap sensationalism (crime fiction, the circus and pornography) in which they are set, and in this respect, they are immediately separated aesthetically from Hammer who employed the old pre-1960 Eastmancolor only twice in The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula. It was Technicolor which had given Hammer’s early horrors their distinctive muted and subtle flavour from The Revenge of Frankenstein and The Mummy right up to The Curse of the Werewolf and Phantom of the Opera. They did return to Eastmancolor for Kiss of the Vampire in 1962, but by that time the processes were far less distinguishable.

The title Horrors of the Black Museum refers to the legendary Scotland Yard museum of murder weapons and immediately evokes the English fascination with murder. (Orson Welles did his famous radio series Black Museum on much the same theme seven years earlier.) The gruesome opening image of the film more or less crystallises the themes and concerns of the whole Anglo series, and became the focus of a very important censorship battle which it now turns out the BBFC finally lost hands down (see The British Sadian movie and the Censor below). A red post office van draws up at a house to deliver a parcel to a shapely blonde, who eagerly takes out a pair of binoculars; she looks through them and adjusts the focusing device whereupon she screams, drops them and covers her eyes as blood appears between her fingers. The binoculars fall to the carpet and we see that two concealed spikes have leapt up and gouged her eyes. This ingeniously vicious, and utterly exploitative, opening was to leave an indelible cinematic mark. It also specifically introduces the idea of voyeurism and the rest of the film is a kind of roller-coaster ride through various nauseating and gruesome actes gratuits, which ends with an enthusiastic crowd at Battersea Fun Fair enjoying a double murder and a suicide. Michael Gough is the museum-keeper/crime writer (his next book is to be called The Poetry of Murder) who conducts a series of elaborate practicals in his spare time; and the action makes it clear that he is able to carry out his crimes simply through public demand. We see him encountering fans in a bookshop and being surrounded by the popular clamour that follows each successive murder. The plot might deserve detailed consideration as a serious comment on violence if it were not executed quite so titillatingly. Crabtree’s direction (no doubt urged on by producer Herman Cohen, see below) is unashamedly blatant, lingering over the prosecution of each crime with the maximum enjoyment and making the most out of every sexual innuendo. His approach makes it impossible to take the film seriously and the overall effect is finally almost innocuous like a grand guignol review sketch. Most of the more fanciful murders are clearly used only as a means of conveying sexual suggestion, and the second one becomes an excuse for a prolonged cinematic flirtation with an attractive blonde who gets killed in her own bed to the accompaniment of a loud and oddly upbeat jazz score. In view of the battles conducted with the censor, it is certainly bizarre to reflect that in 1958 it was possible to include an erotic high angle shot of a blonde lying on a bed, with her head suddenly severed by a guillotine, while the BBFC would never have allowed anyone to include a shot of the same girl in bed with a lover. Murders in films of the 1950s occasionally seem to have their whole raison d’être in the fact that is was impossible to show any other kind of passionate encounter between male and female.

The film – which incidentally contains some poor performances, notably from Shirley Ann Field though it can hardly be her fault given she was so good in Losey’s The Damned – was scripted and produced by the well-known exploitation producer Herman Cohen and remains compelling as a reflection of its time. It was indeed a time when the repressed was returning with a vengeance. Circus of Horrors, which was made the following year on a similarly audacious and decadent theme, is, on the other hand, a slightlly more sophisticated piece of work. Anton Diffring plays Schuller, a plastic surgeon who is forced to leave England after operating illegally on a young girl (Evelyn Morley); it is implied that the operation was only one aspect of their liaison, so that Schuller is immediately cast in the role of surgeon/ torturer/lover on Baudelairian lines. In France, Schuller is excited by a young girl with a scarred face (‘Rather an interesting face, don’t you think?’ he says as he caresses it lovingly), and he manages to operate successfully on her. Later, he is responsible for the death of her circus-owner father and, in his place, Schuller proceeds to people his circus with ex workers and criminals, operating on them to create ‘the most beautiful circus in the world’. He even models the faces of his circus stars on the world’s most famous paintings and, when they become troublesome, he arranges accidents before a gasping audience. All of the underlying sadism of the circus which in reality so much depends upon the possibility of death and mutilation is here brought to the surface: a knife-throwing act ends with a knife plunging into the semi-nude target, an acrobat falls to her death from a rope-ladder and, in the most extraordinary scene of all (which may well delight people who hate circuses), an amateurish female lion-tamer is gradually set upon and mauled by the rebellious animals. Finally, in a high angle shot, Schuller is run down by his first unsuccessful patient, the hideously scarred Evelyn Morley, in front of the circus’s ‘Temple of Beauty’.

As this account suggests, the plot from George Baxt (who supplied an uncredited gravedigging scene to Revenge of Frankenstein) has all the makings of vivid grand guignol and the incorporation by former Rank editor Hayers of bizarre touches (like Schuller embracing a lover swathed in bandages after an operation) sometimes achieves a wildly decadent and romantic flavour. He also uses the circus with considerable imagination so that it quickly becomes a comment on the rest of the film and brings home (as Crabtree’s film never really does) the implications of the public’s appetite for the sensational and the grotesque. But much of the action is let down by the same flatness and unintentional vulgarity which permeated Horrors of the Black Museum, while, as in that film, the construction and motivation often seem too close for comfort to the merely pornographic. Scenes without sexy or violent possibilities, like the police investigation, remain utterly stereotyped and unconvincing.

The lion’s cage in Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers, UK, 1960).

The masterpiece of Anglo’s Sadian trilogy is undoubtedly Powell’s Peeping Tom, which fully deserves its present reputation as one of the most complex and mature films ever made in England. It is the film which, thanks to the English critics, destroyed Powell’s career until it was rescued by Martin Scorsese, a longtime champion of Powell’s work. Peeping Tom is equally saturated in the pale imagery of 1950s pornography, it is very much about the ‘male gaze’, but, at the same time, maintains a rigorous critical distance from it. Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is a voyeur/film cameraman who takes pornographic pictures to make extra money and carries his camera everywhere with him. He has begun to murder women in order to make documentary horror movies of their faces in death, and projects them privately, not daring to tell his naïve girlfriend (Anna Massey) about his compulsion. This may sound horrible but every second we can see Mark is a gentle man in conflict with himself and soon we understand why.

The way in which Peeping Tom amplifies the concerns of the earlier films should already be obvious and may be exemplified by a comparison of their opening sequences. Both Circus of Horrors and Horrors of the Black Museum begin with scenes of mutilation, the one with the girl who removes her bandages too soon, the other with the trick binoculars. Both scenes indirectly suggest voyeurism: Hayers, through his visual technique (though this becomes more effective in the circus sequences later in his film), and Crabtree via the traditionally gruesome image of spikes which gouge out the eyes. Powell, on the other hand, faces the implications of the theme much more directly and begins by announcing that his film will be ‘about’ the experience of watching a horror film. It starts with a lengthy take (of Mark encountering and killing a sex worker) which, after a brief establishing shot, is photographed entirely through the lens of Mark’s 16mm camera. The sequence deserves credit as one of the very few genuinely Brechtian moments in the history of the cinema. Every component – the reduced frame, the clicking of the camera motor, the whirr of the tape recorder and the clumsiness of the camera technique – is designed to enforce our awareness that we are watching a film. Yet at the same time – as a true counterpoint – the director ensures that the detail of the scene is realistic: the woman is no glamorous starlet; there is an emphasis on the money involved and the dinginess of the street and room. It is also notable that every murder in Peeping Tom is preceded by the victim’s attempt to seduce the man behind the camera and all three victims – sex worker, starlet and softcore porn star – rely on the male gaze for their business. The sequence, like all the other violence in the film, compels us to examine our own complicity in the act and it is this disturbing mixture of guilt and anxiety that Powell’s technique is so brilliantly calculated to arouse. This may go some way towards explaining the anger of the critics who were confronted with it in 1960.

Carl Boehm as Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, UK, 1960).

Later, other aspects of the film echo the earlier Anglo horrors. Powell’s use of Shirley Ann Field as an overacting star is surely a joke at the expense of Crabtree’s Black Museum (which it seems Powell saw), as she faces here an exasperated fictional movie director (Esmond Knight) urging her on; finally Mark succeeds in photographing her terror by allowing her to discover one of his victims in a trunk. Similarly, when Mark lovingly photographs the scarred model in the porn studio, the scene is strongly reminiscent of Schuller’s excitement, faced with the scarred beauty in Circus of Horrors, but Powell’s approach incorporates a far more sophisticated understanding of the whole Sadian-narcissistic framework of this kind of horror: Mark wants to capture and enjoy his obsession in private rather than parade it in public like Schuller. The film also manages to undermine the ‘respectable’ alternatives to the tawdry psychopathological world that is being described, by a couple of neat cameos – Miles Malleson as the old gent in search of erotic ‘views’ and Bartlett Mullins as a charming psychiatrist who tells Lewis that a cure for scoptophilia is ‘easy, just a few years’ of analysis. It is not surprising that Peeping Tom is, like both other films, weakest in its positive elements. Carl Boehm remains excellent in the lead (Laurence Harvey, the original choice, would have been disastrous): Mark feels genuinely sad and lost – you can see the child in him – which is what makes the film bearable. But Anna Massey, his wholesome girlfriend, is perhaps just a little too insipid as written (no fault of the actress who gives a very fine performance), and Maxine Audley, the girl’s blind mother, risks overloading the symbolism almost to breaking point. Even so, the film’s weaknesses never come near to unbalancing it, and the casting of Powell himself, as Mark’s evil father – glimpsed in home movies – who has induced his son’s psychosis by cruel experiments in the human response to fear, adds yet another haunting aspect. Peeping Tom remains an extraordinary phenomenon, one of those rare works of the western cinema (like Psycho) whose philosophical implications are practically limitless. It is also undoubtedly one of the few really adult works to have come out of the British film industry, though one would never describe it as a typically British film. Its brilliant analytical approach to horror is as close to being Symbolist as any in this book. Yet most of the English critics did their best to denounce and destroy it, just as they did with so many other English horrors. Only on this occasion, the outcry was so strong that it seems to have caused something like panic and a definite tightening at the BBFC, which is hardly surprising when you consider what was written. One critic, supposedly known for his stand against censorship in the cinema, had gone as far as to say: ‘The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain.’

The British Sadian Movie and the Censor

The appearance of such overtly sensationalist movies, in their way far grosser than Hammer, in this brief flurry from the spring of 1959 (with Jack the Ripper and Horrors of the Black Museum) to May 1960 when Peeping Tom and Circus of Horrors went on release, has always been considered something of a mystery. Subsequent horrors in the 1960s were far less extreme; indeed, many in the early 1960s like Night of the Eagle and Phantom of the Opera were so mild they got away with ‘A’ certificates. So what exactly had happened?

Now that the BBFC files have been opened, the answer is at last clear. There was, it seems, a brief window of latitude, piloted by Trevlyan, and almost certainly resulting from his uneasy knowledge, after Dracula in the summer of 1958, that Hammer’s films were proving very successful and very popular. As has been shown already, many at the censor’s office had fought a dogged and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to keep Hammer horror off UK screens. They had lost and subsequently, as the BBFC were well aware, the films had administered a huge shot in the arm to the UK film industry. By 1959 other producers were clamouring to get in on the action. They knew Hammer had established a beach-head and that the censor could hardly be seen to allow one company into the field, denying others. Also, as is often the way, many of these other producers were prepared to go further than Hammer.

Obviously word was now out in the industry that Hammer had shown how it was done. They had called the censor’s bluff, attended meetings, made all the right placatory noises, and then – refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer – had gone ahead and shot, often with some extra material that could be used as concessions later. It is true Hammer would pay a high price for all this in due course when the censor clamped down hard on them, and everyone else, at the start of the 1960s. But in 1958 that was still in the future, as was the furore that would descend around Peeping Tom. Consequently there was a brief window and several producers of the films discussed in this chapter took full advantage of that window.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the first through it was the American exploitaiton king Herman Cohen, best known for his celebrated I Was a Teenage Werewolf which he had released just after Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein. It was Cohen who masterminded Horrors of the Black Museum, described above, one of the most ferociously sensational of the Anglo trilogy. For a long time the BBFC file on this film has been missing but finally I was able to reproduce it from a microfiche and it makes fascinating reading. Indeed, in some ways it seems to have been a watershed.

A script had been submitted on 14 August 1958 and was read by Audrey Field. Her reaction was as ever very strongly negative, certainly in favour of an outright ban yet also different from before. Whereas, in the case of Hammer, she had been vituperative, furious and insulting, the tone now is far more sober, very much the tone of someone who knows they have lost a major battle and is marshalling forces for another.

‘I do not think’, she writes, ‘the makers should be encouraged to hope for a certificate from us. The X certificate, if given, would merely serve as an umbrella for out-of-the-way sadistic ideas and try the patience of decent people rather too far … We should not I think lose sight of the fact that a sharp increase in crimes of violence has accompanied a relaxation in our standards. Probably both these phenomena spring from the goaded, desperate and destructive spirit of an age hag-ridden with the threat of H-bombs and worse; but we cannot be sure that more violence and horror in films has not in some degree contributed to the decline of self-control among young grown-ups. I don’t feel inclined to suggest modifications in what is basically simply a vehicle for nastiness, but I have a record of all the ugliest and most revolting scenes, which I can produce if JT has to negotiate a compromise.’

‘ … if JT has to negotiate a compromise.’ This last sentence is telling. Examiners like Field were obviously feeling bruised by the compromises John Trevelyan had been negotiating with Hammer. The thrust of the above is quite clearly that now he should stop. But there is also a new caution in these comments for it is one thing to ban the unpopular and the unseen, quite another to go up against a large audience. Two years later after the assault on Peeping Tom – a film which incidentally meant nothing whatsoever to the general public – things would be very different.

As with Hammer, Audrey Field’s comments on the Horrors of the Black Museum script were echoed and amplified by other examiners: ‘THROW IT OUT AND LET THERE BE NO MERCY’ one called Mcg scrawled in large capitals on the report. Yet Trevelyan as ever sounded a more defensive note, himself writing: ‘As written it is very nasty but I don’t think we can reject the basic idea of a madman killing to be able to write about the crimes.¹ It is the maniacal side and the methods of killing … that are prohibited.’

So, Trevelyan wrote to Stuart Levy at Anglo on 22 August to summarise a discussion between himself and Levy and Nat Cohen on 21 August, after the makers had met with him directly. ‘The basic theme,’ he writes, ‘is acceptable but we are much concerned at the horror of some at least of the actual killings.’ Drawing attention to the contemporary setting, he emphasises that ‘some of the scenes, as now written, are repulsive.’

And predictably he focuses his attention on what was to become the most famous sequence of the film: ‘The murder of Gail with binoculars having needles in the lenses would probably be all right if no details were shown, including gruesome after effects and we would particularly deplore screaming or blood gushing … the murder of Jean with the home-made guillotine, as described in the script is very repulsive and should be done by implication rather than by direct shooting. We would like you to avoid any shots of the severed head and to keep blood to a minimum … if there is too much horror – particularly in the actual killings – the film will give both you and me a lot of trouble.’

The note of warning at the end is interesting for it reflects, probably with due honesty, how little Trevelyan personally wanted to cut or ban. At this point it does seem as though he considered himself a facilitator and, to be fair, it is almost unimaginable how different and difficult things would have been for the makers of these films if one of the examiners who wrote the reports had been dealing with them directly.² At the same time, given that there seems to have been no further communication between the team who made the picture and Trevelyan, until he saw the film the following December, some of the remarks above would seem a trifle naïve. Did he really imagine for a minute (without asking to see it scripted in shots) that the murder of Jean by guillotine in bed – another of the film’s most exploitative elements – would be reduced to a point where it was done ‘by implication’ (whatever that might mean). Also the famous binoculars scene would hardly have been comprehensible as an opening sequence without reaction and screaming ‘if no details were shown’.

At any event, on 7 December 1959 the three most controversial sequences were submitted to the examiners who were duly horrified. The binoculars scene came in for the most criticism and their notes are absolutely unambiguous: The scene was unacceptable, the screaming must be reduced and the shot of the blood gushing through the victim’s fingers as she puts her hands to her eyes must in any case (underlined in the examiners’ joint notes) be removed. Among other things, the notes also demand that the shot of the killer peering down before the guillotine strikes must also be cut.

Herman Cohen was dealing with the censor personally now and Trevelyan wrote to him on the 8 January. On the binoculars murder scene, Trevelyan wrote that it was

extremely unpleasant. There is far too much screaming by both girls and we do not like the shot of Gail with her hands over her eyes, blood gushing through her fingers … we hope you have an alternative take as requested earlier showing the girl with her hands over her eyes without blood. Otherwise we may have to ask you to remove the shot … In many ways this is the most unpleasant sequence in the film … the murder of the girl with the guillotine will need some alteration. We would like you to remove the shot of Rick’s face seen upside down before the guillotine is dropped, and we cannot allow the shot of Rick picking up the girl’s head and putting it in a bag.

Trevelyan’s letter is, it may be observed, strikingly softer than the notes of his examiners. The written conclusion of the viewing was that the scene of the girl with her hands over her eyes and blood coming through her fingers must in any case be removed. Trevelyan much more diplomatically expresses a hope that there is an alternate take and warns ‘we may have to ask you to remove it’, even though, as shot, the scene flagrantly disregards the censor’s earlier script advice on precisely this point. As to the guillotine shot, showing the murderer, the examiners stated it ‘must be removed’, while Trevelyan states more tentatively ‘we would like you to remove it’. He is much more strident about the scene in which Rick picks up the head and puts it in a bag, stating that he ‘cannot allow’ this. But this shot never seemed likely to get through in any case and may well have been placed strategically where it is in order to protect the earlier one.

For Herman Cohen now met with the censor, saying he would do his best to reduce screams in the opening, but he had no alternative take of the hands. And, by the time of his letter summarising the meeting on 9 January 1959, Trevelyan seems to have moderated his position considerably, for he states merely that he hopes the shot will be acceptable by, ‘your modifying it in other ways,’ a very far cry from the earlier call that it must ‘in any case’ be removed altogether. Herman Cohen appealed too against the excision of the shot of the killer before the guillotining, the film’s other strongest sequence. And, again, Trevelyan concedes, agreeing to reconsider this when the film is resubmitted. ‘You will appreciate,’ Trevelyan concludes in his letter, ‘that there has been a great deal of criticism about horror pictures generally and in particular about scenes such as the murders in this film. This is the reason why we have to be very careful when dealing with a picture like this.’

It is therefore obvious that at this point Trevelyan was struggling to be more lenient with this kind of picture in spite of his examiners. And Herman Cohen seems to have sensed as much. On 3 March the film was viewed again and the examiners found the binoculars scene much as it was before, minus a few screams covered by music. ‘The examiners,’ Trevelyan writes to Cohen, ‘found the visuals unacceptable’, referring specifically to the key controversial shot with the blood coming through the victim’s fingers: ‘I do not think by removing the shot you will lessen the impact and there is plenty to explain what has happened.’ But the censor now made yet another concession: ‘We are prepared to accept the scene of the murder by guillotine and to waive our original objection to the shot of Rick from the girl’s point of view on the bed. We shall not need to see the film again. If you will send me a written assurance that the deletion asked for in reel 1 has been made I will issue the “X” certificate.’

Once again this was an extremely conciliatory letter, the sort of letter in fact Hammer might have dreamed of. Trevelyan not only concedes the guillotine shot which the examiners had stated categorically in writing at their viewing ‘must be removed.’ But also, rather than demand the removal of the all-important shot of blood on the girl’s fingers as she covers her eyes in the binoculars scene, he merely urges its removal with the carrot that a certificate will be forthcoming sight unseen, once he is informed it has gone. Cohen saw his chance at once and in a letter of 4 March pleads with Trevelyan to see a shortened version of the shot:

I have endeavoured to do everything in shortening this scene to the very minimum footage that is necessary for my picture. I definitely feel that without this new short version sequence of the girl covering her eyes that my picture would lose its entire meaning of the story … As you know I have tried very hard to co-operate with you in every way during the course of the production of Horrors of the Black Museum.

The phraseology here is intriguing. How could a shot of bloody fingers over eyes ‘constitute the entire meaning’ of the story? But Cohen knew well it would be more than anyone had ever been allowed before and he could sell the film hard on it (as in fact he did with his strident trailer discussed earlier). And, with his protest that he had tried very hard to co-operate, it seems he was pushing all the right buttons. Within 24 hours John Trevelyan and unspecified examiners had looked at the reel again and decided they would accept it and approve the film, adding a somewhat forlorn last-minute plea that Cohen cut the other controversial shot of the bloody binoculars on the carpet.

But Cohen had won and he knew it. In fact, his reply of 9 March is somewhat regal:’I am leaving tomorrow morning for the States and I wish to thank you again for your co-operation and for all the courtesies extended to me by your office.’ He informs them additionally that the shot of the binoculars on the carpet (the subject of their new plea) had been shortened, but makes no offer to show it so nobody will ever know if it was. The two shots at stake, of the binoculars with spikes and of the bloody eyes, are the most violent and memorable in the film and Cohen had secured them both, not to mention the guillotine scene. He was the first producer to make the window work for him. But it would only be there for a further 12 months.

And Cohen was probably lucky in another respect. Because around exactly this time the BBFC had an even more angry dispute on their hands, perhaps the most protracted production versus censorship battle of the 1950s. And this was Jack the Ripper.

The script had arrived from Robert Baker and Monty Berman working on behalf of Regal International and Tempean, the same team responsible for the blatant Hammer Frankenstein imitation Blood of the Vampire in late 1957. With the exception of The Flesh and the Fiends (directed by John Gilling in 1959 and discussed elsewhere), the pair usually collaborated on these films in a slightly unorthodox fashion, each co-directing and co-producing.³

‘I think this is a monstrous script (the adjective is an understatement)’ wrote an unidentifiable BBFC examiner, very likely Audrey Field (on 1 December 1957), underlining the word ferociously. Among numerous objections were the constant references to prostitutes, gruesome operations, a murderer with two knives, gore and last but not least a cancan dance described as ‘orgiastic.’ The letter that went back to Monty Berman of Tempean on 4 December 1957 was for once apparently unambiguous:

I must tell you that we can hold out no hope of being able to give a certificate to a film based on this script. Or indeed to any film which purported to portray and comment on the known facts of the Ripper murders and reconstruct the actions and motives of the unknown murderer. The public will know Jack the Ripper to have been a murderer who attacked only prostitutes and who mutilated his victims into the bargain, and in our opinion this makes even the title too full of sordid and sadistic association to be acceptable as a film.

This was categorical. Many filmmakers would surely have given up at this point. The BBFC was saying even the title alone ruled it out. However, Monty Berman knew quite well from his friend Jimmy Sangster that Hammer had been given a very negative reaction to the Curse of Frankenstein script, yet even so they had persevered and made a fortune. So somewhat cheekily he made an appointment with the BBFC and turned up to it with Sangster himself. It was a shrewd move given that the censor had passed (admittedly through gritted teeth) Sangster’s work for Hammer. At the meeting, as a note in the censor’s file of 25 July 1958 shows, they agreed a complete rewrite and Jimmy Sangster said ‘that he was quite prepared to avoid having prostitutes altogether and would bear this point very much in mind.’ Weakening a little – as always seemed to happen in face-to-face meetings at this stage of the horror cycle before the Peeping Tom debacle – the always affable John Trevelyan now seems to have conceded the subject might be acceptable ‘as a kind of thriller with a shadowy figure moving through the foggy London streets and killing his victims off-screen without unpleasant shots and close-ups. Mr. Sangster agreed to avoid the scene at the end of which the principal character is shown disintegrating.’ There followed some bargaining over colour, indeed a deal was done in principle by which if the film went ahead in black-and-white the censor would overlook some of their original objections. The meeting ended with the censor offering ‘to discuss the treatment or script at any stage if our advice was wanted about particular scenes.’

Yet again the notes of this meeting in the BBFC file, which I summarise above, show the censor actually entering the filmmaking process, suggesting scenes and an approach. But, given what finally emerged, they also show how fatal such an engagement ultimately proves to censorship itself (at least before the panic of 1960). For the meeting marked another spectacular U-turn by the BBFC. What had been utterly banned even as a title was now permissible. From this point on therefore, with their foot in the door, it was clear the makers would go ahead even though, breaking Jimmy Sangster’s promise, the film certainly would contain ‘prostitutes’, indeed one of its key elements is a brothel above a music hall. And even the agreement reached over colour was not 100 per cent honoured by the makers. Some of Jack the Ripper was shot in colour; indeed, in America it was released with a colour climax.

There was some further discussion but shooting began and unsurprisingly the resulting film caused utter consternation when it was viewed. Numerous cuts were requested over nine reels and it must have infuriated the BBFC that most of them are very similar to what was in the first script, even down to details like the ‘orgiastic’ cancan. Included in the list were ‘the strangling of a prostitute, the attack on a barmaid, pouring of champagne over breasts, shots of cancan dancers’ bottoms, sexual material between client and prostitute, naked breasts, corpses, shots of weapons, of another murder victim’s face, and of the murderer coming to a bloody end.’ ‘I must impress upon you,’ wrote Trevelyan on 24 February 1959, ‘the importance of giving close attention to our requirements.’

And now something rather remarkable happened. For it would seem Tempean effectively refused to make the cuts. That is, they kept resubmitting the film with hardly any of them instituted. ‘Practically nothing cut’ wrote an anguished examiner after a fifth viewing on 1 March. On 3 March, Trevelyan writes to Berman ‘we were most disappointed … I thought I had made it clear in my letter of 24 February the cuts that were required.’ Still Tempean fought on, perhaps taking Sangster’s advice, certainly knowing Trevelyan disliked banning films. At last on 13 March, still perhaps smarting from the defeat over Horrors of the Black Museum only a few days earlier, the censor’s patience was finally exhausted and a very angry letter went out, probably fuelled by the knowledge he had been sweet-talked into enabling a film he and all his examiners were violently against. The film was ‘still completely unacceptable to us. As I have explained to you this kind of film is one which causes us great concern …we run the risk of considerable criticism. There has been plenty of warning about this. We have now viewed these scenes five times, quite apart from my viewing the reels with you. We have spent a great deal of valuable time on this film and are getting reluctant to give much more … the scenes must be cut extensively. Otherwise we will just have to give the film up.’

Joe Vegoda, who had taken over negotiations on behalf of Regal and Tempean, wrote back ‘your letter completely stunned me because I felt that together with the producers we have done everything possible to conform to your suggestions.’ A meeting was arranged and in a memo dated 16 March 1959 Trevelyan noted: ‘I think I made them see that that they must cut the murder scenes to ribbons if they are to be accepted, they may appeal on the less important lift-shaft scene. If they do this … we might perhaps be tolerant about this?’ (The ‘lift-shaft scene’ refers to the film’s climax in which the murderer is crushed in a hospital lift – the very scene issued partly in colour in the US.)

By 20 March, after much more cutting of the murders (though they were hardly cut to ribbons as Trevelyan said he required), a compromise was struck and the lift scene was left except for a trim where the blood welled up. The censor now deemed the rest acceptable and there was a certain amount of apologising all round. Jimmy Sangster, perhaps worried the matter would be held against him, even wrote personally to Trevelyan on 7 April: ‘You have a difficult enough job at the best of times and I’m sure that this particular item hasn’t made things any easier for you. Please believe me I followed your advice given at our meeting, I thought to the letter.

But I am only the writer and once the script has been finished and delivered I have no further say or even knowledge as to what goes on. I’m not going to say anything about the merits or demerits of the film but I can only apologise for what you may consider my part in the affair.’

Trevelyan was as ever gracious enough in reply on 9 April:

It was good of you to write I do realise that after delivering the script you had no part in making this film, indeed I guessed that when I saw the film! You will not be surprised we had a good deal of trouble with it. … I only wish you could be consulted in the actual making of your pictures.’ Trevelyan was still evidently so anxious about the film he even went to the trouble of writing to Vegoda ‘to express the hope that your publicity for the film will be discreet and unsensational. As you may know, a good deal of the criticism that has been made recently of this type of film has been made by people who have seen the publicity … a great deal of harm has been done by sensational scarifying publicity and that has made our work much more difficult. I do not for a moment imagine that you would use publicity of this nature but I feel that I ought to make this request of you … the KRS dealing with this matter are taking a strong line about sensational posters and that is all to the good.

But Trevelyan’s worst fears were confirmed when a district of Manchester did ban the film Jack the Ripper as ‘undesirable’ and of an ‘unduly gruesome and sadistic nature.’ This was the very thing his office was supposed to prevent. Councillor Mrs M. Dickinson, one of the team who vetted the film, reported, ‘I think the men were frightened to death.’

It would be interesting to see what a film based on the original script (which so far as I know does not survive) would have been like. No doubt cruder than what did emerge for, despite what would now be considered a very controversial subject, Jack the Ripper is a passably effective film. Indeed, like several other films of the period the sexual tension at its core seems almost to have been enhanced by the prolonged battle to get it on the screen. It is as if, by trying to stop the tide, the censor merely created more lurid and violent ebbs and flows within it. It is true that, as Trevelyan seems to have wished, the film is full of the gloomy fog-laden expressionism so inseparably associated with the murders in the English imagination. But also, in a way that the BBFC was clearly not prepared for, he also takes up his role as the anti-libidinal ego gone wild, a surgeon – crazed by venereal disease – who feels compelled to cut out the ‘foul malignant virus’ of the city. The modest but stylised interiors of London streets provide good atmosphere and, for all the attempts to stop him, Jimmy Sangster’s script exploits to the full the subconscious cruelty that may, at least in the inflamed romantic imagination, be inherent in surgery, utilising a Victorian hospital setting that ends with the lift crushing the murderer. It is strange to think now that what we are seeing (in the cut version) is a kind of inflamed collaboration between sensational filmmakers and a prurient yet partly manipulable censor. And, while these strange English battles were going on in the UK, Joseph E. Levine would give the film a saturation release in the US with violently lurid publicity and children of all ages welcome, espeiclaly at afternoon mntinees! His version even concluded with the same shot the censor had cut back here of blood oozing out of the lift-shaft in full colour, a shot that would later influence Kubrick’s extravagant blood-lift trailer for The Shining.

Audrey Field’s report on the second Anglo-Sadian film Circus of Horrors is more passionate than her notes on Horrors of the Black Museum, indeed much more like the comments that were voiced on Hammer. ‘This disgustingly strident script fills me with nausea,’ she wrote of the project’s first draft submitted to the BBFC on the 24 September 1959 – it was indeed proving a bruising year for the Censor’s office. ‘Everything which we have objected to in excessively violent and horrible “horror films” is here outdone … It seems to be the product of a diseased mind … there ought to be a point at which this Board, regardless of the consequences, will not allow its certificates to impart a semblance of respectability to that which is not respectable.’ Regardless of the consequences? The phrase is indicative. At this point Trevelyan was obviously still cautioning his examiners that if they were too hard on the industry, and it lost faith in them, there might be consequences of an adverse nature. But the next line of the report is something of a giveaway: ‘One thing which particularly upsets me is that this is supposed to be a story of contemporary England.’ But was it the BBFC’s job to worry about the portrayal of contemporary England? Here there seems a real confusion between the job the BBFC was supposed to do, namely protect the cinemas from protest and prosecution, and national propaganda.

In the list of objections that she appends, most are physical and gruesome, a few are sexual. Among the many problems she itemised were Evelyn’s face being described as a ‘botched and hideous paraphrase of plastic surgery’, several killings including the ‘death of Magda with hatchet in skull, a shot of Mellina’s face eaten by acid, the monstrous freaks that resulted from the surgeon’s botched operations and the stabbing and killing of a client by a prostitute.’ Alongside this are much milder things like Magda admiring herself in a mirror in a state of undress and ‘Magda’s revealing costume.’

In the resulting letter to the producer Julian Wintle, the BBFC makes clear ‘there would be no hope that a film made from the script as it stands would be acceptable.’ The letter goes on to explain that the script breaks cardinal rules by mixing sex with violence, besides having much gore and cruelty. As if the rejection was not clear enough, the last line added another restriction: ‘If this film is made in colour several of the problems will be intensified and made more difficult. I earnestly hope that this is not intended.’

But once again, as before, Circus of Horrors did appear, including some (but not all) of the material to which the examiner had objected so strongly – and in colour too. Julian Wintle, producer of Circus of Horrors, had a cordial relationship with Trevelyan and assessed correctly that, because the letter did not prohibit the whole subject outright but merely the script, he had got his foot in the door. He made some show of having the script rewritten and some changes were made. The most important alteration seems to have been a removal of that part of the plot-line which had already been compared by a nervous censor to the earlier banned Island of Lost Souls (based on H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr Moreau). This involved freaks who were past victims of the mad surgeon’s experiments. By conceding that much, eventually Wintle won grudging approval for the rewritten draft and – somewhat amazingly in this last moment of latitude – was able to enter production only weeks after Audrey Field’s initial unpromising reaction.

When, on 16 March 1960, he submitted the resulting film, cuts were requested and it is notable that some of these had featured in Field’s very first reaction to the script, including a shot of a circus performer with a knife in her throat. The makers were also ordered to lose nudity and some gore. But by the end, a battle which had begun very noisily ended rather quietly and proved far less protracted and bloody than that over Jack the Ripper or Horrors of the Black Museum. This is all the odder when you reflect that the resulting film was far stronger in content than the former and perhaps the latter too. It seems almost as if by this time a certain exhaustion was creeping into the BBFC. But it was not quite the end of the story. For once again, as with Jack the Ripper, there were objections from the very quarter the censor dreaded, namely local councils.

And the timing could hardly have been worse. If 1959 had been a hard year for the BBFC, 1960 was to prove a complete disaster. The file on Peeping Tom has gone missing, but fortunately the censorship history of the film is already well chronicled in most studies of Powell’s work. Cunningly during this more lenient time Powell had managed to convince Trevelyan that he was making a serious study of mental illness.⁴ And it was only because of this, and Powell’s reputation, that the film went into production at all. Later it was heavily cut and some of the cuts were never, it seems, completely restored. Even so, its impact, which is light years ahead of the other Anglo shockers, was not diminished.

No doubt Trevelyan had hoped that Powell’s reputation as a filmmaker would help to defuse any flak that came his way. That was his usual strategy but on this occasion he could hardly have been more wrong. Indeed, Powell’s status as a respectable British director only seems to have added fuel to the flames of the critical uproar that erupted when Peeping Tom was shown. Here was a moral panic of a kind that far exceeded even the response to Hammer. The denunciations were hysterical and pretty well across the board while, unlike Hammer, Powell’s film did not even have the benefit of an audience to protect and champion it. For this was one occasion when the outcry in the press did not translate into a prurient interest on the part of the audience. The limited release of Peeping Tom in May 1960 proved unsuccessful and was soon curtailed, leaving the BBFC terribly exposed. And, at this awful time for Trevlyan, indeed in the same month the castigated Peeping Tom was enduring its limited release, news came that Bedfordshire, another council, was defying the BBFC and refusing to grant a certificate to Circus of Horrors.

From here, inevitably, everything changed. For the caution of Trevelyan’s examiners with regard to the Anglo films was now seen to be vindicated. Indeed, the consequences of easing the restrictions in this period had proved far more costly to the BBFC’s reputation than if they had enforced them rigidly. And so it was that after this, as we have seen, Trevelyan frequently informed filmmakers that material he might have passed at the end of the 1950s was no longer acceptable. As a consequence, no-one should be surprised that British horror in the early 1960s, unlike the late 1950s, had a subdued feel. Given the baying for ‘something to be done’ that followed Peeping Tom, in some respects it is remarkable that the British horror film survived at all.

The Aftermath

The Anglo Trilogy certainly forms a distinctive cycle maudit: Crabtree was never again to work in features after Horrors of the Black Museum, while Powell only made one further film in this country (The Queen’s Guards) before retreating to Australia. Only Sidney Hayers’ career got back on track, after a thin period in the early 1960s. For this indefatigable director went on to work in American television right up to the age of 76 before he died in 2000. But before he went into TV, Hayers did make one other horror movie which was perhaps superior to everything else he has done, including Circus of Horrors, and is well worth a brief parenthesis.

At first sight Night of the Eagle (or Burn Witch Burn in the US), made in 1961, might seem to belong exclusively to that part of horror which is closest to the ghost story (like Tourneur’s Night of the Demon). But in fact, as the 1960s began to get underway, it became more difficult, in movies, if not in TV, to make such clear-cut distinctions. Later on, films like Curse of the Crimson Altar and The Devil Rides Out would fuse Schauer-Romantik and ghost-story elements inextricably together, and Night of the Eagle undoubtedly incorporates many of the more vital effects from the mainstream Hammer movies to complement its subtle story line.

Night of the Eagle was very loosely based on Fritz Leiber’s fascinating, if sexist, fantasy about women and witchcraft⁵ – Conjure Wife – and adapted by two of America’s most talented fantasy writers: Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson with George Baxt re-contextualising it in England. Matheson, in particular, has a host of screenplays to his name which include some of the greatest SF/horror ever made (The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Devil Rides Out and Duel for instance). It is difficult to think of any film in which he has been involved as an author which has not been comparatively outstanding other than the disappointing Legend of Hell House (a negative opinion Matheson himself shared).

Peter Wyngarde in Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn, Sidney Hayers, UK, 1962).

Even so, Night of the Eagle – though a very modest film on a tiny budget – ranks among his very finest work. From the first shot, in which the hero is underlining the words ‘I do not believe’ on a blackboard before his class, to the climactic moment in which he backs in abject terror towards the same blackboard, accidentally obliterating the word ‘not’, it is structured with an incredible symmetry and tightness which reflects the precision of Matheson’s work on The Devil Rides Out. Hayers too shoots the whole thing with an almost Wellesian flourish, extracting the maximum effect from every scene.

The plot is about a sceptical psychologist who gets drawn into a world of black magic in the unlikely setting of a provincial university. At its beginning the superficially innocent dialogue at a faculty bridge party plays on colloquial superstition to a point which gradually becomes more and more unnerving (‘dark horse’, ‘hypnosis’, ‘jinx’, ‘charmed life’, ‘good luck charm’, ‘sold your soul’, etc), while Hayers accompanies it by subtly ill-proportioned compositions and an undertone of suppressed panic. When the guests leave, Tansy, the hero’s wife, scrambles around her house with ever-increasing desperation until she finds an evil witch doll which has been strapped to the standard lamp by one of the faculty wives. From this point on the whole film takes off into a kind of strange amalgamation of Rosemary’s Baby and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There are one or two irritations in the spurious transatlantic medical school setting, while the performances have dated in places, but the use of what was then modern apparatus (tape recorders and telephones) to convey the supernatural has rarely been done so well and Hayers’ more ambitious directorial trappings, like the overlapping dialogue and subjective camera, are integrated seamlessly into the whole structure. The climax, in which the hero pursues his wife to a deserted churchyard on the coast and manages to summon her back from the point of suicide via a desperate incantation with candles, has an icy grandeur rarely duplicated in any British horro film. It is a pity that Hayers, who made some good films in a long career, never again made anything quite as good as this.

Grip of the Strangler (aka The Haunted Strangler, Robert Day, UK, 1958).

Two further films certainly deserve to be discussed under the approximate heading of ‘Sadian’, both made by Robert Day and producer Richard Gordon in 1957. Corridors of Blood and Grip of the Strangler also share Boris Karloff in similar roles, but here the similarity ends, for the films differ markedly in quality. The first, Corridors of Blood, is about surgery without anaesthetics and it often seems to be little more than an excuse for the detailed coverage of some utterly gruesome operations. There is little relief, none of the more playful sensationalist elements which would give the film some life except for a few touches of sub-Dickensian whimsy. Karloff himself gives a typically sensitive performance as the drug addicted doctor and he was obviously trying to elevate the film into a proper historical study, while Christopher Lee turns up as a resurrectionist; but most of the action concerns the systematic mutilation of patients on the operating table which is pursued without much variation or purpose.

In contrast, Grip of the Strangler, though a fairly sombre historical piece about the English capacity for brutality, which opens with spectators embracing and eating at a public hanging, has none of the other film’s clinical approach. Instead, Karloff throws himself wholeheartedly into an absurdly ingenious script by Jan Read and John Croydon about a social reformer, investigating the hanging of an innocent man, who finds himself slowly possessed by murderous impulses. Subsequently, he begins to suspect he was the murderer himself, but is unable to convince anyone of his problems and commits more murders before being taken to a public asylum from which he escapes. As in Jack the Ripper, the occasional barbarism of Victorian England is well portrayed and integrated acceptably into the plot, while Day and his writers try hard to accumulate these observations into an understanding of the nineteenth century social climate and its repressive effect. The result is not always successful, for the monochrome photography gives the whole thing a grisly documentary flavour which finally seems incongruous, but the film deserves the reputation which has survived its catchpenny title.

The Amicus Factor

During the years that immediately followed Hammer’s arrival on the scene, several small English companies followed Hammer’s lead in the field. But only one established itself within the next decade as a recognisable entity in its own right and made a serious attempt to take on Hammer at its own game: namely, Amicus. This was the brainchild of native New Yorkers Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, who were still smarting from being pushed aside by Hammer and Eliot Hyman over their idea to remake Frankenstein in 1955, all the more since they had seen The Curse of Frankenstein (which they hated) become a huge success. This must have been highly frustrating to Subotsky who did not like much of Hammer’s early product at all. To make matters worse, in their first negotiations with the company, Amicus seem to have thought James and Michael Carreras were brothers. ‘We are writing to you,’ Wayne Kinsey⁶ quotes them as writing to Michael Carreras on 10 May 1956, ‘at the request of your brother James …’. This would not have endeared them to either man, especially Michael, and Hammer kept a tight lid on Subotsky’s early involvement in Frankenstein for a long time, ensuring very few people knew the pair were indirectly responsible for the whole British horror boom. Indeed, I once heard Michael Carreras refusing to endorse the notion when asked by a journalist.

Rosenberg, who was the quiet businessman of the two and had no hands-on interest in the films, was a lawyer who had entered the film business in 1939 at the age of 25 as a foreign film distributor. Subotsky, his partner, was an enthusiastic and highly approachable man whose slightly geeky and youthful appearance belied the fact he was only a few years younger than Rosenberg and well into his 40s by the time Amicus became a serious producer. Before that he and Rosenberg had made some low-budget rock ‘n’ roll musicals in America like Rock Rock Rock, a form they brought to England with It’s Trad Dad (Ring-a-Ding Rhythm in the US). And later they found England congenial while making the very Val Lewton-ish City of the Dead here in 1959.

Subotsky, who for all creative purposes was Amicus, could hardly have been less like the men at Hammer. In terms of business style, they believed in discretion, very strict privacy and an almost feudal set-up, relying on a few trusted creatives. Subotsky was brash, energised and open to anyone; indeed, he was frequently on record saying he did not think direction was that important and he would let any screenwriter direct as long as they had a good cinematographer. This enabled him to break talent and he gave William Friedkin (later to make The Exorcist) what was effectively his debut picture, a screen adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. It may seem an unlikely venture but Subotsky saw himself as a cultured man, regularly attending plays and the opera. His cast lists too reflected his theatre-going, with Ralph Richardson joining UK horror somewhat belatedly (and it must be admitted, to no great effect) in the Amicus adaptation of the classic horror comic Tales from the Crypt.

A voracious reader and a lover of old-style horror, Subotsky constantly scoured horror fiction for adaptable material, inviting material from all-comers. It was typical of the man that he wrote to the publisher of the first edition of this book immediately it was announced, expecting there would be a section on Amicus and requesting to see it. Taking a risk we sent him the chapter, and he pronounced it fair and accurate without any complaint about the more negative parts.

But to understand Subotsky, who was married to the distinguished psychiatrist Fiona Subotsky, you also have to understand too there was a child-like almost naïve quality to the man. He once joked to me he made horror movies because these days ‘it was the only kind of cinema where you could avoid sex and violence’. And, when you consider Amicus’s output, there is an odd truth to this. Indeed, I often reflect that it illustrates both the strength and the weakness of their films. It was great that sometimes, to very enjoyable effect, he used material from some of the greatest horror writers in his short story films, which were inspired by his love of Ealing’s Dead of Night and horror fiction in general. But most Amicus films are mild even by Hammer’s post-1960 standards and at worst there is a flattened quality about them, a lack of resonance. Subotsky deserves huge credit for resurrecting the EC Comics, an incredibly rich source of material, some of it gleefully mordant, but even here there was at times a slightly theatrical and anodyne quality.

When Subotsky did come across a powerfully subversive book like The Disorientated Man (Scream and Scream Again), his screenplay adaptation of it was so old-fashioned it had to be discarded by AIP in favour of Christopher Wicking’s high-octane version (see below). And even then Subotsky still did not grasp why the film was successful, putting it down to the stars (Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee) and the title. Some may agree with him, but I always felt the film succeeded because it was more contemporary and hard-hitting than many of the other movies around at the time.

In his book Inside Hammer, Jimmy Sangster reflects how Amicus made a lot of good horror movies, yet he never met Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, ‘which, all things considered,’ he continues, ‘is strange … wonder why they never employed Jimmy Sangster?’ There was a good reason for this though and it had nothing to do with old wounds for Subotsky was not a petty man and used many others from the Hammer team. But he was also light years away from understanding or liking Sangster’s somewhat lurid approach to horror. It was just not to Subotsky’s taste. With the possible exception of The Skull you will search Amicus’ work in vain for the brooding sexual tension to be found elsewhere in UK horror. It’s true, as Peter Hutchings writes in his spirited defence of the company in ‘The Amicus house of horror’ in the essay collection British Horror Cinema (Routledge), a few of the later adaptations from EC Comics had a uniquely savage morality in which minor transgressions met with very gruesome ends, giving some of the films an anarchic flavour. But almost everything here is in the source, nothing in the execution. Any comparison soon indicates Amicus tended to soften the EC edge rather than sharpen it. Not that this is necessarily that important. And in the comments above, and the ones that follow, I want to be clear: while everyone has their own favourite golden-age UK horror movies, nothing should detract from Subtosky’s major achievement in broadening and enriching the whole field. One of their first was City of the Dead (Horror Hotel in the US), made just before the partnership became Amicus, an intriguing and expressionist piece shot entirely at Shepperton by John Moxey, who was given this first break by Subotsky and subsequently – like several other UK horror directors of the 1960s – went on to a long and lucrative career in American television. Despite a few phoney transatlantic settings and accents it remains the English horror film which comes nearest to reproducing Val Lewton’s RKO work in the 1940s, and the ‘City’ itself – with black and rotting buildings saturated in fog and gloom – had an unusual Lovecraftian flavour.

However, its style is not typical of Amicus, whose approach was more definitively established by Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, made in 1964 with Freddie Francis directing. Subotsky had seen Francis’ two psychological thrillers for Hammer (Hysteria, Nightmare), and consequently chose him to make this colourful episode film which, despite its clunky title, had a great cast led by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and used an ominous gathering in a railway carriage as an effective frame for five stories (including a vampire, a severed hand, a man-eating plant, a Voodoo curse and a werewolf ). The production suffered from a few rough moments, and at least two of the episodes were weak, but it could boast considerable originality in terms of format and its success set the seal on the pattern of future Amicus productions. At first the collections tended to be woven around Robert Bloch’s short stories, like Torture Garden (1967), one of the best from Freddie Francis, and The House That Dripped Blood which offered the talented Peter Duffell an early feature and contained one particularly effective episode about a child witch. But eventually Subotsky was foresighted enough to manage to persuade William Gaines to let him adapt the classic EC horror comics, commencing with Tales from the Crypt (Freddie Francis, 1971). Some of these witty stories, like All Through the House about a maniac dressed as Father Christmas, are among the best of their kind ever written and work well on screen. But, despite careful framing, Amicus never quite managed to match the visual intensity of the source material. There is something slightly literal and theatrical about the style though to be fair much of the problem is budgetary and technical. It would not be until much later that cinema truly achieved the perfect comic book look.

Tales from the Crypt was a success but its follow-ups proved less remunerative so that, by the early 1970s, Amicus was in the same kind of mire as Hammer, even though they had only been going a few years and had nothing like the same level of past success to bolster them. Subotsky was not prepared to emulate his rival in the sex vampire area, but he was aware how successful they had been in exploiting adventure stories with monsters, so Amicus moved in this direction. But The Land That Time Forgot and At the Earth’s Core proved lacklustre and impoverished outings; Edgar Rice Burroughs would never be as profitable for Amicus as H. Rider Haggard was for Hammer and it was also notable that, while Hammer had proved adept at discovering glamour with Raquel Welch and Caroline Munro, Amicus showed no similar skills (though they used Munro some years after Hammer). Meanwhile, Subotsky’s omnibus style had a couple of late outings minus Rosenberg with The Uncanny and The Monster Club (the former with Cushing, the latter with Vincent Price), but both were dull, exposing the format at its weakest.

The resurrection of Edgar Allan Poe in The Torture Garden (Freddie Francis, UK, 1967).

Of course, in some ways it is invidious to compare a company like Hammer which employed dozens of people in its heyday, and even owned a studio, with what was effectively a two-man band. But then the films invite comparison. Subotsky’s appetite for literary material reinvigorated British horror, but his budgets could not always do them full justice and the subjects offered limited scope for sequels. Visually too there are striking differences between the two companies’ films despite the fact that directors like Freddie Francis and Roy Ward Baker worked for both. Hammer’s art directors like Bernard Robinson generally favoured a more sweeping classical look whatever period they were in, while the Amicus style is very different. Tony Curtis, who did most though not all of the later omnibus films, favoured (or was instructed to favour) a very bright pseudo-modernist urban style for the interiors which now looks very 1970s. Subotsky always maintained people preferred this, yet it is surely the reason why in the end the Amicus look has dated faster than Hammer’s.

There are many exceptions though and one is The Skull, an Amicus film from Freddie Francis on which Bill Constable did an utterly superb job as art director (Constable also did Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors and The Torture Garden but was not used again for the other omnibus films). The Skull is a highly unusual movie, extremely visual, highly atmospheric with minimal dialogue, and of a texture and construction unlike Hammer and most of Amicus too. It is in its own way highly ambitious for there are few shock effects and, to give him full credit, Subotsky himself adapted the script of this Robert Bloch story. Subotsky often said the best horror was storytelling without words and here he managed to bring it off. The film, which is about the malevolent unseen influence of the skull of the Marquis De Sade on collector Peter Cushing, has very little dialogue and is a kind of visual essay on unseen terror.

The Skull in fact raises questions that are difficult to answer. Why is this low-budget film, which was made by exactly the same team as The Psychopath a year later, both of them from Robert Bloch stories, so visually and stylistically confident and compelling whereas the latter film lacks all these qualities? Was it the budget or the script, or was Subotsky simply determined for once to prove his thesis that (verbal) silence in horror is golden? For it is a thesis he came near to proving with this film.

Originally called The Skull of the Marquis De Sade before De Sade’s relatives objected, the film’s style is very striking. Indeed, some people have found it gimmicky, but the criticism has never been more misplaced. It is true that there are many trick shots, in some of which for example the camera looks out through the skull’s eye sockets, but this is entirely in keeping with the mood of the film. For the whole premise is governed, if not by De Sade himself, at least by the popular idea of De Sade as bogeyman and bringer of madness, which the skull represents. We are constantly invited to sense the presence of something inside and around the skull, and it is an object which really does begin to assume a hypnotic intensity as the film progresses, all the more because of some brilliant editing and lighting.

Most of the film’s leading characters (other than Christopher Lee as Cushing’s friend and his wife played by Jill Bennett) are slowly reduced before our eyes under the influence of this inanimate object into flattened ciphers at the mercy of the most basic and unpalatable human emotions. There is also a wonderfully disturbing and long sequence involving a Kafkaesque nightmare where the central character (Peter Cushing) wakes up to find he is still caught up in a dream world, drawn by the influence of the skull, standing in unfamiliar surroundings. And we start to sense that, while the supernatural is an option, we may also be watching his character’s descent into schizophrenia and madness.

The ending is very ambitious, containing almost no dialogue at all, just a prolonged night of accumulating terror beautifully played by Cushing and all the more scary for the absence of anything palpable. Until, that is, the film’s one overt device (of the skull floating) has the effect of reducing the tension. Perhaps if The Skull were re-edited and this effect removed, making it more explicitly about a strange descent into madness, the film would win the acclaim it deserves.

1.An interesting comment. At this point a blanket ban seemed to exist on any gothic or supernatural horrors shown in a modern context and in colour. Hammer had been forbidden outright to shoot the modern vampire story I Am Legend (see Chapter 2). But films with a conetemporaty setting involving sadistic murders, that were merely criminal, were not it seems subect to the same ban. Doctor Blood’’s Coffin (See Chapter 4) was presumably just on the edge, since its sub-Frankenstein theme was more about criminal madness than monsters.

2.In fact, this did happen in 1962 when Trevelyan was on leave during the early stages of censorship on The Damned with duly desperate results (see Chaptrer 7).

3.Their other efforts in the genre included The Trollenberg Terror and The Hellfire Club, whose title is misleading, for the historical Hellfire Club of Francis Dashwood is barely featured for most of the movie.

4.If Peeping Tom is a ‘serious study’ of anything it is surely British (and male) sexuality but the term ‘serious study’ hardly seems appropriate anyway for such a poetic, playful work.

5.The book imagines a kind of sexual conspiracy among all women to conceal witchcraft from men! Even in 1961, Mathesom knew this could not work and turns the leading woman character into a loving wife, troubled by her own superstitious fears though there is a supernatural aspect and a female villain.

6.Little Shoppe of Horrors, 4 (1978), letter given by Subtosky to Richard Klemensen in 1973.

7

Three Satellite Directors

Horror is a very filmic mode and filmmakers who associate themselves with it often attract a following that is denied to those in other genres. Sometimes this is justified, often it is not. But the three filmmakers whose work I examine in this chapter from the first UK horror boom, seemed to me to deserve attention. All made horror movies both inside and outside the Hammer stable (though Sewell worked there pre-horror) while managing to establish a consistent relationship to their material. Beyond this, as will be seen, they have little in common, for their individual styles are quite distinct and each of them has a widely differing background in the industry.

Don Sharp

Don Sharp arrived in this country shortly after the war to work as an actor. Two years at Group Three followed, and one of his most famous roles in the early 1950s was Mitch in the first and third series of the previously discussed Charles Chilton BBC Radio drama Journey into Space. But his objective was to make films, and soon he began to script some children’s adventures and comedies. From 1960 onwards, Sharp was directing and often co-scripting low-budget thrillers and an early Tommy Steele musical It’s All Happening.

Meanwhile, Hammer had had another big success with Brides of Dracula, proving that a vampire movie without Lee and Dracula could work with the public, and Anthony Hinds was being pushed hard to mount another vampire film. Without Lee or even Cushing major savings could be made and Hinds scripted it, using ideas from earlier unused drafts, like the vampire bat attack which Cushing had vetoed as an idea for Brides of Dracula. For the climactic suspense hook, Hinds also added a rather Hitchcockian twist in which the wife disappears and no-one will acknowledge that they have ever laid eyes on her, a storyline consciously lifted, as mentioned earlier, from So Long at the Fair.

Having sacrificed stars, it is not so surprising Anthony Hinds also turned to a completely new director, Sharp, who had never even seen a horror movie. Wayne Kinsey, in his book Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years, speculates that Terence Fisher may have been out of favour after the failure of Phantom of the Opera, but whatever the grumbling, which undoubtedly existed, this seems unlikely since Hammer brought Fisher back for what was a far-more risky original, The Gorgon, the following year. It seems more likely that either Fisher’s commitments in Germany on Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace ruled him out or that Sharp’s hiring was yet another economy, for Hammer’s express intention was to spend far less on this film than it had on Brides of Dracula which, at £125,000, cost close to 50 per cent more than the original Dracula.

Kiss of the Vampire concerns a young English couple honeymooning in Bavaria whose car breaks down (for Hammer had moved the date forward to 1910) and their encounter with yet another sub-Dracula vampire, called Dr Ravna (Noel Willman), master of a vampire cult. The film is passably enjoyable but has a very different feel from Fisher’s, being much more obviously theatrical, no doubt because of Sharp’s background in theatre. The cast, almost all of whom were new to Hammer though not to the London stage, sometimes struggle with tone, but there is only the occasional jarring note, and Isobel Black’s venomous energy as a particularly zestful vampire recruit is splendid (though at times so much more energised than anything else it almost unbalances the film). The physical elements of vampirism are handled with a sharp wit and the use of landscape, notably the lush woodland setting around Black Park is particularly striking.

Sharp seems to have pleased Hammer and he would make two more films for them, neither quite in the horror category. He also caught the eye of US producer Robert L. Lippert, who had watched as his former partner Hammer flourished with their new horror movies and (having hired Terence Fisher for an abortive horror comedy The Horror of It All) now contracted Sharp to take on a tiny 20-day shoot for a monochrome feature starring Lon Chaney Jr. called Witchcraft, a stylish but predictable piece about a witch’s serial revenge on a family who buried her alive 300 years earlier. Sharp managed to keep Lon Chaney Jr. on an even keel, though by this time Chaney’s nickname of ‘King Vodka’ was becoming catastrophically accurate. Generally, it seems the unit had to do his scenes before lunch. But the stand-out was Yvette Reece, making a suitably atmospheric witch.

The following year Lippert put Sharp into The Curse of the Fly, the third version of an original idea which even in its pristine form as The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958) had had its limitations. The basic idea of the original Fox film (which as we have seen seems to have drawn partly on The Four-Sided Triangle) concerned a teletransporter which disintegrates and reintegrates people in order to transport them until the atoms of a fly intermingle with those of the experimenter to create a monster. Fox made a great deal of money out of their colour production in the 1950s. Lippert, though uncredited, appears to have been involved, milking the idea into two more movies which shamelessly rehash the old theme. Here writer Harry Spalding’s only real difficulty seems to have been to clarify things for those who had not seen the earlier film and also prolong the denouement; so, he brings in a new character called Patricia Stanley who is gradually introduced to the various horrifying machinations of the ‘Fly’ household headed by Martin Delambre.

The film begins with the escape of Patricia Stanley (Carole Gray) from a mental institution. In shimmering and ghostly slow motion, glass bursts out in all directions as Patricia swings eerily from the window to glide through the garden, before the credits roll. The dialogue will soon inform us that Patricia is now free and happy, but the whole effect seems to be designed to convey the opposite of liberation. Patricia is like an apparition or someone in a nightmare whose limbs will not obey her; and soon it becomes clear that she is moving from one trap to a far more sinister imprisonment. After an uneasy romance with Martin Delambre (Brian Donlevy taking over from Vincent Price) whom she meets by chance, they marry and return to his house where the ‘Fly’ experiments are conducted. To cope with the battery of sensational effects which the script now brings into play – some of which admittedly like the things locked away in an outhouse have a pleasingly Lovecraftian ring – Sharp concentrates all he can on making Patricia the focal point of the narrative. Her gradual descent from fragile optimism to depression and then near-insanity is carefully portrayed. Admittedly it is soon difficult to take the relationship between Delambre and Patricia seriously, but still Sharp manages – through judicious editing, the use of subjective shots and above all the performances – to take some pressure off the weaknesses of the plot and re-adapt his own stated favourite theme: namely to elicit irony and suspense by a change in someone’s material/spiritual circumstances.

It was not until 1965, that Sharp was given the opportunity to show what he could do on a comparatively ambitious production; and he promptly delivered what seems to me his best film: The Face of Fu Manchu. Unfortunately, the books on which the film is based contain a racist element that is all too familiar from other British empire thrillers. So let me be clear that, while this film tells us much about the psyche of empire and of Britain, it tells us absolutely nothing whatsoever about China or its people. The author of the books, Sax Rohmer, had never been anywhere near China. Essentially the ‘China’ of his created world is an invented fictitious nation that does not exist and never did.

I offer this point not as any excuse. If you libel a country or a person, it is not much help to point out there is content, other than the libel, that is of interest, but I believe as long as we acknowledge the libel upfront, we can still proceed to appraise Sharp’s film. It was produced and scripted under the pseudonym ‘Peter Welbeck’ by Harry Alan Towers¹, a somewhat notorious producer nicknamed ‘Towers of London’, who produced over 80 feature films between 1962 and 2004, often using somewhat weird and devious practices to do so. Face of Fu Manchu was devised as the first film in a series to be built around Fu Manchu, the supervillain created by Sax Rohmer. In the event, further films were made, but only one of these (The Brides of Fu Manchu) was directed by Sharp, the rest mainly declined into mediocrity though some have points of interest.

Fu Manchu’s execution in The Face of Fu Manchu (Don Sharp, UK/West Germany, 1965).

The Face of Fu Manchu was shot in February and March of 1965 on various locations in Ireland. At this time parts of Dublin proved to be extraordinarily apt reproductions of the London of the 1930s, while other scenes were filmed in Kilmainham Jail (which served as the Tibetan monastery and the place of Fu Manchu’s execution), an old mansion north of Dublin and the Wicklow hills.

Sharp fought to get the time and settings he required and the film starts with a ghostly execution in which Fu Manchu, dressed in white robes, is led out to the block and a sentence is read. Afterwards the vast courtyard empties and the camera holds a steady, silent gaze as the corpse’s white robes begin to blow gently in the wind and the rain falls, while the solitary guard stands stiffly to one side.

There is something intrinsically disturbing about this opening, perhaps because it reflects the film’s central tension. Everything about the organisation of the execution – including its efficiency, its painstaking attention to procedural detail and its antiseptic sadism – is British. But the pictorial and thematic weight of the sequence is in contrast Asian: the imposingly solemn and detached figure of Fu Manchu in his strange robes is set against an arch in a distinctly alien composition and later, to the sound of thunder, his robes begin to move ominously in the wind. The whole unnerving effect is to make clear from the beginning that it is impossible to kill this man. He is a mystical entity, a figment of the British empire’s imagination quite as potent as Dracula, with roots that go equally deep into the psychopathology of England’s past. The last shot of the film juxtaposes an enormous explosion (in which sane cinematic syntax demands that Fu Manchu has been destroyed) with an enormous biblical superimposition of his face and the words: ‘The world shall hear from me again.’

In view of Fu Manchu’s essentially symbolic identity, as a personification of the unconscious self-destructive impulse within empire itself, it is appropriate that his opposite, Nayland Smith, first makes contact with him on this occasion in a dream. Commissioner Smith is a more ruthless and less sympathetic variation on the Sherlock Holmes/Van Helsing hunter of demons already discussed, and his minor eccentricities enable him to solve the ‘puzzle – with every thread leading to the river’ which Fu Manchu poses. Throughout this fever dream, Sharp plays flawlessly on the exultant paranoia of the whole conception, associating Fu Manchu with London’s muted yellowy smog and the ‘teeming life’ of the dockland; he also contrives to make the action engagingly picaresque with frantic dashes via the Essex marshes and Fleetwick (a cunning use of the best ideas of Village of the Damned in this section) to Tibet and the final closing of the circle. Of course, as I have indicated, Fu Manchu is at heart a racist conception and could never be reworked now, intriguing as some of Sax Rohmer’s frenzied tales are in purely thriller terms. But Sharp and Towers’ film is far more like an anti-colonial nightmare than a patriotic story of empire. Some scenes, it is true, have dated, especially those that trespass on James Bond territory, but in places it still attains that outlandish configuration of poetry, metaphysics and myth which denotes an authentic interior landscape.

John Gilling

John Gilling, born in 1912, worked in the British film industry from 1933 when he became an assistant director with British International Pictures. He scripted his first film Black Memory in 1947 and later that year wrote House of Darkness for the same director, Oswald Mitchell (the somewhat stagy supernatural melodrama discussed in Chapter 2, very distantly related to Dead of Night). From this point on, Gilling began to script an enormous number of films, often directing them as well, but his first isolated foray into the fringes of screen horror came in 1952 when he directed (but did not script) Bela Lugosi in one of his last films, a lame comedy-thriller called Mother Riley meets the Vampire (aka Vampire Over London (1952). Four years later, Gilling co-wrote and directed a very early and odd piece of British science fiction The Gamma People (1956), which has now finally surfaced after years of unavailability. It turns out to be a weird hybrid of dated comedy thriller and newer brainwashing themes with zombies thrown in. The script had been kicking around since 1951 in various guises and you could not possibly call the film a success but it is a fascinating curiosity, reflecting the British film industry’s desperate effort to come to grips with the new science fiction/ fantasy genre.

The film’s heroes – American reporter (Paul Douglas) and his very English photographer (Leslie Phillips) – are a light comedy duo obviously modelled on the similar characters in Hitchock’s The Lady Vanishes. As there, the train strands them in foreign lands, in this case a ludicrously small and authoritarian principality called Gudavia. Soon they confront a mad scientist who plans to use gamma ray machines to turn the country’s youth into geniuses or sub human zombies. Some of the zombie stuff looks forward weirdly to later films but, despite some semi-expressionist thrills, the whole still somehow feels more like Gilbert and Sullivan than horror, receiving only a mild ‘A’ certificate. And perhaps the oddest thing of all about this very odd film is that its script by British producer John Gossage and Gilling is based on a treatment by, of all people, the great American director Robert Aldrich who was breaking much more interesting ground around exactly this time with his classic futuristic cold war noir Kiss Me Deadly.

Four years later, Gilling would move properly into the horror field under the auspices of producers Baker and Berman, (see Jack the Ripper discussed earlier), with The Flesh and the Fiends, which he wrote and directed in 1959. It is a restrained historical piece in black-and-white which concerns Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh bodysnatchers, and their association with Dr Knox, the pioneering anatomist. Gilling concentrates mainly on Knox (played by Peter Cushing) and though he departs from historical accuracy in places, Cushing was able to add style and ambiguity to the character of Knox who moves rather like Hammer’s Baron Frankenstein between unthinking brutality (the deliberate covering up of gruesome murders) and dedicated altruism. Donald Pleasence is also striking as the fiend-like Hare, who is finally blinded in the streets by the people of Edinburgh. Hammer knew Gilling of old, they liked The Flesh and the Fiends, and Gilling had other successes around this time including the rock ‘n’ roll comedy Idol On Parade with Anthony Newley. So, it was not surprising he was invited back to Bray to do Shadow of the Cat at the end of 1960, a film which marks a break with Hammer’s style and may well reflect the new toughness of the censor (it was made in the wake of Curse of the Werewolf). Its horror content is distinctly subdued and, probably for legal and distribution reasons, the credits do not even contain the word Hammer.

The French critic Gerard Lenne put forward Shadow of the Cat as Gilling’s masterpiece – and on visual grounds, it is not difficult to see why. The film contains some monochrome photography from one of Hammer’s very best cameramen, Arthur Grant, which immediately evokes the pre-war German horror films. The script is also uncharacteristic, developing after a quote from The Raven into a moody stylised reworking of Poe’s short story The Black Cat. The trouble is that it remains strictly a short story idea and the outcome is so predictable that even the stylish treatment it receives cannot finally sustain interest. The action takes place in an old house in which a cat, whose mistress has been brutally murdered, threatens the guilty family responsible for the crime. The cat is metamorphosed into a kind of vengeful monster, or at least a projection of guilt (‘He’s become a sort of evil symbol’ says one character); and Gilling inserts subjective shots through a distorting lens from the cat’s point of view which are reasonably effective. There is also a bizarre score by Mikis Theodorakis which occasionally counterpoints the sombre visual effects with passages of sly cheerfulness. But in the end, I disagree with Lenne for essentially, under its surface, this is dull old-school suspense and the cat seems too obvious a symbol of revenge for the film to be highly effective.

Plague of the Zombies (John Gilling, UK, 1966).

In the years that followed Shadow of the Cat, Gilling made three swashbucklers for Hammer (The Pirates of Blood River, The Scarlet Bride, The Brigand of Kandahar) and elsewhere The Night Caller, a science fiction film made on a painfully low budget, which he handled with characteristic restraint and style, even if its script about a benevolent alien was conventional. Finally, he scripted The Gorgon (Fisher’s occasionally enjoyable but finally flawed attempt to introduce a new screen monster) before returning to direction for the two films which more or less established his reputation among aficionados: Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile.

Both of these were shot back-to-back at Bray in 1965 and set in nineteenth-century Cornwall, with scripts by Peter Bryan and Anthony Hinds respectively. Hammer naturally enough released them with other films, but the odd thing is that, taken together, they work well and much of their enjoyment arises from the way they complement each other. Both concern small Cornish communities threatened by a kind of alien and inexplicable plague which has been imported from the East via a corrupt aristocracy; both are, by implication at least, violently anti-colonial and both set up the same premise of the evil manor house which ‘infects’ the village. The repertory aspect of Hammer has never been demonstrated to greater effect than here, with the same sets and scenes being readapted ingeniously so that they grow rather than diminish by comparison; if Plague of the Zombies is stronger on ideas, The Reptile has more original images (like that in which the snake woman writhes on the bed to the weird chanting of her master). But each film is put together meticulously, with Arthur Grant returning to his less flamboyant, but perhaps ultimately more impressive, colour style. Gilling concentrates primarily on trying to convey the basic orientation of the threatened communities, whose life is seen to revolve around churchyard, pub, cottage and moorland. The beginning of The Reptile, for example, has an abstract beauty all of its own, with an oriental pipe playing on the soundtrack, as Gilling constructs a series of careful compositions which close in gradually on the big house, whose windows are always lighted when there is a death. The climax, in which the snake woman lunges forward through the flames to bite her own father, specifically conveys the venomous incestuous evil of the house which the fire has to purify.

The Reptile (John Gilling, UK, 1966).

The two films strongly suggested that, thanks no doubt largely to Hinds, Gilling was able to express his themes not simply through atmosphere or tension but through visual imagery: near the beginning of Zombies, Sir James Forbes (Andre Morell) arrives in the village to identify the mysterious plague which is affecting it and sees the local nobility, who are out hunting, riding brutally through a funeral procession and knocking the coffin to the ground. The episode suggests visually what the film will later establish, that the squirearchy are disturbing and degrading the dead for their own acquisitive and sadistic ends. The squire has created ‘zombies’ to work a tin mine under his house. It is also noteworthy that, in absolute contrast to Fisher’s work, both Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile are among the most pessimistic films that the old Hammer have made. There is no sense of relief at the climax of either; the most attractive character (Alice/Anna, both played beautifully by Jacqueline Pearce in one of Hammer’s all-time best female performances) meets the worst fate; and, though fire has purged the community of evil, a sense of shock prevails and the gloom remains unrelieved. One scene in Plague of the Zombies more or less sums up the series’ darkest concerns: in a green suffused dream sequence, which often turns up in other horror films – sometimes on a random TV – the corpses in the little church-yard begin to churn their way up through the earth of their graves to encircle the dreamer in a crumbling, crawling mass. This is quintessential Hammer, one of their most famous sequences – and it also seems to have been a secondary inspiration for Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

Unfortunately, the ‘Cornish’ double was effectively the climax of Gilling’s career. It would seem he was a more creative director when, as here, he was not working from his own material, but trying to visualise and revitalise other people’s. Gilling would work with Hinds again on The Mummy’s Shroud, but this time Hinds only wrote the story while Gilling was working from his own script. The film has admirers, but for others it is a pale formulaic shadow of the earlier movies. Indeed, Gilling, who had a reputation at Hammer as an abrasive, occasionally intimidating director, who frequently lost his temper on set, is on record as saying he had no high opinion of the film himself. ‘I thought,’ he told Little Shoppe of Horrors (4), ‘it was one of my worst.’ Afterwards, apart from co-writing the story for the poor Herman Cohen/Freddie Francis film Trog in which Joan Crawford made her last screen appearance, he helped out on just one Spanish film, Cross of the Devil, in 1975 and did not work again. He died in 1984.

Vernon Sewell

Vernon Sewell (born in 1903 and educated at Marlborough College before training as an engineer) was one of the real veterans of British horror. Having begun as a camera assistant at Nettlefold in 1929, he made his first film (Dawn) in 1933, 15 years before even Terence Fisher began directing; indeed, Dawn was a very odd debut because it was made by UFA in Germany and concerned German U-boat activity in the First World War, being released after Hitler had just become Chancellor. The subject reflects Sewell’s nautical background and his life-long fascination with boats. Later, with his friend Michael Powell, he would become one of the crew of castaways on the Shetland island of Foula, making The Edge of the World (1937). And, by 1943, he would again collaborate with Michael Powell on the wartime naval propaganda film The Silver Fleet.

Sewell remains one of the great, heroic (yet unsung) eccentrics of British cinema. While I was writing the first edition of A Heritage of Horror, I went to meet him in what was then his South Kensington flat. I was amazed – given that all I knew about him were films like The Bloodbeast Terror – to be greeted by a weather-beaten old seadog with a commanding style and a very nautical line in expletives. He told me with typical candour he was ‘f****d off with films’ and was going away in his boat – the same boat which had appeared in several of his movies and with which his film career was inextricably linked. At this point, Sewell had just made Burke and Hare, which was more of a sexploiter than historical drama. Since he was more than 70 at the time (and I was in my early twenties), I remember supposing he must be near the end of his life but I could hardly have been more wrong. He would sail on for several more decades into the millennium, finally dying in Australia at the age of nearly 100.

Burke and Hare (Vernon Sewell, UK, 1972).

Sewell made close on 40 features, mainly from his own scripts, including two early thrillers for Hammer, The Black Widow and The Dark Light starring Joan Carol, whom Sewell married and who would star in five of his films right up to the last, Burke and Hare, in which she played the madame of the brothel. His work reveals a continuing and (by the standards of pre-horror UK cinema highly unusual) fascination with the supernatural. His first UK film The Medium (1934) arose out of a French grand guignol play he had found (L’Angoisse by Pierre Mills and Celia De Vilyars) about a haunted house. This play was to be loosely re-adapted by Sewell at least once in each successive decade throughout his career, in effect he remade it four times. In the story a protagonist or a couple always buy a haunted house (or ship or studio) and then a psychical investigator is called in who uses a medium to isolate the ‘vibrations’ with disturbing results. Sewell’s biggest popular success with the plot came in 1945, a ghostly thriller set in the Paris of the 1890s called Latin Quarter, which opened in London one week after Dead of Night.

Latin Quarter has a dull opening but quickly develops into quite a special piece of early cinema, almost like an expanded episode from Dead of Night with which it shares the German actor Frederick Volk (who was a psychiatrist in Dead of Night and is the psychical investigator in Latin Quarter). Told mostly in flashback, it concerns a very creepy artist, who effectively ‘buys’ a young and beautiful orphan (Joan Greenwood) from a Paris ballet school. The ballet sequences, based on the prints of Degas, are wonderfully done and so is the girl’s effective imprisonment in her new husband’s studio. There is a suspenseful sequence in a morgue and finally a séance. The concluding revelation is familiar but still effectively grotesque and, while the film is not remotely in the same league as Dead of Night, partly because the story is thin, Latin Quarter certainly showed Sewell had a feel for his subject.

By the end of the 1940s after another success, this time with a supernatural comedy called The Ghosts of Berkeley Square, which starred Robert Morley and Felix Aylmer, Sewell was forced into lower budgets. Consequently, he remade The Medium on his own steam yacht, this time calling it Ghost Ship (1952). The low budget of Ghost Ship certainly shows, but most of its ingredients are attractive. Once again, as in practically all Sewell’s work the plot relies heavily on flashback while, later in his career, the time structure of his films (in House of Mystery and Curse of the Crimson Altar) became surprisingly complex. Here, after the couple have seen the haunted yacht that is up for sale, a flashback reveals the mysterious fate of its last occupants.

The apparitions in Sewell’s films are often menacing while in contrast there is something refreshingly prosaic about the psychical investigations. In Ghost Ship, for example, when the couple go to meet the investigator, they encounter an eccentric vicar floundering towards them in a black cape who is simply an ironical red herring. The real ghost hunter is calm and authoritative, offering prolonged pseudo-scientific explanations about ‘radio waves’ and ‘atmospheric disturbance’. The cause of the ghosts in Sewell’s work is usually violent sexual jealousy (as here), often involving a scientist or chemist which brings in a minor science-fiction angle, an aspect foregrounded in yet another sea story about mysterious disappearances from a yacht: Dangerous Voyage.

A supernatural theme appears in about half of Sewell’s films while, equally important, especially throughout his crime thrillers, is the intrusion of the horribly unexpected incident, which gives bank robberies and hold-ups the quality of an anxiety dream. In, one of his more intriguing films The Man in the Back Seat, a robbery ends with two criminals driving round and round London with a dying victim who’s been hit on the head. Every time they try to get rid of him (by dumping him at the local hospital, for example), something occurs to prevent it so that gradually, but chillingly, he becomes the film’s dominant presence. Loosely based on an unnamed Edgar Wallace novel, with Deren Nesbitt putting in an excellent performance as the crueller and more devious of the two men, it shows just how good Sewell was both as a director of actors and at building atmosphere out of almost nothing.

The Man in the Back Seat (Vernon Sewell, UK, 1961).

The same element of nightmarish fatalism appears in more diluted form in Wrong Number where a guard is once more hit too hard and dies, and an accidental phone call implicates the criminals. In Strongroom it works better: the bank robbers accidentally lock some people in a vault which will suffocate them. They decide to separate so that one group can drive to Watford to leave the vault keys in a phone box, after calling the police. But quite unexpectedly there is a fatal car crash before they can reach Watford, leaving their accomplices in a desperate dilemma. Sewell is peculiarly good at inserting his love of macabre detail into the crime thriller, but it is probably true – The Man in the Back Seat apart – that he was more effective when he could explicitly evoke the supernatural. It seems quite surprising therefore that, unlike so many other British directors, including several who had never dealt with fantastic themes in their lives, it was not until 1967 that he became fully involved in the new fantasy cinema. In between, however – in 1960 – he had contrived to make the definitive version of The Medium, calling it this time House of Mystery.

House of Mystery (1961), which merges Schauer-Romantik and Radcliffian elements to good effect, is an anomalous film for its tine, made in black-and-white at Beaconsfield from Sewell’s own script and very much a second feature; indeed, it barely lasts an hour. Even so it has retained quite a reputation, and the internet contains plenty of posts from people describing it as the most frightening film they have ever seen.

The film consists of a long narrative told by a mysterious old woman to a naïve young couple looking over a house, and Sewell adds immensely to the atmosphere of the piece by exploiting its sprawling irregular time structure in true Gothic fashion so that at one point there is virtually a triple flashback. The prospective buyers learn that another couple had been living in the house when something began to go wrong with the lights and a mysterious figure appeared in various places, including even on the TV screen. ‘There was no such close-up as you describe’, an anxious television producer tells the couple when they ring the broadcaster in desperation and it is strange to reflect that this could well be the earliest use of the ghost-in-the-TV idea which later developed into Poltergeist and The Ring. When a psychical investigator enters the plot, it is handled far more ambiguously and interestingly than in Ghost Ship, and the violence unearthed by the resulting séance almost takes us into Sadian realms. Apparently, a jealous husband who also happened to be an electrical engineer (we see him experimenting cruelly on his dog) had wired up the sitting room so that wife and lover would be electrocuted if they touched anything. The victims’ disbelief, merging into horror, is well conveyed and when the lover finally picks up the phone in desperation he is immediately electrocuted. Then the wife attempts to climb through a window, while her husband looks out at her from his workshop and sends the current through her as she hangs suspended. The result of this long sequence, which Sewell tailors immaculately, is that the vague idea of ‘vibrations’ in the house, as described by the psychical investigator, is given a terrifying physicality; and indeed, the whole film seems to be construing a universe in which manifestations of evil are as material as an electric current, again uncannily prefiguring the Ring series. By the time the narrator is revealed to be a ghost, the naïve optimism of the house-buyers is understandably shattered, and the revelation that they are standing in the electrified chamber gives the film its final edge of cruelty. There is a distinctly strange and unnatural quality about the whole production, not simply because of its style, but also because practically no other British films were exploring this kind of material, reminiscent of Dead of Night, but with very cruel added twists, in the early 1960s. Subsequently, Sewell returned to more conventional subjects until he entered the horror field in 1967 for Tigon.

This was The Blood Beast Terror, from a script by Peter Bryan which in some ways echoes Bryan’s work on Plague of the Zombies. Although it has some good qualities, this fairly weird period project – in which the daughter of a celebrated entomologist turns into a (cannibalistic!) moth – misses the solid production values Hammer would have given it. And the film is also let down by a humdrum police procedural sub-plot, which Hammer and Hinds would surely have eliminated. Sewell found more scope in the contemporary setting of Curse of the Crimson Altar – a Tigon/AIP co-production released in the US as The Crimson Cult – which he made the next year. The script was based on an H. P. Lovecraft short story called Dreams in the Witch’s House and, though Lovecraft was not finally credited, there are rich echoes of the author here because Lovecraft’s theme – about a series of nightmarish witch-dreams which gradually merge into reality – suited Sewell’s own love of complex time structure. He was aided too by Johnny Coquillon, later Reeves’ cameraman on Witchfinder General, who managed to milk the film’s locations, turning Grim’s Dyke Hall (the former home of W. S. Gilbert) into an enticing mansion, full of mysterious corridors and attics. The script expanded Lovecraft to incorporate a spirited cameo from Boris Karloff, who was already confined to a wheelchair by illness.² Sewell also introduced several hallucinatory rituals involving nudity (which the film’s American partner AIP saw as its major selling point) and cult horror star Barbara Steele turns up, painted in green with a ram headpiece.

Curse of the Crimson Altar (Vernon Sewell, UK, 1968).

Such exotic elements are interspersed with minor touches of contemporary realism, and the plot proceeds to switch and intermingle the two in a way that was unusual: as the story begins Robert Manning (Mark Eden) arrives at the village of Greymarsh in search of his brother on the eve of a strange local festival celebrating the burning of Lavinia, a historical witch. Manning is an antique dealer, and the bizarre juxtaposition of modern and traditional continues as he runs after some men chasing a girl down a country lane in their cars, only to find it is part of the ‘celebration’. Later he enters the house of the local squire, Morley (a convincingly civilised Christopher Lee), and then discovers his niece (Virginia Wetherell) conducting an orgiastic party. This might at first seem very late-1960s in its decadent detail until you realise Sewell – who constantly cannibalised his own work – has lifted almost all of it from a wild Parisienne party he staged for Latin Quarter back in the 1940s, including exactly similar details like a paint duel between artists and a woman dousing herself in champagne!

The film has its weak aspects, in particular Michael Gough in the pointless role of a senile butler, who is forever pulling Manning aside to utter clichéd warnings. But it does for the most part mirror Lovecraft’s structure in which dreams gradually infiltrate and invade reality, with Manning awaking from the second of a series of nightmares, bleeding profusely, while later he uncovers the witch chamber he has seen in his dream, now subtly altered. At times, as when he is awakened from a sleep-walking dream by the local policeman, the two aspects of the film seem to be heading for a major collision which doesn’t materialise. But, despite its cruder moments, the first hour or so of Curse of the Crimson Altar has a delicate, ghostly beauty, reinforcing the view that Vernon Sewell’s strange and entirely untypical British films, like his idiosyncratic career, deserve greater recognition.

1Among many other colourful stories, Towers was once in 1961 charged with operating a vice ring at a New York hotel, but he jumped bail and returned to Europe. After this, he could not visit the US until 1980 when he managed to get the charges dropped by paying a £4,200 fine.

2.This was not Karloff’s last film, but it was the last released while he was still alive.

8

Science Fiction, Exoticism and Psychosis

SCIENCE FICTION

1950s and 60s

As was observed in Chapter 2, the entire British horror film cycle was directly derived from the science fiction boom of the 1950s. Hammer had realised that the public’s appetite for science fiction might very well reflect a much more deeply rooted need for imaginative mythical and sensationalist themes, and their intuition proved accurate. But, as a consequence, science fiction became for a time the poor neighbour of horror, and the renaissance of science-fiction writing in England in the 1960s under the supervision of J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and others was not accompanied by a corresponding renaissance in science-fiction movies. Indeed, it was to be decades before science fiction, even in the American cinema, moved from monsters and futuristic costumes to the cosmological ironies of Philip K. Dick in Blade Runner and Minority Report and the world-within-world paradoxes of The Matrix and Dark City.

For this reason, Quatermass II, analysed in the second chapter, was a rare and sophisticated example, well ahead of the field; and its sequel, Quatermass and the Pit (American title: Five Million Years to Earth), stayed on Hammer’s schedules for many years, until it was finally made in 1967. Despite Kneale’s excellent script and, though others disagree, I always found the results disappointing. Kneale’s original TV series, which is now widely available on DVD, imagined the discovery of an ancient spacecraft, containing fascinating occult relics, during the construction of a London Underground. Gradually Quatermass pieces together the evidence to prove that billions of years ago Earth was colonised by a race of satanic Martians who altered the course of human evolution. Finally, as the machine begins to emanate a life of its own, he has to face the menace of a new kind of invasion.

Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth, Roy Ward Baker, UK, 1968).

As a concept and TV serial, Quatermass and the Pit is without question one of Kneale’s masterpieces. But for me the movie lacked proper resources and suffers from the cheaply glossy colour production it was given at Elstree.

After all. the original vision of Kneale and his television collaborator Rudolph Cartier had been highly expressionist, utilising monochrome and shadow, and performances that could be both stylised but also oddly realist. (On television’s Quatermass II, for example, Cartier cast very old actors for some of the smaller incidental parts in a way that was both startling and unsettling.) Hammer’s early films from Val Guest were not exactly similar but they partook of the same mood. Indeed, greatly to Guest’s credit he had issued one strict instruction to his cinematographer: ‘Whatever you do, don’t pretty it up.’

But now the series moved to bright colours, and Bernard Robinson, who had done such wonders on Quatermass II, could not achieve the same feel for the look of Quatermass and the Pit, at least not on the money he had. The underground excavation and the surrounding streets in Hammer’s Quatermass and the Pit, including Hobbs Lane, were constructed entirely in a studio with results that looked to me plastic and unreal. Of course, some of the power of Kneale’s writing remains, especially in the accumulation of little ironies (when they first discover the object the bomb disposal experts speculate whether it is a ‘Satan’) and the powerful juxtaposition of scientific/mythological/occult themes; but the overall plot is much diluted from the complexities of the original television script. Even the bizarre role of Barbara Shelley, who changes in the course of the film from a blank assistant to the all-powerful medium of the Martians, seems here finally like a plagiarism from Village of the Damned, as Roy Ward Baker utilises close-ups in an attempt to convey tension.

I know many disagree with me about this and Nigel Kneale himself was on record as saying this is the only one of the Quatermass films he could bear. But in a way that is understandable. For Kneale could never forgive the casting of the rumbustious American Brian Donlevy as the very English Quatermass in the first two films, or the way that Hammer ditched the more philosophical ending of The Quatermass Xperiment for a short, sharp, electrical shock to the monster, provided by all of London’s electricity. The film of Quatermass and the Pit takes no such liberties and has a perfectly English Quatermass in Andrew Keir but I still feel it lacks the bite and edge Val Guest had injected into the earlier movies and I regret not being more positive about Guest’s contribution when I first wrote about them.

There can, however, be little doubt that the Quatermass series as a whole represented, at script level at least, an unusually adult approach to science-fiction movies and it is a notorious fact that, during this period, Hammer came close to mounting another science fiction title which could have proved just as interesting.

In 1957, at the height of the horror boom, Michael Carreras, with the enthusiastic endorsement of his father, had snapped up the rights to Richard Matheson’s classic SF novel I am Legend, the brilliant story about the last man on Earth besieged by hordes of strange nocturnal humans who have mutated into a kind of vampire. Filming was planned for early 1958 and the author was flown over to this country (he was even photographed at work on the script, to be called Night Creatures). And then at the last moment the censor gave the entire production an absolute veto.

The timing here was crucial. For the BBFC were right in the middle of their bruising run-in with Hammer over Dracula and the idea of vampires in a contemporary setting was at this stage more than the censor could possibly stand. The project had to be abruptly dropped.

I Am Legend has since had three unsatisfactory screen versions (The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price in 1967, The Omega Man with Charlton Heston in 1971 and I Am Legend with Will Smith in 2007), none scripted by Matheson and none very good. For some reason the book has always been sanitized and only Romero, who used it to inspire Night of the Living Dead, has got anywhere near its dark savage vision.

In the 1950s, as the horror boom continued in the UK, producers moved quickly into other monster projects like Man Without a Body, Fiend Without a Face, First Man into Space and The Strange World of Planet X. The first of these, co-directed by Charles Saunders and Lee Wilder (the brother of Billy Wilder) was a particularly ludicrous piece about an eccentric American financier with a brain tumour who resurrects the head of Nostradamus and tries to persuade it to take over his business affairs. Nostradamus is understandably furious when he comes back alive and the unintentionally comic scenes, in which the two harangue each other, almost make the film worthwhile, though it finally degenerates into a sub-Frankenstein climax. Far more typical was The Strange World of Planet X (Gilbert Gunn 1957), a thoroughly pedestrian piece starring Forrest Tucker, about a visitor from space, which consists mainly of conversations in a pub for its first hour and then brings on a few desultory monsters for the climax.

However, the pseudo-American category should not be confused with the far more interesting cold war cycle of films, already discussed in Chapter 2. This cycle had originated in 1956 with Hammer’s X The Unknown, around the time of Suez, and certainly includes Quentin Lawrence’s 1958 The Trollenberg Terror, adapted by Jimmy Sangster from a TV serial. Here a community (in this case, an Alpine mountain-village) is threatened with invasion in the form of octopus-like creatures concealed in a radioactive cloud until the RAF wing triumphantly overhead to drop their fire bombs and avert the menace. But it is not quite as routine as this synopsis might suggest, with aspects that look forward to Quatermass and the Pit’s plot. Janet Munro plays a telepathic young girl who becomes a kind of medium for the monsters and later, as in much of Kneale’s work, many of the villagers are possessed by the aliens. The film (released as The Crawling Eye in the US) later inspired John Carpenter’s movie The Fog and also terrifies one of the characters in Stephen King’s classic horror novel It.

By the 1960s, however, the pattern of science fiction in British films was beginning to change. It was now clear that there was no automatic market and production in the field consequently became highly sporadic. A few of the established directors of horror, like Terence Fisher, John Gilling and Freddie Francis, were occasionally asked to turn their talents to the field, with mixed results. Fisher brought to Night of the Big Heat, Island of Terror and The Earth Dies Screaming (the first two made for Planet, the third for Fox) much of the solid storytelling excellence that is a feature of his work for Hammer; but the three films (all are about the extra-terrestrial invasion of isolated communities) end up by being minor explorations of the director’s favourite themes rather than exercises in SF, a field in which Fisher had declared himself uninterested. I waited a long time and hopefully to see The Earth Dies Screaming, which had the highest reputation of the three, only to be disappointed. This tale, about the invasion of a small English village by robots, has a quiet menace, but special effects were never Fisher’s forte and robots were never likely to be his style, while the human element is less interesting than Night of the Big Heat.

The more high-profile UK science fiction films after the initial boom tended to be reserved for adaptations of certain highly successful mainstream science-fiction novels, especially those of John Wyndham (Village of the Damned, its sequel Children of the Damned, The Day of The Triffids and the more obscure and less successful parallel universe story Quest For Love). The two monochrome ‘Damned’ films are among the best, deriving from Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, about some mysteriously impregnated women in an English village who give birth to strange alien children. Wolf Rilla handled the first Village of the Damned reasonably well, using the Hertfordshire village of Letchmore Heath with a script which is a straightforward adaptation of Wyndham’s novel. As Jonathan Rigby points out in his very well researched book English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema, Rilla’s visual approach is a little plain alongside the work Hammer and Gerald Gibbs had been doing for their monochrome chillers, and the result is carried more by its story than its style which seems almost too pretty. Though to be fair, Rilla does set up an effective contrast between the peace of the countryside and the external threat, probably taking a cue here from the beleagured village in Cavalcanti and Graham Greene’s Went the Day Well. The sequel, Children of the Damned, was somewhat tougher in approach, though its surreal beginning promised a generation war of apocalyptic dimensions which is never delivered and the film finally falls into some unconvincing moralising (a frequent problem with early science fiction movies). The Day of the Triffids – perhaps the most lavish Wyndham adaptation and in colour unlike the Damned films – provided a good example of all the things that seemed to go wrong at that time when a film company moved into the genre. In the first place, the film, directed by Hungarian émigré Steve Sekely, appears to have been made on an extremely erratic production schedule. Although co-written by two excellent (blacklisted) American writers, Philip Yordan and Bernard Gordon, the script labours its romantic/moralistic asides and the actors seem unsure of both their characters and their lines. Freddie Francis was brought in to do extra scenes and it is even said that stars Kieron Moore and Janette Scott were added to the cast when it was discovered, upon completion of filming, that there was only 57 minutes of good, usable footage available! Yet the basic story (of a sudden nationwide blindness and the attack of alien plants) is intrinsically fascinating and manages to hold the attention in spite of the uncertain tone. Cornel Wilde’s 1970 adaptation of another apocalyptic story, John Christopher’s Death of Grass, had much the same uneven quality.

Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, UK, 1960).

The 1960s also saw various comic adaptations of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne (First Men in the Moon, Rocket to the Moon) which are more or less unrelated to science fiction, and one lauded Val Guest original The Day the Earth Caught Fire about a hard-bitten Fleet Street journalist who makes the discovery the Earth is spinning into the sun. Despite his Quatermass work, Guest (who fought to get it made and co-scripted as well as directing) was more perhaps interested in documenting the reality of British journalism than in the sf plot though the film is memorably cynical. Amicus also beat Hammer to the spin-off potential of television’s Doctor Who, making two films of which the best is Daleks: Invasion of Earth 2150 A.D. But the most important and adult SF of the decade in the UK was to come from an unlikely source and have an extremely troubled passage to the screen. It was Hammer’s and Joseph Losey’s The Damned.

I think it is fair to say that up until recently nobody had quite got to the bottom of why Hammer were ever connected with H. L. Lawrence’s obscure novel The Children of Light. The book was published by a small UK publisher, Macdonalds, in 1960, but received minimal publicity. Moreover, it is an odd hybrid of a novel for, despite a few futuristic references, much of its adventure seems almost 1930s in feel. In fact, the plot starts out as a noirish chase thriller with the hero’s crime of passion and subsequent escape. Later he encounters a violent gang on the south coast, but even they are not teddy boys, as in the film, but rather obviously modelled on Graham Greene’s razor gang in Brighton Rock. And it is only after he escapes with the gang leader’s half-sister – almost halfway through the book – that we finally get to the plot’s ace ingredient: a spooky (and rivetingly imagined) government experiment to prepare a group of irradiated children for post-nuclear survival.

Subsequently it is true the story has some haunting moments – and there is clearly potential in the basic idea of the cold and white-haired children – but it is not as if Hammer were doing much apocalyptic science fiction at this time. However, the answer to the puzzle lies in a handwritten letter which was sent to James Carreras on 5 November 1960. It was from a Surrey businessman friend, Ernest Simon and read:

Dear Jimmy,

A friend of mine has written a book which I think would make a sensational film. The author is H. L. Lawrence, the title ‘The Children of Light’.

Would you be interested in having it read, if so I will have a copy delivered to you.

James Carreras scrawled in red on the letter. ‘YES. I would.’ And the book was duly sent to him, Anthony Hinds read it and was able to tell the senior Carreras at once there was potential, in such a semi-horrific theme. For its angelic, yet chilling children, gave it an unmistakable resemblance to Village of the Damned which had been a big hit that year (much to James Carreras’ irritation, for Hammer had missed out on the rights). Even the rather odd title that was now cooked up, The Damned, demonstrates Hammer’s ambition to cash on the success of the earlier film. Later, others including Joseph Losey would desperately try to get Carreras to change it to On The Brink or The Brink, but they might as well have tried to make him change the title of Dracula to Jonathan Harker. James Carreras would never pass up the chance of a title that was pre-sold.

The Damned (aka These Are the Damned, Joseph Losey, UK, 1963)

Hinds and Carreras talked to Columbia who were very interested, and it looked like a deal was in the offing. But there was one problem, for it now turned out that Lawrence, who had never written a script before, wanted to do the screenplay. Hinds asked him to submit a few pages and wrote back to Simon on 19 January 1962 that ‘although I do not think they are quite good enough I feel that between Lawrence, the director and myself we can make them work.’ He went on to offer £500 for a screenplay and another £500 payable on photography provided no other writer is engaged. Once this was agreed Hinds opened negotiations with Joseph Losey.

This was a bold and insightful choice on Hinds’ part. Losey was in many ways the perfect creator for this subject, a man who could make hard-hitting thrillers and would understand at once the implications of the material. Hinds and Losey had worked together before, on the engaging short Man on the Beach, and it seems Losey correctly blamed Dean Jagger, rather than Hammer, for the fact he had been kicked off X The Unknown.

Yet Hinds and Hammer were to get little kudos for this bold choice from anyone, least of all Losey himself. In most subsequent interviews the filmmaker talked dismissively of Hammer as an exploitation studio out for a quick buck. Even Losey’s fans among the serious critics would seem almost to blame Hammer as if they were abusing the man’s talents by employing him at all. Later, when Columbia delayed releasing the film, Hammer was in the firing line again, even though they were desperate to get it out. Hinds had thought he was doing Losey a favour: ‘I soon realised he thought he was doing me a favour.’

At first though all had been cordial, for Losey saw the material’s potential and in early February accepted in principle a deal of £5,000 (about £152,000 in 2024) to direct the film plus 5 per cent of Hammer’s profits. Neither he nor Hinds, however, were happy with Lawrence’s script so Losey asked if Ben Barzman, the blacklisted American expatriate writer Losey had worked with on The Boy with Green Hair in the US and Time Without Pity in the UK, could do a draft. Hinds agreed and Barzman, then in Zurich, was contacted and paid £5,000 in Swiss francs. In a letter of 23 February, Hinds writes: ‘It is understood that should any objection be raised by the distributor to the use of your name, you will insist that your name be removed from the credits and publicity.’ This was mutual protection for the American blacklist was still very much a consideration, though Hammer had been flouting it from as long ago as 1954.

However, with shooting due to start on 8 May, more problems were beginning. Firstly, there were difficulties surrounding Losey’s contract, which by late March was still not agreed, and Hinds was well aware the filmmaker had a reputation for temperament and perfectionism. ‘You should make it quite clear in the contract,’ he writes in an internal Hammer memo, ‘that if Losey wishes to continue working on the project in any capacity after his stop-date then he does this completely voluntarily.’ Hinds was also trying to get some more upfront money for Losey.

And there were problems with the censor too. Here was one occasion when Trevelyan was away on leave, giving Hammer a taste of what it could be like without him. For on 24 April, Audrey Field wrote an absolutely remarkable report on the project (first unearthed by Wayne Kinsey), which is both patronising and highly political: ‘It seems that the people behind this project are against Teddy Boys, The Establishment and the Nuclear Deterrent. What they are in favour of is less easy to guess, though it seems likely that they are ardent fellow travellers or fully paid up members of the Communist party and would look with a less jaundiced eye on repression and regimentation from the left’ (my italics).

This is astonishing. It was after all a well-known fact that both Losey and Barzman had suffered serious persecution for their political views at the hands of Senator McCarthy in America. And this kind of innuendo makes it sound very much as if the blacklist was alive and well, not within the British film industry, but right at the heart of the British Board of Film Censors. It comes as yet more proof, if it were needed, that John Trevelyan (who perhaps not so coincidentally was away when this was written) did not reveal the whole truth about the attitudes of the board in those heady days. Nobody had any inkling this kind of political attitude existed in the BBFC, which was after all being sold to the media as a totally apolitical organisation to protect the industry from outside interference. It is true Audrey Field goes on to state ‘ … we cannot concern ourselves with their ideas which in any case may escape the sort of “X” film patrons we want to protect.’ But this disclaimer is hard to accept, not only in view of all that has preceded it but also because, almost every time she wrote a report on a Hammer film, it seems painfully clear she is concerned with the ideas; indeed, shortly after this she goes on to talk about ‘the bits that would appeal to morons’ and then dismisses most of the script as ‘symbolic claptrap.’

Some days later the BBFC formally objected to several scenes in The Damned, specifying certain sexual and violent moments. What is unclear now is whether this was why Joseph Losey dropped his bombshell. Which he did around 12 weeks before production started. For he insisted he could not shoot the film unless it was rewritten, and nominated Evan Jones to do the rewrite. Michael Carreras, producer, and Hinds, executive producer, felt they had no choice and Jones was hired. It was a quick job but, on any showing, a very good one. The film, which originally opened like the book, became much more exterior as the hero starts by encountering Oliver Reed and his gang on the streets of Weymouth; the gang itself is more contemporary, the whole government operation more chilling.

But troubles with the censor would continue to dog The Damned. The old BBFC internet site indicated erroneously that no cuts were made, something which their own and Hammer’s files prove to be wrong. For by November the film had still been refused a certificate because of the gang’s violence. Indeed, it was not until August 1962 after further discussions with Columbia, who also seem to have had their problems, that the film finally received a certificate.

The Damned, made at the very beginning of the 1960s, was a kind of summation of the hysterical science-fiction movies of the decade that had just ended. Photographed with Arthur Grant’s customary brilliance, its brittle grey coastal compositions channeled all the tensions and extravagances that had fuelled the apocalyptic visions of the 1950s. A bike gang whose sadism was made quite explicit and outdid anything in The Wild One, a government experiment that concerned itself solely with the slow torture of little children by radiation, an inhibited psychotic gang leader with protective/sexual designs on his own sister; the movie was a compendium of themes which could scarcely have been dealt with before. But Jones and Losey were careful not to turn the thing into a mere carnival of atrocities and the script interconnected the various strands in a way that was penetratingly subtle. The performances are all strong with Shirley Ann Field far more impressive than in her early Anglo films. Finally, the climax, in which Macdonald Carey and Field, aided by the now subdued gang, pathetically try to engineer the children’s escape, only to be killed or left to die on government orders, manages to combine complex irony with a directly emotional appeal in a way that now seems – with hindsight – uneasily credible. It is true that, since then, the image of a ruthless institutionalised violence has become more widespread; but has it ever been portrayed in such memorable images?

The Damned proved to be a rarity. It would take a long time for science fiction movies to finally come of age, but eventually they did with major adaptations in America of great science fiction writers like Philp K. Dick and William Gibson not to mention ambitious originals like The Matrix. At this point Britain could not easily follow simply because of the huge budgets involved. That might be one reason why in the twenty-first century there has been less British science fiction than horror: the more recent sf titles are covered in the last chapter of this book, but two earlier ones are relevant here,

In 2008, before moving to US film production and much higher budgets (like Warcraft in 2016 which cost $160 million), philosophy graduate Duncan Jones, made the highly original Moon in the UK for $5 million. It was from his own story, set in the near future, about a solitary astronaut on the moon, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who’s using robots and automata to mine an important fuel that is shipped to earth. Sam is nearing the end of his three-year mission, with only his AI machine GERTY for company, and he longs to return to his wife and family but communications keep being interrupted. Gradually through his eerie solitude, Sam grasps that little of his life is as it seems, in fact he is the victim of a ruthless and cruel technical conspiracy.

Using many paradoxical elements of modern science fiction like cloning and neural implants, Jones mounts an amazingly atmospheric, and sometimes tragic, story which grips from the start. It was shot in 33 days at Shepperton Studios by a team that included Bill Pearson (supervising model maker on Alien), who designed the elaborate lunar rovers and harvesters. The result is entirely convincing, one of the most sophisticated but also affecting sf movies to come out of the UK with a great central performance from Rockwell.

Under the Skin is a milestone of a very different kind from the noted British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. Over a 30-year career Glazer has made only four features in between high-end commercials. But almost all of these films, since Sexy Beast in 2000, have had considerable impact even if they have not always found box office success. He had wanted to make Under the Skin (very loosely adapted from the novel by Michel Faber – author of The Crimson Petal and the White) for a decade before he finally shot it in Scotland in 2011 with Scarlett Johansson in the lead.

Like all of Glazer’s films, Under the Skin is an unexpected and quite paradoxical work. On paper the essence of its science fiction plot could be dismissed as utterly standard – in fact old school: an alien takes the form of a very beautiful woman and destroys men. At root, this is the same basic plot as Species, and its sequels, except that the humans here are completely unaware of the danger. But anyone who came to this film expecting a variation on Species would be utterly confounded: Glazer is single-mindedly intent on reproducing the experience of what it must be like to encounter an alien, making us feel above all else the being’s essential strangeness as she is forced to engage with people. Scarlett Johansson’s beauty is utilised to some effect in places but not in any conventional way and the whole film deconstructs her, in appearance and personality, to a point where it is reported many people involved by chance in the filming (as described below) could not recognise her.

The plotting of the film is a little obscure at times – evidently several special effects sequences were cut at the last minute – but Glazer maintains that, in the end, such cuts helped him concentrate his vision. Certainly, every scene is worked out meticulously in a way that must have taken endless time and patience to achieve: One example is the scene on a stormy beach, in which the alien ignores a drowning couple and a screaming baby, in order to procure the body of a swimmer. As cinematic moments go, it is astonishingly powerful and quite unforgettable but also at times almost unbearable. Apparently, several of the scenes, in which the alien lures men, were improvised with real people (not actors). who were unaware they were being filmed, but later agreed to participate, adding to the film’s highly unusual blend of weirdness and realism.

The result of all this is a strange, heady mix, visually sensational but also tense and quite daunting in mood. The film won several awards, and much critical kudos, but proved just too harrowing and alienating for many, under-performing at the box office. In the end it was perhaps a more forceful reminder than most people would like, that a real encounter with a shape-shifting alien is unlikely to be a very comfortable experience. But, in the long history of such alien movies, it is unique.

Lastly mention should be made here of a British filmmaker, who started out specialising in special effects and broke through to huge budget American productions, like the 2014 reboot Godzilla and the Star Wars movie Rogue One. Gareth Edwards, who hails from Nuneaton but is of Welsh parentage, had been inspired by the films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to study film at Surrey’s Institute of Art and Design before moving into special effects for documentary TV shows. He broke out with the highly enterprising and innovative British–Mexican co-production Monsters, not quite an early example of micro-budget but made very cheaply for its time in 2010 at around $500,000 (roughly $720,000 in 2024). Edwards, then 35, was writer, director, cinematographer, production designer and visual effects creator on the film and shot it in Belize, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the United States over three weeks, turning out one of the very best British-made creature movies ever (a UK–Mexico co-production). The story was highly original, being set years after most monster invasion movies are usually set, not at the start of the invasion but near its end. He imagined a world where a prolonged war with monsters, in various countries, is now taken for granted rather like the aftermath of a series of natural disasters. The film – which features a couple’s epic journey, beset with hazards, as they make the difficult crossing from south to north America – has some of the cinematic freshness and real footage feel of Blair Witch Project with much improvisation. It is rough in places, being made on the run, using real characters the crew encountered on their journey, but is still arguably the most realistic portrayal of what such a war with extra-terrestrials might be like – namely chaotic and piecemeal. The ending in a lonely garage on the US border is extremely clever, not merely in its haunting portrayal of the monsters but also in the dawning reality – captured partly via TV news channels – that America will in the end be overrun.

It was a spectacular debut and Edwards moved on into major US features, not only the Star Wars spin-off but, more recently, the clever, and in places audacious, American epic fantasy The Creator in which the US military end up being the bad guys. He certainly ranks as one of the leading British fantasy filmmakers of the new century.

EXOTICISM

The Gothic strain in English literature has always been dependent to some extent upon the literary phenomenon which Mario Praz calls ‘exoticism’. In a technical sense this refers to a kind of escapism in which the artist invokes remote periods and distant countries as a stimulus for his imagination and as a means of avoiding sexual/ mental inhibitions. It is in fact a kind of indulgent surrealism and, in this sense, the word might certainly be applied to much of Hammer’s early horror output. It could also be used more narrowly to describe the kind of part-oriental, part-fantastic themes which were the basis of William Beckford’s sensational novel Vathek in 1782; and it is this kind of deliberate foreignness, the creation of a fictional country, which marks Hammer’s own exotic cycle from its tentative beginnings in Terror of the Tongs to When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

Terror of the Tongs (1961) is about a Chinese secret society, led by a wicked Oriental villain (Christopher Lee) who kidnaps a ship captain’s daughter in turn-of-the-century Hong Kong. Jimmy Sangster’s script has some verve and suspense, but the film is rarely revived now because of the issues we discussed in the last chapter around Fu Manchu. The project appears to have come about purely because, following the failure of Tales of Frankenstein, James Carreras was doubly desperate to launch the company into the high volume and high turnover world of television. Therefore, a supposed pilot for a US spy series called Visa to Canton was produced, once more with Columbia. And this time, to make doubly sure he would not be out-manoeuvred by his partners and that any follow-ups had to be made at Bray, Bernard Robinson was commissioned to build a splendid and expensive standing set of a large merchant ship moored at a Chinese dockside.

The problem was the pilot was not picked up, becoming a second feature movie instead, which left Hammer with a set that had cost them a good deal of money. And so Jimmy Sangster, who helped Hammer out of so many such jams, was commissioned to write Terror of the Tongs, which exploits the set to the full; indeed, the express aim was to make another Stranglers of Bombay adventure story with lots of gruesome details and the added benefit of colour. Rank veteran actor/producer/ director Anthony Bushell gave it a little more weight than it might have had and the film formed part of a successful double bill at the London Pavilion. Much later Hammer, who had flirted with cutting this X certificate picture for an ‘A’, concluded it was not worth excluding older children from such swashbucklers. Consequently, when it returned to this kind of subject, it did so without the more macabre touches and without the UK ‘X’ certificate, generally releasing them over the school holidays. The new approach would result in Pirates of Blood River, Captain Clegg, Devil Ship Pirates and The Scarlet Blade, all well-made adventures, full of stylish sensationalism and all utilising Bernard Robinson’s flair for design at its purest. The films remain minor but pleasing illustrations of Hammer’s ability with story and spectacle, even after all overt horror content had been removed.

One Million Years B.C. (Don Chaffey, UK, 1966).

However, Hammer would also soon be exploring the exotic with higher budgets and more extravagant themes. Robert Day’s She, which effectively began this aspect in 1964, proved to be a rather simplified adaptation of Rider Haggard’s novel with Ursula Andress cast as the virgin queen in a mundane script. As with Dr. No, the previous year, the producers were unhappy with their star’s voice and had it dubbed by Nikki Van Der Zyl, who had done the same in the Bond film. The following year saw the first of the stone-age movies – Don Chaffey’s One Million Years B.C. – which was also Hammer’s hundredth film. Its plot – like most in the cycle – suffers badly from some dull anthropology (rock people versus shell people, etc) but the special effects were fun, being the work of Ray Harryhausen who in the earlier years of special effects pioneered a completely new method of bringing monsters and geophysical disasters to the screen. After the film’s success, Hammer followed it with The Viking Queen and Slave Girls but, as we have seen, the latter film gave them nothing but problems, and in any case the market for such spectaculars was on the wane.

Even so, in 1969 (after The Vengeance of She) Hammer took the unusual and hopeful step of commissioning one of Britain’s foremost science-fiction writers, J. G. Ballard, to write a treatment for a serious exotic movie. Ballard it seems conceived an account of early life on this planet with humans and dinosaurs which would illustrate Horbiger’s theories about violent cosmic upheaval and the creation of the moon as well as focusing on the highly topical subject of dangerous weather. But as it turned out, When the Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was released in the dreaded Hammer year of 1970 after Hinds had left the company, and standards subsequently slipped with dizzying speed. Not only did Hammer hate what Ballard wrote, losing most of it in Val Guest’s uninteresting screenplay, but unforgivably too and amazingly, Ballard’s name was actually mis-spelt on the UK credits as ‘JB Ballard’ – not much of a tribute to one of the most distinguished writers they ever employed. Dinosaurs does retain some cosmological material, rendering it marginally more interesting than the other movies in this series. But its invented language is as tedious as in all the other movies and it is mainly concerned with showing its star Victoria Vetri’s body. It also contains some agonisingly insipid moments including the hatching of a dinosaur’s egg. Evidently when the science-fiction writers Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard actually saw the film, they watched with increasing disbelief: ‘I know one thing you must have written,’ Moorcock goaded afterwards, ‘that stuff with the egg?’ Ballard kept up his end, replying: ‘It was the only thing they left in!’

Yet Dinosaurs did not do too badly at the box office and on 10 December 1970 James Carreras was writing to Michael in an internal memo:

I met with Deke Hayward last night at RYAN’S DAUGHTER [David Lean’s oscar winning movie] and he was full of enthusiasm for the business that VAMPIRE LOVERS is doing via AIP and wants to do a spectacular with us having heard of the takings of DINOSAURS etc. We ought to start making a presentation of either WHEN THE EARTH CRACKED OPEN, ZEPPELIN v PTERODACTYLS or the subject that you and Don Chaffey are working on. I think you ought to have a meeting with Deke Hayward as it would be very useful to start a picture like this sometime in the middle of next year. He will want to make it as cheaply as possible but with the most amount of glamour etc. possible. Also what’s happening with the script of DRACULA/ CHELSEA 72 as I’d like to get this to EMI at the end of the year? Please keep me advised.

Deke Hayward would never get his ‘spectacular’ and it is a pity that the titles James Carreras mentions here, which exist as alluring posters, sound so much more interesting than any of the ones Hammer actually made. Zeppelin v Pterodactyls has a particularly legendary status among Hammer fans. It was originally called Raiders of the Stone Ring, a title somewhat ahead of its time, and involved a period Zeppelin flight to a prehistoric valley at one of the poles where scientists encounter a lost civilisation and many monsters. Hammer tried to interest distributors, who always found it far too expensive. But in the months before he left Hammer, Anthony Hinds struggled to turn it around. His feeling was that if the monsters were limited to pterodactyls, and they attacked the Zeppelin at the beginning and the end, with more routine action in the middle, the film might just be viable. That rewrite work was never done and now the film exists only as a somewhat turgid treatment in their files alongside Hinds’ notes for its improvement – apart of course from its tantalising poster.

Whatever the subject Chaffey and Carreras were working on, as mentioned in this memo it was not Creatures the World Forgot for that was already in post at this point, being released the following April. The last of the cycle, it marked a peculiarly feeble return to the earlier sub-anthropological concerns of One Million Years B.C. with Rock Tribes versus Mud Men in some South African locations and not a dinosaur in sight. Unsurprisingly it did no business for Columbia who were by now disgruntled with their erstwhile partner and nicknamed this ‘the movie the world forgot’. It was a sad end to a partnership that had produced so many films. Columbia would never do business with Hammer and James Carreras again.

Exoticism, in the old monsters and glamour vein, has unsurprisingly faded since Hammer ran with it so long ago. But, recently and unexpectedly, in 2023 came a British stone-age action horror movie with a big difference and real atmosphere,

On paper Out of Darkness, a debut for its director, National Film School graduate Andrew Cumming, and screenwriter Ruth Greenberg, might sound unpromising. For it employs an invented language with subtitles to tell its story of a group of six prehistoric people arriving on unknown land in search of shelter and food. But, precisely by avoiding the grunts and snarls (or, even worse, pigeon English), the production manages to dodge all the old fakeness to achieve a seriously authentic feel. Beautifully and hauntingly photographed in luminous forest and mountain settings, the menace builds to a highly suspenseful pitch as the group encounter several mysteries and an unkown deadly nemesis, which is only revealed, to great and meaningful effect, at the end.

Made in the Scottish highland, during Covid, this award-winning feature marks an impressive debut for its makers. It shows that if you disregard the old clichés and try to imagine what our ancestors really faced, there is still effective space left in this now rare sub-genre.

PSYCHOSIS

The brief for Hammer’s prolonged psychological cycle was undoubtedly the enormous success of Psycho and before that The Fiends (Les Diaboliques) in 1955. The latter film is only rarely seen now (it was remade unsuccessfully with Sharon Stone in 1996) but was enormously influential in its time. Much of this kind of material (and, a warning, there are some spoilers in my discussion of these films) can be traced back directly to it and to its source novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, two influential French figures in the history of the horror thriller who also helped to script Franju’s Eyes Without a Face in 1959, the classic mad surgeon thriller.

As regards Les Diaboliques, it seems Hitchcock was beaten to the rights by French filmmaker Georges Clouzot or he would have made the film himself (later he would adapt Boileau and Narcejac’s novel D’entre les Morts into Vertigo). This is indeed the world where Hitchcock and horror intertwine, a world of deceit and mad cruelty, gruesome murder and Freudian ghosts. Usually too it is a world, as in Hitchcock’s Pyscho, of narrative twists, where events that seem supernatural turn out to be the result of either madness or attempts to drive people mad.

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, UK, 1965).

One of the more unusual, early examples is the British psycho-thriller, Repulsion, made for the tiny UK company Compton by the young Roman Polanski in 1965. The film is rightly regarded as a classic of the genre, partly because it remains different from most of the others. There is no real twist except perhaps that for a time we do not fully grasp we are witnessing the heroine’s descent into paranoid delusions. Set in the uneasy world of London’s flat flotsam culture of the mid-1960s, Repulsion is pure style, wonderfully shot and acted, a sumptuous and sometimes terrifying treat in which Catherine Deneuve gives an extraordinarily well-judged performance as a lonely, potentially violent, French girl. Interestingly it was around this time that Polanski declared himself to be a major fan of Hammer and Terence Fisher, and it remains a pity Hammer never took up the bait.

Fisher himself never made a psycho-thriller and it was Jimmy Sangster who led Hammer into the field, frequently claiming Les Diaboliques as his favourite film. Taste of Fear (1960) was the first and one of the best. Like Les Diaboliques it was based around the visual theme of water, benefiting greatly from Douglas Slocombe’s monochrome photography. Seth Holt, its director, had an erratic but acclaimed career and – apart from Losey’s The Damned – Taste of Fear was the only Hammer film ever to be endorsed by the highly influential British movie magazine Movie, which championed popular cinema as art. Later Holt would go on to make another commercially successful Hammer psycho-thriller, The Nanny, about a boy who comes to believe his nanny (Bette Davis in one of her later movies) is trying to kill him. Both Holt’s Hammer thrillers have atmosphere and effective moments, both also suffer from a certain implausibility. The Nanny tried at times to be a whodunit yet it was fairly obvious from early on Davis must be the villain.

The Freddie Francis/Jimmy Sangster trilogy within Hammer’s psychological series – Paranoiac, Nightmare (both 1962) and Hysteria (1964) – has its own flavour, quite an engaging one. Sangster would always refer to his scripts in this genre as his Gaslight films after the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play Gaslight,¹ in which a murderous husband attempts to drive his wife mad through a process of mental torture, often making her think she is seeing or hearing ghosts. Paranoiac also added the plot of Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar (in which a man pretends to be the long-lost heir to a family fortune) and made it a starring vehicle for Oliver Reed, who the studio had under contract.

Taste of Fear (Seth Holt, UK, 1961).

The result was not bad, with some atmospheric sequences, though, like all the others in this category, it constantly risks descending into the merely mechanical in its attempt to deliver an unguessable ending. Hysteria stands out because it seems to have as a model not so much Psycho as Hitchcock’s extraordinary Vertigo. Here an amnesiac (Robert Webber) leaves hospital, and is told only that he is being paid money and offered stylish accommodation by an unknown benefactor. The one clue to his past is the image of a beautiful woman (Lelia Goldoni) torn from a magazine. He discovers she was murdered but he keeps seeing her and is slowly drawn to this ghostly presence. But, as he becomes increasingly involved with her, his nightmares of ghosts and violence begin to come true.

The idea has real potential and there are strange, surreal touches strongly reminiscent of the English television mystery writer Francis Durbridge, whose home counties brand of surrealism is now too often forgotten. But Hysteria is undercast and has a tacky feel, badly missing Bernard Robinson (who seems to have been busy at the time on the uninspired retread Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb). Freddie Francis has been quoted by Sangster as saying his heart ‘just wasn’t in it’, which may be understandable for it seems star Robert Webber spent all his time picking on Goldoni and creating a generally foul atmosphere. But the film also labours under Edward Carrick’s plastic sets and a terrible music score from Don Banks. Since Banks did a perfectly good job of scoring The Reptile and others, somebody (quite likely Sangster himself, or Michael Carreras) was obviously trying to push him into an urban jazz score but it fails on every count.

The premise of Nightmare is more modest but the film is much more successful. Jennie Linden plays Janet, a woman whose terrible nightmares about her dead mother, threaten to become reality. It seems Janet was originally cast with Julie Christie but she left to play Billie Liar for John Schlesinger, a film that undoubtedly did much more to propel her career, but (by a quirk of genre fate) is now probably revived less often than Nightmare, which seems to play on television constantly. There is real atmosphere here, the team works well, with Bernard Robinson doing the sets and some expert support, while Don Banks’ score harmonises with the film rather than working against it. The ending may be a little obvious but the film went down well enough to lead to several more.

Fanatic (aka Die! Die! My Darling!, Silvio Narizzano, UK, 1965).

These were the best of Sangster’s work in the genre. Crescendo and Maniac suffered from being overtly mechanical, but he returned to the genre as both writer and director for the 1971 Fear in the Night. This had been written under the title Brainstorm ten years earlier, though it was later rewritten completely in a spirited and not entirely unsuccessful attempt to ring changes on the formula. The new setting (an excellent one for the purposes evidently suggested by Michael Carreras) is an old private school, with Peter Cushing as the headmaster, Joan Collins as his wife, Judy Geeson as the young heroine and Ralph Bates as her fiancé. At least two people are pretending to be what they are not and the ending was a genuine surprise, involving a pleasant dollop of the surreal. But the result still has an old-fashioned feel and by the time Fear in the Night was released in 1971, everything had moved on, television was already featuring this kind of material and the film went almost completely unnoticed.

There were two other Hammer psycho thrillers: one is the best of the bunch, the other an oddity. Straight On Till Morning, the oddity, seems to have started out in Michael Carreras’ mind as a story torn from the grisliest of headlines, but became – via director Peter Collinson and writer John Peacock – a quite sentimental thriller with Shane Briant as the killer who thinks he is Peter Pan and Rita Tushingham as his adoring victim.

Fanatic (aka Die! Die! My Darling!) was made in 1964 from a novel by Anne Blaisdell and is on an entirely different level from all the others. It did not depend on any last-minute twist, but instead on a gradual ratcheting up of the tension. And, what is more, like several of the best fantasy movies in this book, including Night of the Eagle and The Devil Rides Out, it had at its core an excellent script by Richard Matheson.

A young girl (Stefanie Powers) arrives in the country to meet Mrs Trefoil, the mother of her fiancé, who has died in America. Out of politeness she agrees to stay the night with the apparently kind old lady, but it gradually emerges that Mrs Trefoil, played magnificently by Tallulah Bankhead, is a psychotic religious crank. We observe a slow change in her attitude to her guest, when she begins to address her like a child (‘run away and take off that filth’). Soon she is asking personal questions and making impossible demands. The girl’s resistance is quietly worn away and, when she attempts to leave, the mild discipline becomes more extreme and she is locked up. The next step in her enforced degradation is taken when her clothes are removed (at times the film’s progression resembles John Fowles’ novel The Collector, but it is considerably more successful than Wyler’s film version); then she is wounded, refused food and threatened with disfigurement.

The accumulating humiliations are naturally accompanied by some sustained insight into Mrs Trefoil, who is a caricature of the repressed old maid, compensating for her sinful youth (there are no mirrors in the house). It also becomes evident, as the plot builds to its climax and the heroine is increasingly depersonalised, that Matheson is contriving to incorporate the full power of certain Gothic themes which fill whole sections of the work of Lewis and Radcliffe: namely those of the ‘Prioress’ and the ‘Malevolent Convent’. The Trefoil house soon begins to take on the attributes of a religious prison from its absurd and sadistic daily rituals right down to the ghoulish subterranean secrets of its cellars.

Some of the minor characters in the household are, it is true, less interesting and less convincing. Donald Sutherland has a thankless role as a mentally impaired gardener, while the motives of the couple who help Mrs Trefoil (played by Peter Vaughan and Yootha Joyce) are a little far-fetched. But Mrs Trefoil herself is the perfect incarnation of the hard merciless Mother Superior whose kindness kills (‘You must die, die, my darling’ she coos at the film’s climax). The scene in which the prisoner desperately throws down a letter to the demented gardener (who immediately shows it to his mistress) may be paralleled from dozens of nineteenth-century Gothic novels (including, incidentally, Dracula). Directed with a few flourishes by Silvo Narizzano, Fanatic remains one of the most effective adaptations of Gothic themes that Hammer has ever attempted and also indicates just how important characterisation can be in the creation of the psycho-thriller (a category to which the film still recognisably belongs). For all the really major outings in the genre seem to rely less on shock, surprise and action, and much more on complex human observation and interaction. Take Mrs Trefoil out of Fanatic (or, for that matter, Norman Bates out of Psycho, Kathy Bates out of Misery or Martha Scott out of Baby Reindeer) and you may have only routine suspense left.

A Note on Comedy-Horror

Since this chapter is concerned with sub-genres it seems the best place for an aside on comedy-horror, which has developed from a rarity into a very regular theme. This is especially true in Britain, which may be hardly surprising, for comedy has long been one of the most dominant forms of British entertainment: C. S. Lewis wrote in his book The Screwtape Letters that ‘the British take comedy so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame.’ So, what of the intersection of comedy and horror?

The form had a relatively unpromising start in America in the 1930s at the low end of comedy and the dying end of the first boom in horror. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was Universal’s desperate attempt to merge waning comedians with equally waning horror stars and the film was a commercial success, though much less for its horror than the slapstick and farce.

There were also horror farces in the early days of the later British horror boom but none were particularly successful. What a Carve Up (1962), – a rough comic adaptation of the Karloff film The Ghoul using a Carry On cast – is remembered, but primarily because novelist Jonathan Coe recalled his experience of a family viewing to write a prize-winning novel.

Later on, The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971) launched the Phibes films, with Vincent Price as a vengeful doctor. I was never a fan of these comedies of revenge, grossly overdressed and stylised by former set designer Robert Fuest. but they were successful and spawned sequels.

Equally unhorrific in its way is the vampire comedy genre that has been a constantly recurring feature since Bela Lugosi camped it up with Old Mother Riley. Even Polanski made one with Dance of the Vampires (aka The Fearless Vampire Killers), describing it at the time as a tribute to Hammer. And the fun ‘n’ fangs theme has continued right up to Jake West’s 1996 Razor Blade Smile, a reasonably likeable postpunk romp, which feels like a satirical tribute to Interview with the Vampire via MTV. The plot is soggy in places and entirely absent in others, the cheeky commentary not quite funny enough, but there’s enough blood, sex and violence for an effective parody even if the pace is dragged by the fact that for some inexplicable reason almost all the cast – especially the voluptuous women vampires – talk like Margaret Thatcher on barbiturates.

I would even argue that, in an admittedly much darker way, a film like Vadim Jean’s Beyond Bedlam from 1993, though it has gore, and ran into big trouble with the British censor in the last fit of moral panic around video nasties, is at heart black comedy, far more than it is anything else with its crazy dreams and mixed-up dead people. Jean’s subsequent career as director of Leon the Pig Farmer, The Real Howard Spitz and writer/director of Hogfather seems to confirm this.

In the new century though British comedy horror has come into its own with a profusion of titles, and also launched at least one major filmmaker in Edgar Wright.

Wright evidently started out as a kid making parody genre films on camcorder. His first feature in 1995 was a parody western and subsequently he worked on many TV comedy shows before teaming up with actor/writer Simon Pegg to direct the Channel 4 comedy show Spaced, where he used a very cinematic style for gags, particularly a spoof horror style.

Eventually he teamed with Pegg on Shaun of the Dead, an affectionate and likeable fusion of male blokeish culture, bromance and zombie movie, in which the hapless hero Pegg can only think of one place to escape from the apocalypse, namely his local pub. In many ways this is almost new-style Ealing comedy with Pegg giving a strongly authentic performance as Shaun, a hopeless male who’s primarily loyal to Ed, his even more hopeless slacker buddy. The script has a pleasingly self-deprecatory wit, typified by its final punchline when Ed turns out to be quite happy as a videogame playing zombie, locked up in Shaun’s shed!

The film was a major international success and Wright followed it with two other British comedy hits, parodies, of action movies and science fiction respectively (Hot Fuzz and World’s End) before making what is perhaps his best film and his highest grossing hit as a director to date, the highly original and poignant American action thriller Baby Driver (a sequel has been long planned). Wright did return to the UK for Last Night in Soho, which turned out to be a strange and less coherent genre fusion – part-musical, part-horror, part time travel. Variety dubbed it a ‘surprising misfire’ and it did not win a huge audience, but Wright has at least ten films in active development including the sequel to Baby Driver and has conclusively proved that UK comedy horror can work for audiences.

But where does comedy-horror sit exactly in the horror category? Is it as close to horror as the other sub-genres, namely action horror, romantic horror, gothic horror, psychological horror, folk horror, science fiction horror, dystopian horror, fairy-tale horror ‘Paradise Lost’ horror and all the rest? Some would say so, but I think you can see a clear dividing line here. Naturally you can have comedy and comical moments in horror. As in all genres, that is incredibly important, Psycho has some of the wittiest dialogue ever written while many modern horrors have funny scenes. But if you have a constant comic tone, it may become hard not to tip over into farce. And once there, can you pull back into serious suspense and thrills? Not easily I would argue, since the absurdity of farce too easily shatters any suspension of disbelief and can even lead to boredom. Unless of course you add more laughs and parody and pratfalls, in which case audiences know they are not being asked to believe in the story but will stick around anyway because they like laughing. In other words, comedy is a primary colour which, if added without restraint, may well drown out other colours.

This leads me to conclude Scary Movie and Shaun of the Dead and the rest are essentially comedies with horror themes, rather than horror films. Cross the psychological with horror or action with horror, you have horror. Cross non-stop comedy with horror, you have comedy.

1.The term has had a renaissance in recent years, partly it seems because it has been attributed to President Trump’s denials of fact.

9

A Renaissance of Themes and Ideas?

MICHAEL REEVES

An air of melodrama or even tragedy sometimes seems to surround the lives and careers of many of those involved in Romantic/Gothic literature. Taking as an example the distinguished 1816 lakeside gathering at Byron’s Villa Diodati, discussed earlier, it is perhaps worth recalling that only six years later, at the age of 30, Shelley was drowned, while Byron died violently in 1824 and Polidori killed himself in his mid-20s in 1821, shortly after writing The Vampire. The last 29 years of Mary Shelley’s life are consequently often described as an epilogue and she herself wrote that ‘All my life since is an unreal fantasmagoria … storm and blight and death have passed over, and destroyed all.’

It is easy to become glibly sensational in examining this aspect of the Romantic temperament. But in so far as this book discusses the development of the Gothic strain into the cinema, it should be observed that something of the same intensely tragic atmosphere has on occasions pervaded the world of the horror film and those who create them. The point was made originally by Peter John Dyer in Sight & Sound, Autumn 1968, when he listed a number of horror names (Lon Chaney Sr, Laird Cregar, James Whale, Bela Lugosi, etc) who had died in tragic or mysterious circumstances. I am not entirely convinced, given that early Hollywood had plenty of tragic figures. But it is a sad fact that only weeks after Dyer’s article appeared, Michael Reeves, one of the most remarkable young English filmmakers of the 1960s, who pioneered a new approach to British horror, was found dead in his flat of a barbiturate overdose. He was 25.

Reeves only completed three and a half films, over a period of five years from 1964 to 1969 but, despite all the time that has elapsed, he is still among the most important filmmakers discussed in this book. For at a time when the impetus behind the original English horror revival of the late 1950s was beginning to flag, Reeves fought with enormous courage and perseverance to introduce a new and radical approach to the entire genre. The best film he made in England generates a power which scarcely diminishes with repeated viewing; though almost compromised by interference, Witchfinder General is unlike anything else that was being done at the time and (regrettably) has been done since. We had to wait a long time for a good biography of Reeves, but at last it appeared in 2003 with Benjamin Halligan’s Michael Reeves. This exhaustive study brought him to life and is particularly strong on his early unseen amateur films and on every aspect of the making of Witchfinder General. It also has the best account I have ever seen of the circumstances surrounding his death.

Michael Leith Reeves was born in 1944 and, although part-American, was educated in England at Radley School. Obsessed with movies from an early age, upon leaving school he joined his parents in Boston and then, on an impulse, flew to Los Angeles and went straight to the home of one of his idols, filmmaker Don Siegel. This sounds so like an invention I have checked and double checked, but apparently it did indeed happen, the startled director appearing in string vest and underpants! A decade before, such a method of breaking into features would have been not only impossible but unthinkable. The English commercial directors, like Terence Fisher who had emerged in the 1950s, cared about cinema, but would have considered it highly eccentric to become passionately involved in the contemporary popular film scene as avid spectator-critics. To them, the craft of films was learned, not in cinemas, but in the cutting rooms and the studios. Reeves, however, was only the first of a number of young director/writers who now entered British horror movies with a long apprenticeship as voracious cinéastes: and in this respect the influence of Don Siegel, especially, can scarcely be over-estimated. His Invasion of the Body Snatchers had proved to be one of the most liberating and influential genre movies of two decades, so much so that Chris Wicking’s Scream and Scream Again even drew some of its characters’ names from a Siegel filmography.

When Reeves went to Siegel’s house, the director was impressed enough to help him, out, giving him a job on the spot as dialogue director on some tests he was doing for Paramount. Later Reeves returned to England and worked as a runner for Irving Allen on The Long Ships and Genghis Khan, before becoming an assistant director on television commercials. His first real break came when Paul Maslansky invited him to Italy to work on some scripts and he was given the job of assistant director on a horror picture starring Christopher Lee called Castle of the Living Dead. The film was directed by Warren Kiefer (though credited to Luciano Ricci for quota purposes) and considerable confusion remains about the extent of Reeves’ contribution. Some writers have recorded that Reeves took over the whole production for about nine days because Kiefer fell ill. Maslansky corrected this for me while I was writing the first edition of Heritage, explaining it was quite untrue. Reeves remained on the second unit for the entire picture, but the work he was doing with a scratch crew turned out so much better than Kiefer’s that his contribution was enlarged and he was allowed to make some additions to the script, including the introduction of a rather Bergmanesque dwarf. Kiefer has since evidently denied this completely to Reeves’ resourceful biographer Halligan, claiming there was no second unit. So the mystery remains, but I tend to hold by Maslansky’s account, which was impartial and provided only a few years after the event, as opposed to Kiefer’s memories 30 years later. Of course the controversy only exists at all because Reeves’ filmography is so painfully short, and it must be admitted Castle of the Living Dead is not that good. But it remains a collector’s item for its uncharacteristically authentic flavour of medievalism which derives largely from the bizarre collection of minor characters like the dwarf and Donald Sutherland’s highly grotesque witch.

Whatever Reeves contributed to Castle, it is much more important that, as a result of his work on the film, Maslansky offered Reeves a screenplay called Vardella to direct, with a shooting schedule of 18 days and a derisory budget for those days of £13,000 (about £340,00 in 2024). Reeves himself was so desperate to direct that he was prepared to put up a large amount of his own money to finance the film, and he completely rewrote the script under the pseudonym of Michael Byron. The film was shot in 1965 and Reeves was forced by the circumstances of the production to use a second unit for the only time in his career. The result was Revenge of the Blood Beast, which contained definite indications of his promise as a director. Admittedly some of the film is tiresome and banal, notably all the footage shot by the second unit, containing a running gag about a motorcyclist, but there is a memorable opening sequence which clearly prefigured Witchfinder General in which the witch, Vardella, is hunted out and drowned by the villagers. Revenge of the Blood Beast also tentatively indicates some of the themes that run through all Reeves’ three films, for the evil of the indestructible witch, Vardella, has a force which derives clearly from the evil in the other characters, including the hero. When the innkeeper is about to attack a girl for example, Reeves cuts to Vardella’s putrefying features, and when a boy is eagerly enjoying the savagery of a cock-fight below his window he is savagely attacked by Vardella. From moments like these it can already be seen that the world Reeves set out to create is diametrically opposed to the dualistic universe elaborated by Fisher. In Reeves’ characters, evil is inextricably intertwined with good, and their violence is circular and ambiguous.

The following year Reeves returned to England and, after various unsuccessful attempts to set up productions, wrote an adaptation with Tom Baker of John Burke’s novel The Sorcerers, shooting it on a budget of £52,000 (somewhere around £1.3 million in 2024). The story is about an old couple, Dr Marcus Monsarrat (Boris Karloff) and his wife Estelle (Catherine Lacey), who have devised a method of hypnotising which is effective at a distance and enables them to experience all the sensations of their subjects. They begin to control the mind of a teenager (Ian Ogilvy) and to feel through him the physical sensations of youth; Estelle becomes completely obsessed with sensual excitement and begins to make the puppet indulge in sadistic murders. Finally, after a number of violent outbreaks, the boy is killed when his car crashes into flames and, unknown to everyone, his controllers are also burnt alive in their tiny flat.

As will be made clear from this outline, the subject had enormous potential to anyone with Reeves’ insight into the mechanics of cinema. On one level, as so many have pointed out, it is about the whole cinematic experience, and the vicarious emotions which any audience indulges at the expense of the puppet characters, manipulated before their eyes. The Monsarrats are finally corrupted and destroyed by the experience of passive identification (‘It’s as though we were him,’ says Estelle, with demonic glee), and there are numerous other angles to the film. From the boy’s point of view (he is never consciously aware of his controllers or what is happening) it is a nightmarish essay in predestination as two unknown and unknowable gods pull the strings of a clockwork universe. For the other characters, including Mike’s girlfriend, the film is about psychopathy (they are told that Mike ‘blacks out’ before becoming violent, etc). And on yet another level it could be regarded as a study of possession (the old couple are Mike’s parents or superego ‘inside his head’). As with Powell’s Peeping Tom, the scope for interpretation in The Sorcerers is vast but, from the way that Reeves has handled the film, it is clear that he is especially concerned with the psychopathology of the Monsarrats, particularly Estelle Monsarrat: when first introduced, Estelle is a kind middle-aged lady coming out of the kitchen, carrying her husband’s supper. The underlying depths of frustration in the old couple are then suggested only in the extraordinary clash in décor between their tatty and tasteless flat, full of faded bric-a-brac, and the dazzling white, symmetrical beauty of the laboratory which they keep like a world apart. Later, after the experiment works, Estelle’s sexual excitement becomes quite uncontrollable until, quivering with joy, she makes Mike kill an ex-girlfriend with a pair of scissors. The director’s handling of this particular sequence is typically deliberate, editing it with absolute precision so that as the girl (Susan George) falls backwards titillatingly towards the bed, there is a sudden flash of Estelle’s ecstatic face which identifies her with the audience. Now she turns to her husband (who for the last half of the film is attempting unsuccessfully to restrain his wife) and says ‘You can’t hold me back now’. Immediately Reeves cuts to Mike’s club where a brazen and amateurish girl pop-singer (who will be her next victim) echoes the words in a harsh discordant pop song: ‘Boy you’re coming on strong now Turning me on now …’.

Ian Ogilvy and Susan George in The Sorcerers (Michael Reeves, UK, 1967).

It is a grotesque juxtaposition, but it exemplifies precisely the lurid sensational aspect of ‘youth’ which Estelle covets. In some ways The Sorcerers is the ultimate portrayal of the tabloid society and it is only a pity much of the youth aspect has dated so badly. This gives the whole thing a slightly uneasy feel for the young people in it, including Mike and his girlfriend, are not strong enough to provide much more than a token presence against the old couple. The slang they speak is also awkward and stilted. For this and other reasons, including its cheap ugly surface, the film certainly stops short of being a major work. However, Reeves succeeded marvellously well in communicating the essential components of his theme and the result is constructed like a series of Chinese Boxes, which open into one another. It was not until seeing it for the second time that I realised why the ending seems strangely incomplete; after the conflagration of Mike in his car followed by the destruction of the Monsarrats’ control centre, the last climax of The Sorcerers is logically the burning of the cinema where the film is being shown and the film itself.

The Sorcerers made money, and consequently in late 1967 at the age of 23, Reeves was given his largest budget yet by Tony Tenser of Tigon to direct Witchfinder General, which he and Tom Baker had adapted from Ronald Bassett’s novel. The film, shot on location in Norfolk and Suffolk with the help of one of England’s most distinguished cameramen, Johnny Coquillon, is certainly Reeves’ most accomplished work. In his hands a fairly ordinary, but interestingly researched, historical novel with a lot of phoney Freudian motivation, is transformed into a highly ornate, evocative and poetic study of England during the Civil War, where the political disorganisation and confusion is vividly mirrored by the chaos and superstition in men’s minds.

From the pre-credits sequence, it is immediately clear that the film is on a much higher level of intensity than Reeves’ earlier work. With a slightly less restricted schedule than before and the services of an expert crew, there is a feeling from the first frame that we are in the hands of a completely assured filmmaker, someone who has learnt his craft with remarkable speed and certainty. It is notable that the elegant photography is matched by an extremely acute and atmospheric use of sound; in the first sequence, for example, where we see sheep grazing beyond an oak tree, and then a man setting up a gibbet, the mood of silent menace is enhanced by the noise of wind through trees on the sound track. Then Reeves cuts to show us the pathetic witch being dragged along, accompanied by a priest reading aloud an obscure and monotonous text. The witch is pushed on to the scaffold and the rabble subsides until, as she hangs, there is only the creaking of the wooden cross-bar and the sound of the wind; after a pause, in which the nightmarish figure of the old woman swings to and fro, Reeves suddenly zooms in close on a dark figure on horseback observing the execution from a distance, revealing an imposing face with gaunt supercilious features, and instantaneously the music comes in for the first time as the credits roll: Witchfinder General. It is an absolutely flawless opening section, particularly when one considers, in retrospect, the extent to which it crystallises the film’s themes. The pure natural beauty of the Suffolk countryside (the light forms a natural cross through the trees) is contrasted with the violence and brutality of the human activity within it (the creaking of the wood reminds us that the gibbet is made from one of the oak trees). The crowd who hang the witch are not blood-lusting savages but ordinary countrymen with perfectly kind faces, fascinated to watch the slaughter of an old woman; the theme of voyeurism is stressed even more by the zoom onto Hopkins, who is observing the details of the proceedings with overt satisfaction. There is also the face of the pitiful old victim, reduced eventually to an object swinging from a rope, and the priest reading meaningless and certainly unheeded words with earnest solemnity. Finally, as the quasi-traditional music begins (this too reflects some of the feeling which the film embodies in the English countryside), a dim outline appears in the credits which becomes an unconscious memory only to be recognised at the end of the film; it is Sarah (Hilary Dwyer) in the moment of her final breakdown.

The devoted mise-en-scène of Witchfinder General is matched by a structure of some thematic complexity. The two superficially opposing poles of the story are represented by Matthew Hopkins, the cruel and ruthless Witchfinder, and Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), the soldier/hero, whose paths cross metaphorically and literally all through the film, until finally their personalities become indistinguishable and inseparable (‘You took him away from me’). Within this structure is the fragile positive of Richard’s love for his betrothed, Sarah Lowes, who agrees to sleep with Hopkins in a futile attempt to save her guardian from torture and execution. Richard’s vengeance against the Witchfinder becomes an obsession and ultimately Sarah goes mad after watching him hack Hopkins to pieces with an axe. Reeves builds towards this deadly self-defeating climax (which like most other things in his script has very little basis in the novel) all through the film.

Although the plot is nominally conventional, with its soldier-hero and self-sacrificing heroine, from the opening section there are moments in which the viewer recognises uneasily that his commonplace expectations are being confounded. Take, for example, the sequence early on in which the hero, Richard Marshall, returns to the home of Sarah and her guardian, John Lowes, the parish priest of Brandeston, to arrange his betrothal. At first sight, this is an utterly conventional situation which could be found within the pages of any hack historical novel, the hero returning to claim his bride; but the scenes which follow have an oddly disturbing quality. To begin with, Reeves has organised matters so that Richard’s return to Brandeston comes immediately after he has killed one of the enemy for the first time (and there is a close-up on his face to reveal doubt and uncertainty). When he appears at Brandeston, and the priest agrees to their marriage, he steps forward to embrace Sarah but she suddenly pulls herself away in pain saying ‘The army has taught you rough manners’: the violence and chaos is inside the couple as well as around them.

Afterwards, in a distinctive composition, the three sit at a long table surrounded by shadow, accompanied on the sound track by the distant barking of dogs. When the lovers do finally come together that night, Reeves cuts away from their lovemaking to the dark imposing figure of Matthew Hopkins riding over the fields towards Brandeston, gradually drawing nearer to them and the sequence of events which will follow his arrival (including Sarah’s rape and her guardian’s murder). Later, Richard rides off along the country road; in the twilight he passes six men waiting for something, silhouetted uneasily against the skyline, and a weird epigrammatic exchange follows. ‘Given up ale for star-gazing Tom Salter?’ Richard says, and the other replies that they are waiting for a lawyer: ‘What would a lawyer want in Brandeston?’ And the reply comes ‘A man who may not be what he seems to be.’ This cryptic dialogue reflects the atmosphere of foreboding. Later Richard actually encounters Hopkins further along the path in near-darkness and confirms the direction of Brandeston, thereby sealing his fate before riding on. It is the first time in the film that the two men meet and as Richard leaves his home we are made to feel, by all these separate touches of uneasiness, that the forces of chaos are quietly descending upon it.

The scenes also depict, in close-knit fairy-tale images, the maelstrom in which England is caught at the time and the infinity of private worlds and superstitions the country now incorporates. Much the same spirit presides over the moment in which Richard uselessly questions an old boatman on the Norfolk coast with a cliff rising behind him into the distance. ‘I didn’t even know there was a war on, sir,’ he says, and the camera tracks into the surf as if trying to probe the secrets of this old man’s utterly separate world before dissolving to the flames of Lavenham where Hopkins is slaughtering some more victims.

The English countryside is a major thematic and symbolic constituent of the structure of Witchfinder General. Many other horror filmmakers have juxtaposed natural beauty with human depravity, but Reeves goes much further in contriving to make the natural scenery and its rootedness a strong positive force against the shifting nomadic evil of the characters; in this respect the film is almost mystical and pantheistic. To begin with, Richard harmonises with the landscape as he rides over the fields, but gradually he loses his empathy with it and, after he has sworn vengeance on Hopkins and set the machinery of tragedy in motion, his alienation is demonstrated by a prolonged long shot in which he rides blindly through the country, scattering sheep on both sides of his horse. Some critics (among them Robin Wood in his thorough and perceptive critique of Reeves’ work in Movie, 17) have found that Vincent Price’s presence adds a jarring note to the proceedings. It is now well-known (and Halligan chronicles it all in fascinating detail) that Reeves had to go to some lengths to prevent Price from lapsing into his usual stylised manner, even re-dubbing all his dialogue. But, while acknowledging these difficulties, it seems to me that Reeves was finally completely successful, and that Price in his role as Matthew Hopkins ultimately contributed the performance of his career. Another actor might have given the part less menace and more background motivation (as it is in the novel), but this was the last thing that the film required, for it does not work on the basis of profound psychological insight. Instead Price emerges as a superb presence of inexorable vindictiveness around which the other characters move with fascinated repulsion, and although the opening scenes suggest a subtlety in the characterisation which is never quite sustained, at no point does the part lapse into melodrama or stereotype. It is difficult to think of any actor who could have played it with such panache and assurance. I quite agree with Kim Newman in Nightmare Movies (Bloomsbury 1984) that it is a masterpiece, but I don’t accept his additional point that it was a ‘90-minute negation of every moral precept horror films have stood for.’ It is true the film stands against violence, but then horror films have done that before and Witchfinder General offers perfectly positive and emotive support for the notion of love, community and comradeship/family. In fact, it is astonishingly moral; it merely shows in graphic details what happens when these things are defiled.

The ending, in which Sarah finally breaks down as she watches Richard hack the Witchfinder into pieces and her screams on the soundtrack merge with the romantic theme music, deserves recognition as one of the cinema’s great climaxes. The rest of the film contains defects, both in script and acting, but there are few cinematic comments on the sickening futility of violence (in the work of Kubrick, Spielberg, Scorsese or anyone else) which can exceed the power of these last few minutes. They are not the product of a morbid sensibility, but of an acutely sensitive and accomplished artist which the British cinema could not afford to lose.

The experience of watching Witchfinder General now is almost unbearably poignant in view of this added resonance but, if the work of Reeves has begun to assume a kind of Keatsian aura, it may not be just because of his death but because he was the kind of filmmaker which the British cinema needed so desperately badly: someone who could merge the popular tradition of the horror film with more avant-garde concerns without rearing the curious bastard which so often results from such experiments. In terms of actual achievement, Reeves’ work is obviously limited by its incompleteness, but Witchfinder General – especially in its overpowering use of landscape – contains the seeds of something which could have developed into an important cinematic idiom in this country, and one which is intrinsically native to it. The literary romantic tradition into which it shades has as much affinity with Malory as with the Gothic and has often remained virtually untapped by current popular English forms. There may perhaps be hints of it in Game of Thrones, but even so Witchfinder General retains its pivotal position in the history of English cinema, a film which brought UK horror to some kind of maturity.

Michael Reeves and Vincent Price on location in Lavenham for Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, UK, 1968).

Halligan has exhaustively analysed the projects Reeves was assigned after Witchfinder and it must be said none of the films on which he was working when he died inspire much confidence at all. Several, like The Oblong Box, The Buttercup Chain and the lifeless De Sade would be made, and it is hard to imagine any of them evolving into much, even with Reeves attached. Overall we are left with the distinct impression Reeves must have known that (barring miracles) it would be years before he would be allowed to make anything as good as this again.

As if to emphasise this, there were massive objections by many critics to Witchfinder and one local banning. Some of Britain’s most distinguished writers from Bernard Levin to Clive James and Alan Bennett queued up to denounce it. The film was also, just like the early Hammers, loathed by the examiners at the BBFC, though to his credit Lord Harlech as President appears to have tried to soften their response. The examiners, it seems, fiercely resisted Harlech’s intervention, even though he was their titular head. They anxiously urged their secretary ‘not to give ground.’ As a result the film was cut in a way that caused Reeves considerable heartache. These cuts have since been triumphantly restored on DVD. And it is fair to say – like Peeping Tom before it – the film has secured a long-lasting and deserved reputation in the face of all those who did their best to kill it.

AFTER WITCHFINDER

The case of Reeves indicates that by the middle of the 1960s the horror genre was just about the only part of the British film industry vital enough to really have a chance of sustaining new directional talent at grass roots level. This does not mean that it was the only possible sector for promising young directors, or that it gave countless opportunities, but it did represent an established cinematic field in Britain, where almost for the first time the aspiring filmmaker could work within a tentative cultural tradition. What is more, it was a tradition that by this time had lost some of its original rigidity and was beginning to hunt for new talent and new ideas. Reeves had been able to take advantage of this flexibility since his films cover the historical, the supernatural, the legendary, the psychopathological and even (in The Sorcerers) elements of science fiction, all within the general category of horror.

The Oblong Box was taken over in 1968 by Gordon Hessler, a 43-year-old German born director who was brought up in England and then moved to America as a teenager where he made shorts and documentaries until he managed to get work on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. producing countless episodes because (he always claimed) he had a posh English accent. He moved to directing on the show and also made a low-budget feature The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die.

In due course Hessler’s work with the American horror and sensation specialist American International (AIP) was to establish him as quite a dynamic filmmaker, with a fluid documentary style. He was joined on The Oblong Box by script-writer Chris Wicking, who had formerly collaborated with Reeves in an attempt to revitalise the banal script. The result is fairly obvious froth from a period when AIP seems to have felt anything period with Edgar Allan Poe’s name spuriously attached would pull in an audience (insanely they had even stuck Poe into the credits of Witchfinder General in America by renaming it after the poem as The Conqueror Worm). The film’s pointless story, in which Price has a deformed mad brother, has been obviously strung together as a series of episodes with little thought for the whole. And Wicking’s contribution was confined to additional dialogue.

But in the same year (1969) Hessler and Wicking had a much better opportunity to prove themselves by adapting a science-fiction novel by Peter Saxon (actually Stephen D. Frances) into Scream and Scream Again.

Christopher Wicking, who would later become the old Hammer’s last resident script editor, was a very different figure from anyone who had written UK horror in the past. His film knowledge was encyclopaedic – he had worked as an interviewer/critic for the French magazine Positif – and he was brimful of ideas and references. It is true horror was not necessarily his preferred genre but, unlike so many others in British horror during the boom, he was still a fan and enthusiast. Most of all he liked to try new ideas and many of his scripts, like Scream and Scream Again, are structured in a remarkably complex way. Wicking would often use two or three story-lines, adding some blackly humorous or brutal twists and constantly subverting any figures of authority. So it was that Scream and Scream Again, a less achieved film than Witchfinder, but very significant in its way, would catapult the UK horror film into the modern post-1960s age. There is, too, a strange irony in the fact that once again it was Milton Subtosky who had found the source book for Scream and Scream Again and even wrote an adaptation. But AIP reportedly pushed it aside as ‘old-fashioned’ just as Subotsky’s supposedly old-fashioned script for Frankenstein had been pushed aside by Hammer nearly a decade earlier.

Scream and Scream Again (Gordon Hessler, UK,1970).

The plot of Wicking’s script for Scream and Scream Again was the opposite of old-fashioned. lt looked forward to the serial killer movies of years later and even pre-empted Richard Matheson’s innovative TV franchise The Night Stalker, not merely by having a hard-bitten policeman chasing a quasi-supernatural villain but by the casualness with which its sex killings are established (the first victim is not even introduced until she is a victim: common now, unheard of then). The police detective Bellaver (Alfred Marks) is perhaps the nearest thing the film has to an identification figure, which is remarkable in itself since he does not survive. And, beyond that, his character is startling in the context of the detectives that were on screen in the 1960s. Unlike the serious, generally shocked, policemen of other UK horror movies, Marks is quite unphased when he sees the body of a vampirised victim: ‘Is it murder?’ says one of the press, to which Bellaver merely replies scathingly as he stumps away: ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’

The film’s script therefore had no official hero or heroine but it did boast a modern vampire sex killer, and what seems to be one of the first full-on dark endings in the history of UK horror. The sequence in which the police track down the humanoid vampire (superbly played by Michael Gothard) has great pace and style, making it scarcely surprising that Fritz Lang – one of the masters of the thriller – should have been so impressed that he singled Scream and Scream Again out for special praise in one of his last interviews.¹ But then the film also revolutionised the story structure of the whole English horror genre, having a complexity we had never seen before. Sometimes Wicking’s ambitious triple or quadruple story-lines worked, sometimes they did not, but his voice was always highly distinctive, and here the structure meshes well with the whole dislocated world of the story which is in its way as bleak a world as the one Kneale had given us in Quatermass II. And, even viewed from this distance, the film’s futuristic themes (of humanoids and bioengineering) still seem uneasily contemporary, though the cut-aways to an East European police state are over-ambitious while also testing the budget to the limit. Finally the plot narrows to England and the various enigmas are resolved, though, as I have indicated, there is little reassurance in the final revelation.

The film did very well on release so it certainly seemed there was a niche for modern subversive British horror thrillers of this kind, and Hessler and Wicking would have been the perfect pair to make them. Wicking in fact wrote a kind of unofficial sequel called Killer Trip – about a teenager programmed to kill via a sensory implant in his brain – but there were no takers and AIP never picked up on the franchise they had created. In this respect it is a great pity Scream and Scream Again was not made by Hammer. James Carreras had many faults, but myopia about success was not one of them. There would certainly have been more.

Instead, having proved how hungry and successful they were for the present, Hessler and Wicking were shunted back by AIP into the past. And they would never work together again on a contemporary UK subject. Hessler’s next film, Cry of the Banshee, made in 1970, is like a parody of Witchfinder General, with absolutely none of its morality or conviction (or its production values). Listlessly staged, with Price giving a bland, auto-pilot performance (somewhat like a watered-down version of his hammy grandee in Masque of the Red Death six years earlier), only Hilary Dwyer, who had proved herself an extremely moving actress of the new trend in horror – as Sarah in Witchfinder General and Elizabeth in The Oblong Box – really brought any life to the cast. And Cry of the Banshee is also among the most exploitative of these films, with constant ripping of women’s blouses and various torture scenes. By 1970 the censor was allowing this, yet, unlike the Anglo films of ten years earlier which had far more sexual energy – exploring female sexuality as well as male – the misogynist cruelty here is paraded for our pleasure in a way that reeks of artifice. Many of the denunciations that greeted the painstakingly moral Witchfinder might well have applied here. But of course, nobody cared or noticed, making the whole uproar over Reeves’ film seem more infantile than ever.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (Gordon Hessler, US, 1971).

But Hessler and Wicking returned to form with their next. AIP had wanted to make one of Poe’s most famous stories, Murders in the Rue Morgue but both director and writer concluded, surely rightly, the whodunit plot was already too well known to have any impact. ‘Everybody knew it was an ape.’ Wicking observed of Poe’s ending. So they took it a completely different way and designed a film like Scream to disorientate the viewer for a specific purpose. Set in 1880s Paris, the heroine, Madeline (Christine Kaufman), is an actress in a grand Gugnol play based on Poe’s famous short story when a series of gruesome murders begin. The script alternates ambiguously between the play, the circumstances of the actress’s everyday life and the obsessional dreams she is having at night. It systematically juxtaposes these three levels of her consciousness and the result is an extraordinary triple layered structure which was shot by Hessler with great lushness and style. Unfortunately, upon completion the result was deemed to be too difficult for audiences and was drastically recut by AIP against the director’s wishes. They even flagged the dream sequences by a red tinting process, which meant the viewer was ahead of the heroine, no longer sharing her mental confusion, something that is near-fatal in this kind of film. The result was not at all what was intended, even if there is good work in it and it feels original. A DVD now available with Hessler’s comments contains some of the lost and altered footage, enabling us to see what might have been.

Hessler was subsequently to have a successful (if intermittent) mainstream career, making mainly action adventure. Other than the thriller Medusa shot in Greece with George Hamilton, he would never again work with Wicking though he did write and direct a thoroughly enigmatic adaptation of the quasi-ghost story The Girl in a Swing in 1989 from Richard Adams’ strange novel. Meanwhile Wicking’s career in horror continued as he moved to Hammer.

LATE YEARS OF THE ORIGINAL HAMMER

Before the second incarnation of Hammer when John De Mol purchased the name and the library in 2007, Hammer existed in a kind of twilight. Apart from two anthology TV series, all that had come out of the company since the 1970s had been an endless series of announcements of supposedly forthcoming films. A few of these seemed more plausible than others, but none ever resulted in anything. In 2000 a consortium including Charles Saatchi bought the company, but their promise of an ‘early return to production’ was again misleading.

Until finally in 2007 the Dutch founders of ‘Big Brother’ and producer Simon Oakes took over with a serious amount of money and an intention to make films, which they did, at least for some years (see Chapter 10). But this was only after a miserable time for the company, when Hammer seemed to be permanently locked in the cinematic realm of the entombed undead. How did it get there?

As we have seen, after 1971 with the departure of Anthony Hinds, a certain rudderlessness hit Hammer. James Carreras merely wanted to keep his pipeline busy with product. This meant Hammer were effectively in thrall to those producers from outside who could catch James Carreras’ eye, something that had been unnecessary when Hinds was in charge and Hammer could generate their product from within the company.

The first and most obvious result of this new period was the sex vampire, or the Karnstein trilogy, spun off from J. S. Le Fanu’s celebrated lesbian vampire story Carmilla. The whole idea was the brainchild of producer Harry Fine, a former actor and casting director who made the films with his partner Michael Style (then known only for a sex film called Monique) and the writer Tudor Gates. At first people thought Gates was yet another pseudonym for Jimmy Sangster, but in fact he had been working in film and TV since the early 1960s, co-writing among other things the cult film Danger: Diabolik for Mario Bava. And subsequently, in a rare connection between UK horror and UK politics, he became a Liberal parliamentary candidate standing three times without success.

Le Fanu’s Carmilla had been adapted at least twice before, first in the 1960s by French director Roger Vadim (best known for discovering Brigitte Bardot), and later in a stodgy and confused Italian horror movie called Terror in the Crypt (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1964).

The Vampire Lovers is a far more literal, faithful and English take on the story than either of those, but now looks a very odd hybrid piece. After the Hammerish teaser (a vampire hunter stalks his evil prey who turns out to be a beautiful young girl), the film begins like some stagy old-school BBC period drama, though with a script quite closely modelled on Le Fanu’s original novella. In these early sections the production has almost a prudish feel, though it is quite absorbing as it tells how a young girl (Ingrid Pitt) is sent to stay in two households where the young daughter of the house (first Pippa Steel and then Madeline Smith) suffers serious illness – an illness which for the former proves fatal.

Given this straitlaced tone, it is all the more surprising when, about 20 minutes in, a doctor examines his young female patient and exposes a breast. It is the first coy announcement that the film will feature female nudity and soon there is a flirtatious scene between Ingrid Pitt and Pippa Steel, somewhat obviously contrived to offer as much mild sexual titillation as possible. Ingrid Pitt as the vampire descended from the ancient lineage of Karnstein hardly conforms to Le Fanu’s description of the delicate teenage Carmilla, being 33 years old at the time. But Pitt did bring a very European erotic quality to the part, something Hammer had not seen before, while Pippa Steel and Madeline Smith had the right kind of naïve girlishness to be her adolescent victims. Smith in fact lays on the wide-eyed girlish naivety much too heavily but, if at times the film seems to be adopting the whispered excited tone of an old style woman’s magazine romance, Le Fanu’s story is open to exactly the same charge. And by a stylistic quirk the sheer stiffness and rather un-Hammerish feel of the production serves only to highlight its unexpected sexual content.

Indeed, the best aspect of The Vampire Lovers, which is directed by Roy Ward Baker, comes in a kind of thematic collision between the vampire movie and the long-running Edwardian soap Upstairs Downstairs, when the butler Renton (played by Harvey Hall who had a part in all the Karnstein films) seeks to protect his young charge with garlic and is then seduced by Ingrid Pitt. The conflict that develops here between rank, sex, class and vampirism has aspects that are riveting, and it is a shame the seduction is so token and brings the episode to an end so soon. After it, the film moves on to more familiar ground and the vampires are hunted down.

The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, UK,1970).

What of the censor and The Vampire Lovers? The truth is they were in a tricky position. Trevelyan had only months earlier canvassed for the new 18 certificate, supposedly so he could cut less and ban not at all. But it was not so long since mere prolonged heterosexual kissing had been cut by the censor (a long kiss had been excised on the censor’s orders from Devil Doll in 1964). The BBFC’s anti-horror champion Audrey Field watched The Vampire Lovers with, it would seem, dawning apprehension. ‘Admittedly’, she writes, ‘we must allow stronger meat in horror films for the new “X”. But the very great emphasis on lesbianism here goes far beyond anything we have allowed except the uncut version of Sister George which was after all a film about lesbians … we are very concerned with the combination of nudity (transparent night-dresses, pubic hair showing etc.) with horror – there are some very sick things here.’ After objecting to the nudity, showing of pubic hair and the vampiric seductions, etc, she adds: ‘We do feel that this film without considerable cuts will set a very bad precedent. It has a very morbid atmosphere in parts. …’

What the politics in the BBFC were by this point is unimaginable. After all, Audrey Field had been effectively campaigning against Hammer for close to two decades. Now they were putting forward material undreamed of even when she called the earlier films ‘evil’. But it looks very much as if others higher up, specifically Lord Harlech, were much less censorious and that the older examiners, after rallying in the face of Peeping Tom, now felt they were fighting a losing battle. In any event, there is a tone of resignation in Field’s comments that contrasts with her earlier calls to arms. The Vampire Lovers was viewed and re-viewed, and a decapitation and one sex scene was removed. Just like the old days of the 1950s, it was cut much less than Field’s notes requested.

Given the film’s success, a sequel Lust for a Vampire (the title apparently chosen by EMI boss Bernard Delfont) followed hard on its heels and took the image of the omnipotent female sex goddess to even greater lengths. Apart from the dreadful song which Fine and Style forced Sangster to dub over one amorous encounter (something which quite rightly he said he could never forgive) and a few script blunders, some think it the superior film of the two, though it was not as successful. Sangster threw out the stiffer costume elements and was easily able to utilise the new developments as a vehicle for the dark humour that had been a continuing aspect of his approach to horror since The Curse of Frankenstein. Although Lust for a Vampire was written by Tudor Gates, Sangster worked on the script himself and exploited to the full an overtly ludicrous plot about a girls finishing school positioned next door to Karnstein Castle like some heaven-sent butcher’s shop. Naturally Mircalla, the lesbian vampire of the earlier film, becomes a pupil and proceeds to run amok among the girls, with Sangster using all the visual devices at his disposal to convey an aura of potent cloying sensuality. The film is full of furtive adolescent vampirising behind locked doors, lesbian assignations by moonlit lakes and the petty sexual intrigues of the classroom and the dormitory. There is even one long and particularly audacious tracking shot down the garden to the lake in which the camera becomes Mircalla stalking her victim, and in which the director manages to convey just the right feeling of narcissism and ghostly physicality. Even the love affair between vampire and hero, as it is developed here, had some support in Le Fanu’s original text, for there the vampire ‘was prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence resembling the passion of love’.

Lust for a Vampire (Jimmy Sangster, UK, 1971).

Stylistically, Sangster’s direction is on the right side of parody, playing it fairly straight without nudges, but he is finally thwarted and the film undone by some idiotic interpolations like the sub-Dracula appearance of Mike Raven as Count Karnstein and the plot’s disintegration into a steamy mystery story. Le Fanu himself has even been put into the action as Richard le Strange (Michael Johnson). And ultimately the sexual devastation caused by Mircalla makes her seem less an enchanting bisexual femme fatale than some creature of science fiction, a highly tuned and monstrous libido machine. Yutte Stensgaard’s impassive doll-like features only accentuate the effect.

The final film of the series, Twins of Evil (1971), was made by John Hough, a director in his early 30s, working for Hammer for the first time, and the script lacked the verve of Lust for a Vampire. On this occasion the figure of the all-engulfing female vampire is transmuted into a pair of sultry twins (Madeleine and Mary Collinson coming to Hammer direct from the British sex movie scene). The script dealt with a potentially interesting confrontation between vampires and puritans, but the ambiguities are never explored and the potential clash of sensibilities remains unexpressed. Peter Cushing’s part as the puritan witchhunter is wholly insubstantial and again the emphasis is limitingly on sex; the films does, however, contain one moment of stunning beauty which excels anything else from the trilogy, as an ectoplasmic shape rises from the coffin in Karnstein Castle and floats across the chamber towards the figure of the Count, who is sitting completely absorbed at his desk.

The overall problem with the Karnstein films is that they pose little positive alternative to the all-engulfing figure of the female vampire, and consequently tend to degenerate into overwrought exercises in sensuality. The discreetly sensual female vampires of Fisher’s Dracula had given way to brazenly voluptuous vamps, whose supernatural origins become less important with each succeeding appearance. The dark overladen allusiveness was being replaced more and more by banal sexual antics, the charged hermetic atmosphere by heavy-handed humour, the solid narrative structure by half-understood experimentation. Around this time the English films sometimes began to look like bad imitations of the European horror films, for many of the younger British filmmakers had begun to ape the overtly Freudian and surrealist intellectual quality of the French approach to horror without understanding the potential historical virtues of their own tradition. But of course, in a way such a development was highly appropriate to our age, for vampirism is the most physical, the least spiritual, of all supernatural manifestations. It records the triumph of sex over death, of flesh over spirit, of the corporeal over the invisible. It is the most materialistic of all possible cosmologies.

So, gradually the directional and dramatic weight which had been given in Fisher’s work to the spiritual element in the films (Van Helsing, Professor Meister, etc) was being eroded, and accompanying this process the evil male vampire tended more and more to give way to a sexual omniscient woman. Peculiarly, Mario Praz analysed this tendency in the Gothic/Romantic movement in England: ‘We shall see how, in the second half of the nineteenth century,’ he writes, ‘(the fatal cruel lover), the vampire, becomes a woman.’

Evidently Anthony Hinds, who was not involved, hated the new development. James Carreras, for his part, seemed to relish it, loving the idea that now ‘we can do anything we like.’ His glee, however, would not last long. For, by a peculiar irony, the freedom from censorship that enabled filmmakers to tackle the more visually graphic aspects of vampirism was, by the mid-1970s, enabling others to move on to even more explicit erotic material. This made the whole field of the sex vampire very short-lived as a mainstream subject. Though it continued intermittently and was to have a worthy climax some years down the line in Joseph Larraz’s Vampyres.

Hammer Versus Warner Brothers

Twins of Evil was not a success and it soon became clear the trend was petering out. Nor was James Carreras at all clear what would replace it. There was at least still Frankenstein and Dracula to fall back on. Or was there? For to make matters worse at this time, it became known within the company (though not outside) that a serious error had been made by Hammer and James Carreras in the contract with their main partner, Warners Seven Arts. This had been drawn up for Dracula has Risen from the Grave on 15 March 1968. In his usual eagerness to get the next film made, James Carreras seems to have overlooked the implications of a wide-ranging and complicated clause Warner-Seven Arts asked Hammer to sign. This stated, among various other things, that Hammer Films could not themselves authorise, nor authorise anyone else, to ‘produce any DRACULA pictures without first offering to produce the same for Warners on the same terms as those contained in the basic Warner/ Hammer agreement relating to Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.’

The document was signed and forgotten but, by 1970, when Hammer faced a blanket rejection from Warners on their next Frankenstein and Dracula subjects (The Horror of Frankenstein and The Scars of Dracula), they turned to EMI for finance. James Carreras felt it was his perfect right, but the American majors have long corporate memories and Warners soon heard of it. They were not at all happy. On 10 March vice-president Norman Katz wrote to James Carreras: ‘As I told you over the phone there is a bit of rhubarb here because of the two pictures being done for ABC since in your “master agreement” all films made by Hammer utilizing the names of “Frankenstein” or “Dracula” may be made only for worldwide distribution by us or may be used only with permission from us if we are not distributing them.’

James Carreras consulted his lawyer on 16 March. To his amazement he found the situation was almost as bad as Katz’s letter indicated. It was a gray area but the contract they had signed could perhaps be interpreted in the way Warners were claiming. A frantic conference at Hammer ensued and a combative letter was drawn up for Warners, fighting, indeed challenging, their interpretation of the agreement. But, given that Hammer could hardly take on Warner Brothers in court, wiser council finally prevailed and the letter was not sent. Instead, James Carreras wrote a milder, gentler note which merely pointed out his surprise and concern that their erstwhile partner was taking this line since Warners had after all been offered these products first.

It was indeed a crazy situation. Frankenstein was in the public domain and now so was Dracula. Yet Hammer, who had revived them both, were the only people in the world unable to make them unless they had ‘permission’ from Warner Brothers. In fact, the sheer craziness, if nothing else, was on Hammer’s side and Hammer’s redoubtable lawyer Edwin Davies expressed some doubt whether Warners could finally enforce the contract so literally. If they stuck by the letter of their agreement and actually refused Hammer the right to make such pictures–something that could easily have closed Hammer down given how important the subjects still were – it might surely be considered an unfair restraint of trade.

But Warners stonewalled. Their vice-president Sidney Kiwitt wrote back to James Carreras on 15 September: ‘Thank you for your note. … I am aware of the past. What I was looking for was to avoid a problem in the future and in that respect I did not wish you to feel that because of the past we are waiving the restricted covenant for future Frankenstein and Dracula pictures.’

The ‘restricted covenant’! Here was a phrase that terrified James Carreras far more than the content of the pictures. Once again, he begged Hammer’s lawyers to scan the fine print. They advised there seemed to be no loophole. The struggle continued until finally on 28 September 1970 a kind of compromise was reached, though not for Hammer a very comfortable one. Warners not only had right of first refusal on both these subjects. It could also turn them down and then change its mind at some later date and pick them up again on the same terms that were being offered to anyone else. Moreover, Hammer had the right to offer such films to Warner only once a year. In effect this meant that, while Hammer could theoretically deal with other distributors on these subjects, it was only in a very hamstrung manner with one hand tied behind its back. This was a terrible come-down for the proud company that had been picking and choosing its US partners only ten years earlier. And in the end the whole issue would come back to haunt them.

Hammer’s Final Days

After Michael Carreras’ sojourn in South Africa at the end of 1970 for Creatures the World Forgot, James Carreras for once needed his help. Michael had not been involved with Hammer on a policy basis for nearly eight years and had often felt excluded by his father. But after the dreaded year of 1970 James was aware he could not go on relying on outside producers. And, sometime in the winter of 1970–1, he offered his son Michael a role as executive producer in charge of production.

The offer was rejected. Time had moved on and Michael now wanted a share in policy or he wanted nothing. Somewhat to his surprise, it seems, his father agreed and Michael Carreras finally took up the post of Managing Director of Hammer on 4 January 1971.

A few days later he went down to the large, private, basement cinema in Hammer House – presided over throughout Hammer’s heyday by the devoted Bob Rixen² – and screened all of Hammer’s recent product, starting (in what he felt later may have been a mistake) at the end rather than the beginning. This ensured that among the first things he saw was a title due for release in 13 days’ time: Lust For a Vampire. He continued through Countess Dracula to The Vampire Lovers.

Though Carreras was nobody’s idea of a prude, he was evidently somewhat shocked. Not having seen the recent titles, he had no idea Hammer were trading on this amount of nudity and lesbian softcore sex. In this respect he was a very different man from his father who, as we have seen, actively relished the new freedom. Nor, it seems, did he think too much of the way the films were produced. ‘I think this company has been rudderless myself,’ he said a few months later in September 1971.³ Reflecting on the company’s major genre of horror he continued: ‘The people involved in making the [horror] pictures are not the same as the people involved in making the early ones and don’t have the respect. Tony Hinds loved these pictures, I was never as close to them. If you look at my credits you’ll find I was only physically involved in about four of them. On the other hand I have discovered since I came back I really cared about them a lot more than I thought I did.’

Carreras felt many of the recent Hammer horrors had not only lost a sense of the gothic but had also lost all suspense. He was outspoken too about the producers who had been working on behalf of the company: ‘They seem to think it’s enough to have a pedantic story, then every now and then you throw in a bucket of blood and you move on … I am not a fan of Harry Fine and Michael Style. Tony Hinds was a great lover of this. Tony Keys understood something of it. I don’t think Aida Young even knew what it was about.’

I doubt anyone would deny that ‘rudderless’ was an apt enough description, given the record now clearly shows how much Anthony Hinds had been responsible for the enormous success of Hammer’s early production policy. He devised the formula and created the brand chemistry. Whether he could have kept that formula going is a question to which we will never know the answer but there was perhaps a chance, if only an outside one. Michael Carreras knew this and wanted to get back to the quality of the earlier movies but he also recognised he was perhaps not the man to do it, he was not creative in the way Hinds was and even freely confessed above he had not really been a creative force behind the brand’s original creation. So it was perhaps unwise of him, at this crucial point in the company’s fortunes, to be so critical of other producers’ films – productions that had, after all, made money for Hammer. In the same Time Out interview though, he also identified something extremely important, perhaps in the end even more important than the brand itself: ‘If you compare the older films with the newer ones and look at the production values we were getting then and aren’t getting now, it seems awful to say this but to an extent it is because Bray Studios has gone. Now we are operating in a major studio and £10,000 at a major studio is only worth £6,000 in value on the screen.’ That was bad enough, but he went on to point out something far worse, namely that in addition Hammer was desperately struggling against the inflation of the industry as a whole. Put simply Britain was no longer a cheap place to film: ‘Over the past two years on a budget of say £200,000 (assuming all of that went on the screen which it didn’t, but make the assumption), today if you spent the same amount only £170,000 would go on the screen. Which is pretty frightening. If it goes on like this it’s probably going to strangle our business stone dead in another two years. I can’t see how it will be possible to go on making them.’

The words were to prove highly prophetic. In effect they came true. Hammer had started with an amazing cost advantage, one that astonished their early American partners. That advantage was now slipping away into nothing, eroding as he pointed out at nearly 10 per cent a year. And such an erosion was rapidly putting the whole basis of Hammer’s existence into question. People often quote The Exorcist as a nail in the original Hammer’s coffin. But the company might easily have weathered rivalry from other horror product, at least for a period, if it had still had the production cost edge with which it started. This was Sir James’s real secret weapon. Consequently, its disappearance was desperate for them. The stark fact was that, just like great swathes of Britain’s other manufacturing industries at this point in the 1970s, Hammer was quietly going out of business. This may even be one reason why in 1971, although much has yet to be revealed even today, relations between Carreras father and son took a particular turn for the worse. For around this time, James Carreras, who had kept the company afloat on a wash of production money from innumerable sources, seems to have begun to feel a real dread (and he was nothing if not a salesman) that the pipeline might finally be running dry. Hammer could no longer command much from American distributors but, unlike any other UK production company, at least it had a good deal with both the trading UK distributors Rank and EMI. Or did it? For Rank had been disappointed with Countess Dracula and now everything relied on their reaction to Vampire Circus.

Vampire Circus (Robert Young, UK, 1972).

Vampire Circus (1972), set in a middle-European village in 1810, was the old Hammer’s last period vampire movie made in the UK. Evidently the production (from director Robert Young and three writers George Baxt, Judson Kinberg and Wilbur Stark) was shut down after six weeks, leaving several sequences un-shot. This may explain why its plot – about a mysterious travelling circus which turns out to be a front for vampires – is not always readily comprehensible. But the film had other problems too. There are dull passages, and at times the sexually explicit elements seem to be fighting the story. The film’s inherent contradictions emerge at their most ludicrous when Count Mitterhouse (another poor sub-Dracula figure played by Robert Tayman) momentarily turns his attention away from his pretty victim’s neck to a full sexual embrace with a muttered ‘One lust feeds the other.’ The line has since become notorious and often got an unsympathetic laugh from audiences. It was becoming clear to everyone at this point that Hammer, like poor Count Mitterhouse himself, did not know which way to turn.

Rank did not like the film, and its release was limited. The deal with Rank was now at an end, leaving Hammer with only EMI. And even here, Bryan Forbes in charge of production was highly unsympathetic to a six-picture deal that had been done over his head between James Carreras and Bernard Delfont.

At this point James Carreras, no doubt as aware as his son of the cost trap that was opening up before their eyes, seems to have seen the writing on the wall. The American distributors by and large no longer wanted. Hammer product which – as they would claim – ‘did not travel’. EMI, the last British distributor, might join them at any moment and then where would Hammer be? It was not as if any other UK film company was having any luck. And Hammer, itself, now risked becoming just another punter in the endless and often futile quest for production finance.

James Carreras had not come so far only to face such a prospect and, while there was still some life in Hammer and the prospect of several releases in the pipeline, he started plans to sell the company. Who to? At the time I was told by a member of the inner circle that the buyer was EMI, which seemed to make considerable sense. And The Hammer Story refers to Sir James offering EMI 75 per cent as early as 1969. Evidently Tigon was a major suitor too, the company run by Tony Tenser who had made Witchfinder General.

What is beyond doubt is that a deal was discussed and, though Michael was not informed of it, he discovered the plans and, while his father was out of the country on a cruise, he put together a management buy-out with the help of investment capital from the ICI pension fund.

Looking back at the discussion of bad business decisions in Chapter 2, it is intriguing to reflect just how bad ICI’s decision was at this point – so poor that the episode would make an excellent business school exercise. For it perfectly illustrates the difficulty, some might say the impossibility, of exercising due diligence over a creative entertainment company. Hammer’s books probably still looked OK at this point, there had been the novelty hit The Vampire Lovers around a year before. How could anyone outside possibly have known that – without the twin engines of Hammer’s key brand-creator Anthony Hinds and key brand-salesman James Carreras – they were buying into a kind of hollow shell? To ICI’s pension fund managers Hammer horror probably looked like a cheese recipe anyone could duplicate. It wasn’t and it would be years (partly because Hinds was so low-key) before anyone figured out the chemistry that had produced Hammer’s big hits. Meanwhile, to add to their problem, audience taste changes even faster than culinary taste.

Some have claimed this was some kind of trap and James Carreras had pulled the wool over his son’s eyes, but this deal was nothing directly to do with him. He didn’t even know about it, though ironically it was a tribute to the spell he had managed to cast about his brand. When James returned, Michael’s offer was put to him as soon as he docked and after some delay a surprised James Carreras finally agreed. From this point Michael Carreras was Hammer.

The sale saved the company for the time being and ensured its independence, but the timing could hardly have been worse. Michael often said later that he had acted hurriedly and found the cupboard far barer than he had anticipated, not least because so much had been sold off. Consequently, at the beginning of his new tenure as Hammer’s owner, he tried desperately to diversify, something his father seems barely to have conceived. He wanted Hammer, as he said, to be in the sex shops, the book shops, the music shops, the poster shops. Just a few years earlier such a strategy might possibly have worked but it was a reach and now there were few takers.

Soon the EMI deal was the company’s sole lifeline and, in an attempt to give the films a new and contemporary voice, Carreras brought in Chris Wicking, writer of Scream and Scream Again, as script editor. It was Wicking who had suggested Seth Holt should make a stab at a modern gothic with the 1971 Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb. Any titles they made now were going to be key but all luck seemed to have left the company with James Carreras. Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb faced innumerable production problems, climaxing when Holt died of a heart condition one week before shooting ended. It seems Michael Carreras offered it to Don Sharp, saying he could start from scratch and shoot everything again, but Sharp declined so Carreras stepped in to finish it. During this time, to his credit, he struggled to try and fulfil what he could understand of Seth Holt’s own intentions: ‘I sat with the producer all night running Seth’s material trying to absorb what he wanted. I went on the floor and did things I’d never done before in my life by putting the camera where I thought Seth would want it as opposed where I thought it ought to be. I tried to keep his feel.’

And it is certainly true Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb (a ridiculous title, plucked out of the air at this time of flagging fortunes) is of a slightly different order from the tired modern gothic scripts that were being served up for Hammer’s modern Dracula movies. Produced by an ebullient American, Howard Brandy (who was more publicist than producer and in fact acted as Hammer’s publicist during this time), it was an updating of the Bram Stoker Egyptian mummy thriller Jewel of the Seven Stars and bore little resemblance to anything Hammer had done before. It is also though a weird and, in places, very talky film in which Valerie Leon, daughter of Egyptologist Andrew Keir, is slowly possessed by the spirit of a long-dead Egyptian Princess. In parts it seems almost like a modern and cruel take on Sangster’s gothic world, with its sadistic male nurses in a mental ward of padded cells, not to mention the voluptuous cruel goddess at its centre. But whether, at this stage of his career at least, Holt was truly the right choice for this kind of thing might now, with hindsight, be open to question. The performances are very full on, verging on the theatrical and lacking any aesthetic distance. The villainous Corbeck character played by Alan Villiers is a very odd combination of character styles (call it stockbroker-fanatic!). Leon herself had a memorable quality, but paradoxically proved almost more plausible as the voluptuous Egyptian queen than as a modern teenager. Given all the circumstances, Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb would remain a curiosity, not without its moments, but ultimately there is just something too literal about the way it is made. It needed the distance of dreams and it gets a succession of big sharp-focus close-ups.

What about the other titles in those last days? There had been huge hopes for Wicking’s Freudian thriller set in 1830s Bavaria, Demons of the Mind, directed by Peter Sykes, a dedicated visual stylist who brought a youthful enthusiasm to Hammer’s product. The film did have flashes of originality and panache with its Poe-like tale about an incestuous crumbling dynasty, and an ancestral lust for killing. The plot was built around a monstrous father/authority figure called Count Zorn, but Hammer had had little luck with its gothic villains since the initial master-stroke of casting Lee and Cushing together in The Curse of Frankenstein, and this particular villain utterly lacked that kind of ambiguity thanks to a full-on performance from Robert Hardy. EMI hated the film.

Subsequently, Michael Carreras tried two psycho-thrillers in a ‘Women in Terror’ double bill comprising Fear in The Night and Straight on Till Morning (both already discussed), but audiences had never liked such subjects together. They preferred to see them with something different as when Crescendo was linked with Taste the Blood of Dracula. Moreover, at this point even the notion of a double bill was fast becoming old-fashioned. And when this ploy failed, Michael Carreras was forced back into bank holiday spin-offs of successful UK comedies like That’s Your Funeral, Nearest and Dearest and Love Thy Neighbour. But soon even that was not bringing in an audience. The EMI deal had reached an end.

And so it was, by 1973 Hammer found itself in the position James Carreras had dreaded. It was searching around for subjects, product and finance like everyone else and failing to find them. By the mid-1970s Michael Carreras was forced to turn to the legendary action studio Shaw Brothers of Hong Kong, who had always admired Hammer’s product. He succeeded in mounting a double bill with them of gothic kung fu, Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, and a more modern, sub-James-Bond thriller, Shatter, starring Stuart Whitman as a hit man on the run. It should have been a marriage made in heaven, especially since there were now almost no other suitors. And to Michael’s credit, Legend was a lively fusion of kung fu and gothic. Courageously too, he went for a maverick talent to direct Shatter, the acclaimed but edgy Roger Corman discovery Monte Hellman.

But in the end the production of both films was to prove a living nightmare. The title Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires might deceive but it featured Count Dracula and Van Helsing (and Peter Cushing was playing Van Helsing). As soon as Warner Brothers heard about this, they knew they were on strong ground because that cast must mean it was covered by the old Dracula agreement. Michael had never been privy to this and knew nothing about it, so in good faith he had done deals with other distributors. Desperate cables flew back and forth from Hong Kong, some baffled, some awkward, some pleading. Finally, after much embarrassment and at a cost, the situation was resolved with Warner elbowing out Avco Embassy as the film’s distributor in the UK.

On Shatter (also scripted by Don Houghton who parted company with Hammer after this) there appear to have been clashes with Monte Hellman. Indeed, rightly or wrongly, Michael Carreras felt Hellman’s then girlfriend Laurie Bird was at times co-directing the film. But another cause of the friction was the difficulty of shooting in Hong Kong where, according to both Hellman and Whitman, overworked crews constantly failed to appear. Hellman was fired and replaced by Carreras himself, who had hopes the resulting film might kick off a TV series, but what finally emerged was barely shown.

Legend, it is true, pleased some fans, but made no huge box office impact. So, the whole ordeal by fire was to have no positive effect on Hammer’s fortunes, and now back at home the cupboard was bare. After one last TV comedy spin-off (Man About the House with Richard O’Sullivan, released in December 1974), the whole of 1975 would pass without a single Hammer release. This was the first blank year since the post-war company’s refounding in 1947 and, though this is in itself a remarkable record, it was also a landmark of a particularly unfortunate kind.

Of this time Denis Meikle reflects (in A History of Horrors) that Michael thought he had bought a film company and discovered he had got instead, ‘a corporate identity for a very specific product’. But of course, if somehow new life had been engendered into that product, a Night of the Living Dead, or a Halloween or a Friday the 13th, or a When a Stranger Calls, or the one film Hammer must surely have regretted missing most, The Omen (itself made by a big fan of the company Richard Donner), that might have just seen them through, despite the rising costs. Even so, given that nobody was coming forward with this kind of material, a breakthrough of this kind looks in retrospect unlikely from a man who had never been a horror fan in the first place. And there was also by then an American dimension that people expected in such product. Even The Omen – discussed in the next chapter – though set in London, with largely British actors other than Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, just happens to be about the American ambassador to the UK! That was the way Michael Carreras tried to take it, but he only had one more throw of the horror dice.

Hammer’s last horror film under the old management (released in March 1976) To the Devil a Daughter, was very loosely adapted from Dennis Wheatley’s black magic novel and starred Richard Widmark as a hard-bitten occult novelist battling Christopher Lee and various Satanist followers who have designs on the 17-year-old Nastasia Kinski. The film lacks the grace and polish of The Devil Rides Out, and Dennis Wheatley hated it, complaining bitterly to James Carreras and Lee. But to be fair, Wheatley’s opinion was never likely to be favourable for it was a contemporary version of his work, made very clearly in the commanding shadow of The Exorcist, an influence Hammer might have been better to avoid at this stage. Wheatley’s Satanist romances are miles away from Blatty’s Roman Catholic sensationalism. And the period trappings of The Devil Rides Out helped enormously to suspend disbelief and gave it style and intrigue (though admittedly any attempt to repeat that formula would have been an even bigger risk.) In contrast To the Devil a Daughter – scripted by various hands including Chris Wicking and John Peacock – is awash with rampaging foetuses, obscene pregnancy rituals and stray sexual suggestion; but it also seems full of mixed intentions and appears to reflect conflict behind the camera as well as in front it. Widmark himself was unhappy from the start, constantly threatening to leave and frequently storming off the set. At one stage he apparently kicked over a wind machine in irritation, a neat metaphor for the American industry’s growing contempt and impatience with Hammer.

The result is an unusual yet confused spin-off in the post-Satanic baby cycle, part-thriller, part-horror. Perhaps no film could have saved the day by this stage, but by the end of its stormy, quarrelsome and troubled production (a period which seems to have lasted most of 1974 and 1975) this one had no chance, all the more because its climax was apparently subject to change on the set on the day. Seeing at once the ending as filmed did not deliver, Michael Carreras pleaded with EMI and Nat Cohen to lay out a little more money so they could reshoot. The request was refused. The film was released and though there was some initial interest, what little money it made did not go to Hammer, who had given away almost everything just to get it made. It was a somewhat low key end to what had been a long and fruitful association between the old Hammer and movie horror.

To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes, UK/West Germany, 1976).

For a few years more Michael Carreras carried on, trimming the company to a much-reduced ship, spending some of his own money and selling his Gloucestershire house. Finally, to his great satisfaction in 1978, he packaged a passable but unmemorable remake of The Lady Vanishes. It would be the old Hammer’s last film.

In April 1979 he was called to a meeting in the City by his paymasters, who had seen almost no return on their £600,000 loan (at least £4 million today). He was told that the company was to be placed in the hands of the official receiver. Michael Carreras resigned as director on 30 April 1979. A few years later, Roy Skeggs and Brian Lawrence reclaimed the company from receivership, buying it out for a mere £100,000 – but they would never package a single film. Since they bowed out in 2000, as mentioned above, there have been two changes of ownership and in 2023 a third. This meant in recent years there have at last been Hammer movies again (as discussed in Chapter 10) but it was essentially a different company. Here in 1979 was the last moment of the old Hammer.

How to interpret that moment? We can – in a not uncommon scenario – cast James Carreras as the prudent and remarkable businessman whose legacy was squandered by the son who was never his match. There is support for this version in the incontestable fact that James Carreras had often showed a selling genius in building a brand even if it had taken Anthony Hinds to identify that brand.

Or, we can put the emphasis entirely the other way. In this version James Carreras was the cynical businessman who was caught betraying a legacy both to the British film industry as a whole, and to his own family, by selling out in secret without even consulting them. Having discovered in time, the son thwarted his father’s intentions and fought heroically to get the company back on its feet. He managed to keep it going for another six years until he was defeated by the overwhelming odds against him.

There is some truth in both these accounts but neither is exactly accurate. If there is a whiff of tragedy about Hammer’s end, it is not the tragedy of business acumen versus profligacy or of decency versus corruption. In fact, the truth has less to do with good versus evil than with two competing philosophies. Hammer’s last act was the story of a father and son whose emotional hearts were opposed, not necessarily to each other (though there was certainly a rift) but to each other’s outlook. As far as James was concerned, Hammer was a business entity and his job was to keep it in business and/or protect assets. If there was any threat of the film pipeline drying up, then the only recourse was to save the assets by selling. For Michael, however it was far less about business per se than the business of making films. He was as keen as anyone on money, but his first love (at least after jazz) was always film. He therefore saw his obligation both to the company his father had built (and the UK film industry as a whole) in stark terms. He wanted to keep it alive, independent and making films until the end, even if it risked his own financial survival and his family’s fortunes to do so. Was this just ego? Yes possibly, for you could argue he had not done much to create the brand, he simply inherited it. His father never would understand it and, if he saw it as folly, he was right in a way.

Yet there is heroism in Michael’s fight to save it, giving Terence Fisher a last film and even trying to persuade Anthony Hinds, who was the major builder of the brand, to come back. By then though Hinds knew it was too late to regroup, too many opportunities had been missed and the old Hammer edge on cost was gone. It was over.

1.Interestingly, one of the film’s detractors, US critic Glenn Erickson (who admits its interest though not its quality), has questioned Lang’s endorsement. Writing on the site Trailers From Hell, Erickson accepts the quote’s authenticity but points out the director was nearly blind by the late 1960s and evidently talked of hearing, rather than seeing, Space Odyssey 2001! So, was Lang in any position to make any kind of judgement? It’s a fair question, but it would be literally impossible to follow the narrative complexity of Scream and Scream Again from the soundtrack alone. So, even if Lang talked of his own failing vision at the time, and wished he could see more of the full majesty of 2001, why would he bother to lie? My conclusion is Lang saw what he could, and was perhaps talked though it to a degree, but loved the concept as he surely would. Maybe, though, it did mean he was less observant of its weaker strands, like the east-European police state.

2.Rixen would show his boss James the latest rushes and product every week on a Tuesday.

3.Conversation with the author and other Time Out journalists (taped).

10

Towards New Horror Mythologies

PART ONE:

UK HORROR IN THE 1980S AND ’90S

A Market Wipe-Out

While working on The Mummy in 1959, Terence Fisher expressed a cautious optimism about British horror. ‘I would like to think,’ he said, ‘that a picture like Dracula will be shown at the NFT in 20 or 30 years’ time.’ His estimate so long ago proved to be incredibly modest but also demonstrates just how much flack Hammer had taken, given he assumed it would need two or three decades for his films to be accepted even by the National Film Theatre! Dracula was in fact shown at the NFT only a few years later and, after a few years more, Hammer was looked back on with a certain amused affection even by most of those who, as their writing reveals, were shocked by its product at the time.

Of course, A Heritage of Horror was first written while the original Hammer horror boom still persisted and therefore in a spirit of optimism. But even at the time it was obvious that, following Britain’s original lead, most of the interesting developments in modern cinematic horror were coming out of America. I suppose I should have been alerted when, three years after Michael Reeves’ death, I wrote an article New Blood for the magazine Sight & Sound, trying to find up-and-coming horror filmmakers in the UK. They were, to be honest, from the point of view not of talent but horror, a dispiriting bunch. None of the directors I spoke to seemed to have a real passion for the subject, none were remotely excited by Hammer’s breakthrough or what Reeves or Michael Powell had done, none outlined ideas for small films which could generate real hope for the form here. In desperation, I pulled a fast one to include the polymath and hardly up-and-coming Jonathan Miller who had made the wonderful M. R. James ghost story Whistle and I’ll Come For You for the BBC and whom I still think should have been recruited to UK horror (he was shamefully neglected as a filmmaker in the UK). It was not that the filmmakers I talked to lacked talent, enthusiasm or initiative: they just did not seem to be truly involved in horror from the heart, unlike many of the writers I met at the same time. Of course, Terence Fisher might well have seemed the same way if I had known him pre-horror. But Fisher (who never lacked enthusiasm for the form) also had the advantage of a studio system to support him. By this time it was absolutely obvious these filmmakers were going to have to make the breakthroughs on their own and, without a love of the genre, what chance did they have? In fact, not one was to make a career out of horror in the end.

Stephen Weeks was the true maverick of the bunch. He was not exactly into horror, but his highly commendable obsession was to make a film of the great English Arthurian text and poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Weeks had got his horror break because Milton Subotsky had hired him to make I Monster, a stylised and not unimpressive version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which had been desperately hampered by a 3D system Subotsky had found (according to Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic) in a copy of New Scientist! The film was hardly commercial and sunk without trace. But Weeks went on to shoot Ghost Story, an English ghost story set in England but shot entirely in India, starring Penelope Keith, Leigh Lawson and Barbara Shelley. The result had as unique an atmosphere as you’d expect given the circumstances, with India providing a strange sense of a long English summer. And then Weeks proceeded against all conceivable odds to fulfil his dream by making a feature from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight not once but twice, the first for Carlo Ponti and United Artists in 1973 and then again for Cannon in 1984.¹

For anyone who knows the UK film industry and its resistance to such material, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, that is quite a feat. Indeed, Weeks put such devotion and dedication into it that in the end, apart from a disastrous adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth in India, which was abandoned after two weeks due to production fraud, the above constitutes his entire movie career. Of further horror, there was none.

But then the years that followed the publication of A Heritage of Horror were disastrous for UK horror. After Hammer’s original burst of creativity, the UK was to produce no further horror franchises of its own. The Omen was only technically a British film, its creatives were all American, and the Hellraiser sequels quickly decamped to the US. Effectively despite many isolated titles and much talent discussed below, some highly promising, there would, in the twentieth century, be no massive second wave of commercial UK horror in the way that there was a second wave of British rock following the initial success of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This was partly to do with the fact that the whole international movie industry was suffering a sea change. British production had always been erratic and hard but, within a few years of the 1970s, as audiences shrank to a tenth of what they had been in the 1950s, even the primary producers like Rank and EMI were on their knees. And eventually the American studios themselves – once mass producers who had farmed out some of that production – became instead largely dependent on blockbusters, high-budget event films or ‘tentpoles’ – as they were named because the whole release structure was built around them. As budgets for primary product ballooned, less and less medium-budget production was undertaken for cinema release, and the anonymity of the studio system which had once sheltered and protected a Terence Fisher, or his US equivalents. was no longer a possibility. Also, to make things even harder, the exploitation themes that had once been the staple fare of smaller US and UK companies became, for the first time, acceptable territory for major studio investment with budgets that only American distributors could possibly afford (and then often with outside finance picking up some of the tab).

As the majors began investing in what had once been B-feature subjects, little space was left for the kind of material Hammer (and in the US AIP) had tackled with economy and audacity. There would, it is true, still be room for the occasional innovative low-budget horror franchise with sequels, like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream and Saw, then many years later The Conjuring, Insidious and Purge, but all of the successful ones came from America (or in the case of Saw, Australia).

In the 1980s the major shift of the whole industry’s focus and structure – not to mention the collapse of most UK indigenous distribution as tax breaks were removed and the UK movie majors like Rank and EMI ceased to exist – was to prove extremely painful for all of British cinema, affecting far more than just horror. In due course it would almost wipe out the British film industry entirely (though as we shall see in Part Two of this chapter it regrouped).

By 1981 enough had changed to remove the whole raison d’être for a company like Hammer and for James Carreras’ beloved pipeline of films. The days of posters and gimmicky titles, of quick and sensational stripped-budget product, supplying a lower-tier audience of drive-ins (in the US) and double or triple bills elsewhere, would, by the 1980s, have vanished like a dream. Much later a little of this market (a very little) would return via video and DVD to fuel cheap sequels or genre product that were never theatrically released (for example, The House That Screamed or The Prophecy 3), but with exceptions, like the bonanza Palace made out of videos of the US breakout horror franchise The Evil Dead, this generated comparably little in revenue. And within a few years, as streaming took over, even the DVD and revenue source would dwindle to a tiny purist market.² Until in the new century a revival of genre filmmaking and horror would occur, both in streaming and also theatrical, but that is for later.

Meanwhile, before the wipe-out of the late 80s, there were a few interesting developments. Indeed, while the original Hammer was taking its very last breath as a maker of theatrical movies, The Omen – which remains even now, the most successful franchise-initiating horror movie produced out of the UK³ – erupted to show what could have been.

The Omen franchise was a cunning idea developed by an American documentary filmmaker called David Seltzer, who had grasped some of the potential for a frightening horror movie that existed in the Book of Revelations. Like Rosemary’s Baby before it, the script expertly uses one of the great horror film paradigms, taking what is essentially a mad and paranoid idea (in this case ‘my son is the anti-Christ’) and then conjuring a chain of circumstances and a world where it comes true. In this case a gilded American diplomat has been posted to England as US ambassador and slowly follows a chain of deaths and prophecies until he begins to suspect the terrible truth about his child. The film made the most of its London locations and was mounted by a great fan of Hammer, Richard Donner, who brilliantly indicated one path Hammer might have taken.⁴

Indeed, The Omen was made even as Hammer struggled with To the Devil a Daughter. The two films were released in the same year and both productions had to fight hard to land an American lead. Charlton Heston, Roy Scheider and William Holden all turned down The Omen before Gregory Peck – who had not worked for five years – agreed to play the part for $250,000. Meanwhile, with just as much difficulty, Hammer persuaded Richard Widmark, older than Peck by two years, to take the part in their devil film, paying him just over half that sum.

Unfortunately, there the similarity ends. For in what followed, Donner (who admittedly had twice as much money at his disposal) wasted no time at all on the residual props of Swinging London, but showed himself to be amazingly skilled at honing The Omen into a real audience-pleasing machine. The story is strong, but Donner applied himself to it with breathtaking discipline and a strategy that was both painstaking and ruthlessly practical. Before shooting began, he prepared a flow chart to ensure that no section of The Omen was ever more than a few minutes away from a shock or suspense sequence. He had cast the film extremely well and now he put all his energies into perfecting these key moments. Here was the way of the future and To the Devil a Daughter never had a chance against it. Indeed, if The Omen had been made by Hammer or another small UK company, it might have been the harbinger of a second wave of UK horror. Instead, it simply reinforced the prevailing wisdom that America understood the field better. And deservedly Donner went on to an enormously successful career, directing at least another 20 films before he died in 2021. The director of To the Devil a Daughter, Peter Sykes, though more than ten years younger than Donner, would make just one more film before leaving the business for teaching. Sykes had been hailed by Michael Carreras as ‘the next Terence Fisher’, but the indigenous British horror movie was absolutely no place to be planning any kind of career as the 1970s turned to the 1980s.

It is true that at the tail-end of the boom the early 1970s did throw up two major cult horror movies from Britain, both greatly enhanced by the fact they were filmed away from the usual Home Counties arena in more exotic locations. Oddly, these two films were also yoked together on a double bill in the UK, by a distributor that clearly did not know what to do with either of them.

The supernatural thriller about premonition, Don’t Look Now, based on a Daphne Du Maurier short story, was set in off-season Venice, a terrific location for suspense – and filmmaker Nick Roeg milked it to the full. The film has lost none of its atmosphere today, with its highly evocative tale of a couple (John and Laura Baxter, played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) trying to overcome the loss of their drowned daughter and their subsequent encounter with a spiritualist woman, who seems to have contact with her. Even so, Roeg had to substitute some ingenious editing to make up for a climax that was somewhat oddly plotted. The whole story finally hinges on John’s visionary premonition of his wife Laura riding a funeral barge. Everything about the image is crystal clear: the fact she is dressed in mourning and at a funeral is made entirely obvious to the audience and certainly was to me on first viewing. Yet Sutherland, though a trained architect, makes no reference to any of this and persists in a hysterical belief she has been kidnapped. Why? In lesser hands such an illogicality would have sunk the story, but Roeg’s Venice is so captivating, the performances so strong and the final twisty act of violence so cruel, that the film manages to get past this and deliver a real frisson.

Anthony Shaffer’s novel and script for The Wicker Man was filmed in Scotland (Skye, Plockton, Dumfries) and took up the basic folk horror theme that had been used extremely successfully by John Bowen three years earlier in the widely acclaimed BBC TV play Robin Redbreast. Bowen’s television drama teased its audience with unknown menace in a rural English setting, but ultimately proved to be about human sacrifice as a pagan ritual (also the theme of David Rudkin’s play Afore Night Come). All three writers of these scripts, not to mention the somewhat bland higher budget Eye of the Devil in 1966, had probably been inspired by one of the great unsolved real-life English murder mysteries: namely the ‘witchcraft’ or ‘pitchfork’ murder which took place in Lower Quinton in Warwickshire in 1945.

The Lower Quinton murder has a role in English horror not dissimilar to the place occupied by the Ed Gein killings, which inspired Pyscho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and many other films in America. It was in the then tiny Warwickshire village of Lower Quinton at dusk on Valentine’s Day 1945 that a farmer called Charles Walton was found in a field pitchforked to death with multiple injuries, a large cross reportedly carved on his chest and neck. All sorts of strange rumours surrounded the crime. Walton was reputed to have had clairvoyant powers and, though Scotland Yard spent days at the scene, they never found the killer. Even the celebrated detective Robert Fabian described in his memoirs how he was baffled by the mystery and believed there had been a community-wide cover-up. In some ways it is strange that the Lower Quinton case has never been officially made into a horror movie, though a TV drama was written around it which was never produced.

The Wicker Man’s central plot, in which a policeman arrives at a lonely Scottish island to solve a mysterious murder, had a further source in the obscure 1967 novel Ritual, about pagan activities in an English village and a series of murders. Christopher Lee and Anthony Shaffer had bought the film rights to this in 1971. The book is odd and whimsical, in many ways resembling a more sexual and violent version of the TV show Midsummer Murders than anything else – indeed the author of Ritual complained the film missed his novel’s sense of humour! But though its human sacrifices are finally a red herring, it does have a lone policeman investigating murders in a Cornish village, as well as strange and licentious pagan behaviour, plus one scene involving an attempted seduction in a pub which stayed in the script. Plenty of movies have diverged far more from their source novels and still credited them, so it remains odd the novel was never acknowledged. It seems possible either the usual clause was left out of the contract, or, perhaps Shaffer paid over the odds in order to get his film credited as an original. Certainly, the sum involved in the purchase seems quite high for a book they did not intend to utilise, it was £15,000 (as much as £180,000 in today’s money).

Alongside the various sources, the film also reflected writer Anthony Schaffer’s love of games and tricks while the entire story’s relocation from Warwickshire (or Cornwall in the novel) to a remote Scottish island, with Christopher Lee as its laird/high priest and Edward Woodward as the lone policeman, was a master-stroke. Lee regarded the film as one of the best things he had ever done, and it is true that, under the confident direction of Robin Hardy, he enjoyed one of the meatiest roles of his life as a pagan laird, presiding over the enchanted if threatening island Summerisle. The interpolation of songs and dances can be a little alienating at times, but the score is now revered and the climax is terrific but also haunting and sad, with Woodward showing the magnificent, if futile, courage of the martyr. It is perfectly true his character seems narrow and even bigoted in places but, while agreeing with many of Jonathan Rigby’s judgements in his excellent English Gothic, I certainly do not agree that by the end of The Wicker Man ‘the hero is made to seem a prig and an idiot by comparison with the level-headed life-affirming islanders.’ Woodward’s policeman may be prudish but it is hardly ‘level-headed’ to enjoy burning people to death, and Woodward’s final bravery in the face of his own physical suffering, and Lee’s smug cruelty, is surely what gives the film its lasting pathos and power. There seems to me no doubt ultimately, in those last moments, the audience is on Woodward’s side.

The Wicker Man’s chaotic release reflected the turmoil in the British film industry at the time – it was made by British Lion in 1972 at a point when the company was on its knees, having just banked a loss of £1 million. The firm was then sold off, including valuable land holdings, to property asset stripper John Bentley, who needed to get something in front of the cameras to show good faith so a horror film seemed a reasonable bet. The rush meant that a story, whose plot was all about May Day pagan festivities, started shooting in October of 1972! This meant artificial leaves and blossoms had to be glued to trees for many scenes.

The same urgency and minor chaos affected its release, for British Lion had by then been sold yet again to EMI, who tried to persuade the producers to add a happier ending in which rain comes to the hapless hero’s rescue. Shaffer and Hardy refused but the film was savagely cut on release by about 20 minutes (some of which has now been restored in various versions) and then, as we have seen, put out as the support feature to Don’t Look Now. Initially it was barely noticed and box office was poor, but steadily its reputation grew and now it has classic status, even eclipsing Don’t Look Now and giving birth to festivals like ‘Burning Man’ in America.

The film’s fame was such Nicholas Cage starred in a remake in 2006, written and directed by Neil LaBute, who finally credited the novel Ritual. But his script was no closer to the novel than the earlier film except it did connect Cage to the island, just as the detective in the novel has a connection to the community. Cage gave a strong performance but the sequel was widely reviled and certainly suffered from adopting the ending almost unchanged. Without some element of surprise, which the original had delivered so well, the whole enterprise can risk seeming a bit pointless.

Another, less fortunate 1970s excursion into exotic locations was Incense for the Damned, shot in Greece and Oxford in 1969 from a novel called Doctors Wear Scarlet, which had been a favourite project of Terence Fisher’s. Fisher never got to make it but Robert Hartford-Davis did, and seems to have deeply regretted the experience since he took his name off the finished product, declaring it to be only work in progress.

Hartford-Davis was very much a fringe figure in UK horror, making the period exploitation piece The Black Torment in 1964, a convoluted eighteenth-century tale of madness and jealousy which had some of the Hammer trappings but none of the style and an unusual, if sometimes ludicrous, plot about an ‘imbecile’ twin brother. The director moved on to comedies but returned to horror for Corruption in 1967, an incongruous piece in which Peter Cushing plays a desperate surgeon, murdering in order to restore his wife’s beauty. The theme could be straight out of Anglo’s films of the late 1950s; indeed, on one level it resembles the plot of Circus of Horrors, but it utterly lacks any of the sexual tension and romantic flourish of these earlier films, adopting instead an oddly prosaic tone. Incense for the Damned was more interesting partly because it stuck closely to Raven’s original idea about a young Oxford don (Patrick Mower) and his mysterious Greek encounter with a girl (Imogen Hassall), who has turned him into a kind of enfeebled vampire.

But there is nothing supernatural about the vampirism of this story. In Raven’s book the sucking of human blood becomes a substitute for sexual activity, engendering a psychological dependence between the impotent man and the woman who allows him to practice it. As this synopsis indicates, the novel was written at a time of wild psychoanalytic speculation in 1959, and it really needed a Polanski to do it justice. Much of Hartford-Davis’ ‘unfinished’ film is a mishmash, but some of it is quietly effective, including the cast, most notably Madeline Hinde as the hero’s somewhat bloodless English girlfriend and Imogen Hassall as his Greek seductress.

Though Incense for the Damned falls a very long way behind Don’t Look Now and The Wicker Man, all of these three films were interesting and unusual, and all were made in the last days of the world boom in horror that had begun in the UK in the late 1950s and petered out (temporarily as we shall see) sometime in the middle of the 1970s. As the boom ended, such adventurous productions became few and far between and high-budget mainstream horror was soon quite a rarity. Matters were not much helped by Fox’s lumbering adaptation of Richard Matheson’s Legend of Hell House. Matheson himself was apparently devastated when he saw the film, ‘sick with disappointment’ as he told Cinefantastique, and you can understand why. Although his novel about a team of scientific investigators who apply their research techniques to Hell House – supposedly ‘the Mount Everest of haunted houses’ – is treated with a commendable seriousness, the film remains at heart thoroughly plodding and unimaginative. Hell House itself is almost startlingly clichéd and the performances never convince, making the final result stilted and entirely unpersuasive. To be fair to the filmmakers though, Matheson’s script itself was not up to his usual high standard.

There were, in the last days of the old boom, several slightly desperate attempts to find new gothic horror subjects, some prefiguring themes that would reappear in horror hits years later but failing to embed them successfully. Christopher Lee had ventured into producing again alongside Hammer stalwart Anthony Nelson-Keyes with the ill-fated Charlemagne production Nothing But the Night in 1972, set partly, like The Wicker Man, on a fictional Scottish island but shot in Devon. The plot, with Lee as the hero and Cushing also in the cast, involved a weird semi-Satanic conspiracy about old men possessing children’s bodies (elements that would later reappear in The Skeleton Key and many others) but took far too long to get going and was quickly forgotten.

Another oddity The Creeping Flesh set in 1893 from Tigon (directed by Freddie Francis after Don Sharp left late in pre-production), had Peter Cushing discovering a prehistoric skeleton which grew flesh when it came into contact with water! Convinced he has isolated some kind of physical manifestation of human evil, he believes he can use it to create a vaccine and injects it into his highly troubled daughter (Lorna Heilbron) who becomes violent as a result. Despite the script’s sheer weirdness, Heilbron was terrific in the part (just as she was in Symptoms, see below); indeed, the word was her role in The Creeping Flesh was expanded when the producers saw just how good she was. But the film was released at a time of maximum market saturation and hardly anyone noticed, though she would later have a long and successful career in television before changing careers.

The Asphyx, with Robert Powell and Robert Stephens, was another highly original subject from this period and one further attempt by a non-Hammer company to develop Gothic themes. Its story, which had an imaginative Conan Doyleish flavour, concerned a Victorian photographic pioneer who succeeds in ‘trapping’ the human soul! This strangely ambitious and metaphysical concept, from Peter Newbrook and his writer Brian Comfort, was a brave attempt to do something new, but finally felt like short-story material as the plot succumbed to its own absurdity.

At the tail-end of the 1970s, one company, Tyburn, did mount a last try to emulate Hammer horror at its most traditional. Seeing a possible gap in the market, producer Kevin Francis set up productions of two Anthony Hinds scripts with his father Freddie Francis directing. The results, though not successful at the box office, are of considerable interest to any Hammer enthusiast. Hinds’ script for The Ghoul, for example, set in the 1920s, has some quite subtle qualities and is recognisably Hinds in its journey from a somewhat vapid English complacency via some 1920s flappers and a car chase, evoking the classic period car comedy Genevieve, to a breakdown in the wilds of Cornwall and then a dark house with sinister secrets on the edge of marshes. John Hurt, Veronica Carlson and Peter Cushing do their very best and there are some nice oddball touches like the village policeman who has never been in a car. But though it is mounted with care, somehow this feels more like a Hammer chamber piece or a Hammer play than a Hammer film. There are echoes of The Reptile with Cushing haunted by an Indian curse (quite an arresting one), but absolutely none of that film’s action, flourish and exterior excitement. This is Hammer Lite and it seems likely Hinds himself would not have considered the production values adequate for audiences if he had been in charge of it, as he was of the earlier film.

There were also attempts to make more modern subjects in the post-war horror boom’s last days of plenty. The most notable was Death Line from American Garry Sherman, who imagined a whole subterranean world of ghouls in the underground beneath London, and achieved quite a considerable degree of suspense, ambiguity and pathos as he did so. ‘Mind the doors’, the forlorn cry echoed by those left behind under London, has rightly entered horror film mythology, while Donald Pleasence played the policeman in charge of the case. The film was in its way a trailblazer, like Scream and Scream Again, with little reverence for those in charge. Indeed, as in the earlier film, it too used Christopher Lee as a symbol of a corrupt authority. Though to be honest it was not quite as much fun.

As the 1970s proceeded and times became harder, Anglo/Canadian co-production became one of the few avenues open to the aspiring UK producer. One typical result was Full Circle or The Haunting of Julia, a rather diffident tale of possession starring Mia Farrow and based on the book by Peter Straub which explores some of the themes of Don’t Look Now. Despite Mia Farrow’s strong performance I always found this a bit lifeless and melancholy but it has its admirers, among them the screenwriter Stephen Volk (discussed below). Meanwhile, having been foolish enough to turn down The Omen, from which Gregory Peck made at least $6 million, Charlton Heston again backed the wrong horse by agreeing to star in The Awakening, based (like Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb) on Bram Stoker’s possession/reincarnation story Jewel of the Seven Stars, a novel whose attraction to filmmakers seems increasingly baffling. For Jewel has now been made at least five times for the screen – most recently in 2023 and additionally once on television – yet not a single successful project has ever come out of it. This time the plot is set largely in Egypt, and the film boasted a talented production team including Don’t Look Now’s writing partnership of Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, with Mike Newell – later one of the UK’s leading filmmakers – directing. Yet the result was an utterly leaden and repetitive tale of possession, lacking even the weirder new twists Wicking had given the story in his version.

Much better was the Canadian–UK co-production Murder By Decree (1979), a spirited Sherlock Holmes thriller about the hunt for Jack the Ripper which mined the more recent conspiracy theories that the murders were part of a Royal cover up. Years later the same idea – though now largely discredited by modern scholarship – was developed somewhat laboriously in From Hell, but here it was crisply handled and had the added effectiveness of novelty. Christopher Plummer played Holmes and James Mason made one of the screen’s best ever Watsons, while director Bob Clark got starry support from Genevieve Bujold, Donald Sutherland, John Gielgud and David Hemmings among others.

But horror films with major stars were fast becoming a huge rarity in Britain. Most of the few titles on offer were emanating from the cheapest end of the market, often from filmmakers who had started out making softcore porn and sex comedy during the Hammer years. One of the more prolific exponents of 1970s horror was Pete Walker who had had some success in the 1960s with titles like School For Sex and Cool It Carol. But in 1973 Walker launched in a new direction with House of Whipcord, apparently based on an idea by Cat Girl’s filmmaker Alfred Shaughnessy, about a senile old judge and his wife who – in reaction to the current climate of permissiveness – set up a gruesome and murderous house of correction for young girls. The film was dedicated (ironically everyone assumed) to those who wished to see the return of the death penalty, and Walker recruited actor, critic and screenwriter David McGillivray to bring vitality and style to the script.

House of Whipcord cost £60,000. This gives a pretty good idea of the downscaling of UK horror by 1973, for without making any adjustment it is still far less than Hammer’s lowest budget horrors cost 16 years earlier! Even today, making the allowance for inflation, the figure works out at less than a million pounds for 102 minutes, below what was at the time a high- end TV drama budget (though of course still higher than the much later digital phenomenon of micro-budget indie movies discussed below).

The plot of House of Whipchord follows a fairly straight arc in which a girl is kidnapped and then another tries to rescue her. It seems Alfred Shaughnessy wanted to make the film so the audience did not quite know which side it was on, a tantalisingly intriguing (and very politically incorrect) idea, but we will never know how it might have played for Walker and McGillivray do quite the opposite. There is never any question that its torturers are mean-spirited and ugly, especially the repressed Mrs Wakehurst, wonderfully played by Barbara Markham as an odious, unedifying, puritan monster (‘I’m going to make you ashamed of your body’). The victims for their part are baffled innocents. To re-imagine this film as Arthur Crabree or Sidney Hayers would have done it for Anglo in the 1950s (which may be what Shaughnessy meant), with Anton Diffring as a tormented doctor/disciplinarian imprisoning devious cruel femmes fatales (as when June Cunningham taunts Michael Gough in Horrors of the Black Museum by kicking away his crutch) is to see at once how dangerous the Shaughnessy version could have been. Such a story would almost certainly have been reviled or even banned from its inception and even today would be considered unacceptable. House of Whipcord avoids any of that kind of ambiguity. It certainly has a sadomasochist element but it is one that could appeal only to the narrowest of devotees; indeed, it is in many ways less a thriller than a somewhat entertaining and cynical satire.

And satire was to prove a constant theme of the McGillivray–Walker partnership. Frightmare which followed, about a cannibalistic family, had plenty of shocks, including the all-devouring mum who attacked her victims with a drill before consuming them raw, but it was at heart a blackly comic parody on the notion of the English family looking out for each other. House of Mortal Sin, in which a priest is driven by lust and jealousy to murder, satirises the church in general, but particularly Roman Catholicism. The strength of these films was their robust reversal of all the norms of English establishment life; their weakness was that, beyond that, they proved unable to offer an audience characters to care about and therefore risked ending up as atmosphere rather than suspense. It was as if, once the subversive theme was identified, the story became a secondary means of illustration and this helped to give the films their satirical edge.

They certainly occupied new ground and have many champions. Steve Chibnall in British Horror Cinema generously quotes the first edition of A Heritage of Horror, and goes on to argue that Walker fulfilled exactly its wish for a filmmaker who would ‘combine the best and traditional elements of the old approach with more complex ideas and emphases.’ His analysis makes a lot of valuable points, even if I cannot finally quite agree with the conclusion. To me the films of Walker and McGillivray look more and more like highly commendable (and brave) steps on the road to the dark alternative British comedy, then taking shape, than a new direction for British horror. And it seems Pete Walker (the son of Syd Walker, a comedian with many screen credits) had himself been a stand-up comedian in his teens.⁵

Another low-budget movie-maker of the time was the ebullient Spaniard Joseph Larraz, who in 1974 managed to get a UK entry into the competition at Cannes with the psycho-thriller Symptoms, a well-acted film about mental breakdown starring Angela Pleasence and Lorna Heilbron, which was lost for years but was finally restored in all its luminous intensity thanks to the BFI most wanted programme. A poignant story of sexual repression directed and co-scripted with Stanley Miller (who wrote a lot of series TV in the 60s), this is one of the most visually poetic of all psycho thrillers. Shot in the early-nineteenth-century Harefield Grove on the edge of Buckinghamshire, it fuses Daphne Du Maurier and Poe in its story of two women taking time out at a crumbling old estate in a mesmerizing atmosphere of sexual tension, growing fear and finally violence. The story is strongest in its first half, and some critics felt its juxtaposition of thwarted lesbian love and murder was opportunistic. Around this time, it’s true lesbian attraction tended to be featured on screen in a negative light but the emotive nature of the performances here surely overcomes that reservation. Given the feebleness of the men in the film and the sympathetic strength of the women, with Angela Pleasence’s Helen so clearly a frightened child, Symptoms deserves its reputation as a minor classic.

Larraz went on to Vampyres, made in 1974 (not to be confused with John Carpenter’s search-and-destroy semi-western of the same name made in 1998), which is the UK apotheosis of the sex-vampire movie. There is some stilted dialogue (the men are not nearly as well cast as the women), but much of the film is almost wordless as it relates its fable about two beautiful ghosts who inhabit an old house and prey for sex and blood on the men travelling the road nearby. There is no coy nonsense here about ‘one lust feeding the other’, in fact no reticence at all as sexuality and vampirism are intertwined into a poetic frenzy. There is a strongly sexual content, but I would hesitate to call this a sex film for it does far more than parade nudity and eroticism for enjoyment. At its best it has a strong fairy-tale element, for Larraz, a former painter/cartoonist, has a wonderful visual eye, especially for nature and rain-soaked vegetation. Indeed, some of my favourite shots both here and in Symptoms contain no people at all but are just subjective shots from cars as the headlights pierce rain-soaked wooded drives. The cinematographer was veteran Harry Waxman, who also shot The Wicker Man. I am strongly in agreement with Tbomas Nul when he wrote in Diabolique Magazine that Larraz’s British films ‘often outdid works by native English directors when it came to conjuring the most character out of the British countryside.’

Vampyres, which was later re-released as Daughters of Dracula, also contains definite echoes of Dracula, both in aspects of its theme, and in props, like the castle-like house and the elegant goblets of wine which befuddle its victims. One of the female vampires becomes so obsessed with her lover that she cannot keep her hands off him as he becomes weaker and weaker, unable to escape in daylight; indeed, at one stage the other vampire girl is seen literally prising her gorged partner from the drained body of her male lover and tottering with her to the cellar. Normality – inevitably the film’s weakest element – is presented in the form of a couple in a caravan nearby, but even here there are elements of interest as they try to piece together, somewhat like the audience, the meaning of what is happening in the house. Finally, the two worlds collide with predictably disastrous results.

Vampyres (Joseph Larraz, UK, 1974).

Vampyres, produced by former editor Brian Smedley-Aston, cost only £80,000 but visually all of that small sum (though it is much larger than the same budget now of course – close to a million in today’s money) seems to be on the screen. What might, in the hands of one of the UK’s purveyors of softcore, have been tacky, has a kind of magnificence here, aided greatly by the casting of the two vampires, especially Marianne Morris who gives in visual terms a bravura performance, amply aided by Anulka Dziubinska as her sidekick. Both women’s voices were later dubbed, the former by jazz singer Annie Ross, but this is less important than it might be since the dialogue is relatively minimal and both remain rightly proud of their work on the film. After it, Larraz tried to set up other movies here and (hardly surprisingly given the production climate) he failed, but continued his career in Spain where he would have many credits.

After Vampyres, in the final years of the 1970s from 1975 to 1980, the pickings become extremely thin. In fact, once you take out films already discussed, there are almost no titles at all in the latter half of the decade other than a few ultra-low-budget slashers and, of course, the American, but British-made, movie Alien, Ridley Scott’s brilliant reworking of the B-feature It! The Terror from Beyond Space which deservedly became a franchise creation. So, as the 1980s started, what had been a difficult time for UK horror after the huge drop in cinema audiences would become even worse. Soon Thatcher’s government prepared to withdraw what few tax breaks were left, ultimately abolishing the Eady Levy, a tax on cinema seats which had been specifically designed to support British production.

The result was startling: 138 feature films of almost every conceivable kind and genre were made in the UK in 1956, the year Hammer made Curse of Frankenstein. By 1981 that number was down to just 24. This is effectively a market wipe-out, more than 80 per cent of movie production in the UK had gone. And the decade would soon also see the all-time worst year for British cinema admissions, 1984, when just 54 million people bought tickets, down from over a billion in the late 1950s.

To give an idea of just how bad this was by today’s standards, we only have to go forward in time to UK cinema admissions in 2022 – a point when Britain was recovering from the worst pandemic in UK history since 1918 and the first enforced closure of UK cinemas since 1939. Even in that year, right after the pandemic, admissions at 117 million were more than twice what they had been in 1984. It is hard to exaggerate just how badly UK cinema suffered in the market wipe-out of the 1980s.

Throughout the dismal decade and a half that followed 1984, the absolute peak year for production was 1987, and that only saw 55 films. It would be 1996 before film production in the UK again entered triple figures (by no means confidently, as we shall see). In the circumstances it is scarcely surprising that the UK horror movie in the 1980s and 1990s is a wasteland. There were a couple of US blockbusters: The Shining, in which Kubrick demonstrates as usual his brilliance with visual set-pieces, (some moments are truly unforgettable), but also his occasional weakness with narrative (so that King eventually asked for his story back); and An American Werewolf in London from John Landis, which was fun and witty but did not do much to further the UK’s own efforts in the field. Against all odds, however, the decade did see the separate rise to success of three creative British filmmakers who genuinely loved horror and had done so right from the start, something still highly unusual in UK cinema up to that time.

Stephen Volk

One was Stephen Volk, a writer who had started in advertising and came to attention in the early 1980s when his first two horror scripts began to generate ecstatic word-of-mouth. Volk had arrived by writing a spec script about the night at the Villa Diodati chronicled in Chapter 4. It was an ambitious subject and he approached it with gusto, delivering a high-octane laudanum-fuelled night in a haunted house which managed to evoke some real thrills. The script saw much interest and soon was successfully sold; but disastrously, and somewhat obviously, the company involved then hired Ken Russell. The adding of Russell’s flamboyant non-stop pyrotechnics, to what was already a very heightened piece, was like turbo-charging a runaway train. The resulting movie, Gothic (1986), is so frenetic that even Russell himself acknowledges it is virtually unwatchable (‘well-nigh unbearable’ in the director’s own words) and a great opportunity was missed.

Volk’s other hot script at the time, Horror Movie, was in some ways even more interesting: about horror film images that come alive. Goldcrest snapped it up but it was finally lost after the company effectively went bust in 1986, and the costs attached to the project’s development made it prohibitively expensive to film. If only Volk had completed these scripts ten years earlier, when there was an industry to house them (or even 14 years later when the tax incentives were back in place), they might have made an enormous difference to British horror.

As it was, and inevitably given the climate, Volk moved his writing to America, where he had several films produced, while here in the UK on TV he also created the legendary milestone of horror spoofs, Ghostwatch, a fake live documentary about ghost-hunting which many viewers took to be real.

Eventually he did make a return to UK filmmaking with Octane (2003), a tale of vampires on the motorway posing as emergency service workers. But what happened next shows some of the problems you had to surmount to make a horror film in the UK in this difficult post-industrial period. Volk had written a highly original script set around the eccentricities of the British motorway system, a perfect subject for a British gothic thriller. It concerned a vulnerable 12-year-old girl travelling with her mother on a motorway on the night of her first period, again an original, unsettling idea, worthy of Nigel Kneale.

Unable to get it off the ground with the BBC, the film was eventually produced by a company called Random Harvest who understandably enough turned to one of the very few recent directors of a UK horror movie, Marcus Adams, who had made a film called Long Time Dead.

Unfortunately, Long Time Dead – made in 2002, just as UK movies emerged from the terrible drought of the 1980s and 1990s – was a slavishly formulaic reworking of the slasher format. It set a group of teenagers with dull and unconvincing characters against a demon they unleash from a Ouija board. In this kind of genre at least, if UK horror filmmakers had any single lesson to learn from their American counterparts, it was how to imitate the ease of reference and shared assumptions that make the American groups in such films cinematic. In Long Time Dead, as often elsewhere at this time, it seemed as if the only thing UK filmmakers had absorbed from teens in American movies was sexual insult, cursing and drug use. Missing completely were the flashes of genuine wit, the character quirks, the pop culture references and consumer kinship that make the threatened groups of US horror feel real and likeable.⁶ From Box Office Mojo it seems Long Time Dead was never released in the US (which may perhaps indicate its weaknesses) but it had done pretty well elsewhere, indicating demand was still out there.

In the case of Volk’s script, the UK company involved was told their US distributor preferred an American setting. This is hardly surprising but it meant Volk’s film was now to be shot in Luxembourg, which would stand in for America. His vulnerable 12-year-old became a much less vulnerable 15-year-old; the ‘period’ idea was abandoned. It was then decreed (according to Volk in a web interview) that all the characters must be ‘young, cool and hip’, while Adams insisted he would have nobody in his film over 40!

This kind of straitjacket destroys even the best idea and it may well have wrecked Octane. What remains is a curious film, with a few good points, but a terrible lack of empathy between the audience and any of the characters. The relationship between mother (Madeleine Stowe) and teenage daughter (Moscha Baryon) does not begin to convince. To be fair, no doubt the producers were aware of the criticism that far too many British scripts reach the screen insufficiently developed, which is true. But there is an equal danger, namely of a bastardised development, reflecting the whims of too many people and drowning the original author’s voice in the process.

But Volk would make it back to UK production in style in the new century, co-writing the 1920s set The Awakening with its director Nick Murphy (a project about a female whistle-blower of fake mediums in the aftermath of World War One) and also creating a hit horror TV series Afterlife in 2005, a project that had been turned down by other broadcasters but which then became a huge peaktime Saturday night success on ITV, with Andrew Lincoln and Leslie Sharp playing, respectively, a sceptical psychologist and a medium. The critical and commercial success of this series, which explored several aspects of haunting and the occult, as well as its sympathetic (and careful) production by the small independent Clerkenwell, was a boost for UK TV horror and prefigured much that was to come in supernatural TV shows.

Stephen Woolley

Another UK filmmaker whose love of horror movies is lifelong is Stephen Woolley, who started out programming movies at London’s Scala cinema, before he co-founded Palace with Nik Powell in the late 1970s. This small UK production/distribution company in part reflected his tastes and enthusiasms right up until it folded in 1992, breaking new ground in the UK in several respects. Which was all the more remarkable in that the 1980s, as we have seen, could hardly have offered a less fertile economic background. But the company flourished thanks to Woolley’s nose for quality, his creative skills and also (though the two rarely go together) his genius for promotion and sales which was firmly grounded in a vast enthusiasm for movies. This approach was certainly noticed, and may even have been copied, by the founders of Miramax who in their early days often did business with Palace.

Palace the company had started where Hammer started, namely as a distributor of fringe product. But where Hammer’s fringe was second features, Palace’s was accessible arthouse. In its earliest incarnation Palace thrived on movies like Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and Diva. But one of Woolley’s first coups was to discover and distribute the trail-blazing horror hit The Evil Dead, actively promoting its director Sam Raimi, long before anyone in the US had heard of him. Following this lead, Palace were keen to start making their own horror movies, but what was once a staple product for the UK film industry had at that point become so rare and unwanted, they found the move incredibly hard. There were fantastique elements and references to screen horror in Palace’s successful first production, Woolley and Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, but it proved easier to find an audience and backing for stylish thrillers like Mona Lisa or the period drama Scandal (a film about the 1963 Profumo affair) than for the then busted genre of horror. The closest they got, other than Dream Demon (discussed below), came with the South African filmmaker Richard Stanley, who directed two imaginative and at times quite disturbing SF pieces: Hardware and Dust Devil.

Palace is probably the nearest thing Britain ever had to a successor to the original Hammer, albeit cast in a very different and more contemporary style and with the horror emphasis much more on distribution than production. So, it is appropriate that a year later, after the huge success of The Crying Game (which came ironically too late to save the company), Woolley would produce in the UK one of the most successful horror movies of the post-Hammer period though it was not a British film. Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, was an epic, colourful, daring and beautifully acted version of Anne Rice’s novel which became a major hit. Rice’s novel, and this film, had turned the page on vampires in an unexpected way, enabling the reader to identify with them as troubled and sometimes noble creatures, who spend as much time debating morality and questioning their fate as in attacking humans. The theme of vampires as fringe tragic figures was only hinted at in the earlier vampire texts like ‘Dracula’ and ‘Carmilla’ but now took on a central significance. Rice’s books which have been adapted for TV and comics, including Japanese manga, were as much grand historical pageants as horror – while their sprawling structure had much in common with Gothic novels. They were also highly erotic, finding a big audience among the LGBT community.

In 2012 Woolley and his producing partner Elizabeth Karlsen returned to the vampire-as-erotic-outsider theme, reuniting with director Neil Jordan. The film was Byzantium scripted by Moira Buffini’s from her play A Vampire Story about two female vampires – a young mother and 16-year-old daughter (though both are of course ancient) – on the run from male vampires who have taken refuge in a rundown seaside town. There are some very original touches in this strongly feminist and poetic fable, for example the transformation to vampire is not instant, but takes place on a strange island with a stone hut in a waterfall. But overall, the tone is highly melancholic and in places very literary with lines such as: ‘The pearl stays pure while the oyster’s flesh rots around it.’

Woolley and Karlsen went on to make ten films in the next decade, including major critical hits like Carol and Living. But Woolley did return to a horror theme with director Juan Carlos Medina’s The Limehouse Golem, based on Peter Ackroyd’s novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. an energized and feminist Jack the Ripper story set in a well realised, if wild, Victorian London.

Over the years Ackroyd’s dark exercises in the murky violence of Victorian London have proved difficult to adapt for the screen. Many producers have tried and failed, especially with his best known book Hawksmoor. The Limehouse Golem was therefore something of a breakthrough, with screenwriter Jane Goldman revelling in the texture and vibrancy of the East End music hall sub-culture and Olivia Cooke (so brilliant recently as Alicent Hightower in House of the Dragon) giving everything to the part of music hall star Lizzie Cree. The film even boasts (as is typical of Ackroyd) fictionalised versions of real life Victorian characters like music hall star Dan Leno and Karl Marx, both of whom are suspects in grisly murders, superstitiously attributed to the mythical Jewish legend of The Golem (a clay monster of Jewish folklore featured in German expressionist movies but never picked up by Universal or Hammer, though it was the basis of the somewhat lacklustre Herbert J. Leader 1966 movie It.)

All of this makes The Limehouse Golem a true, if eccentric, horror original, which also spectacularly demonstrates the horrific way women were treated by a section of Victorian society. The film’s ending is highly topical and, if it has not had the commercial success of some of its producers’ other movies, that may be because, despite plenty of action and menace, it is constructed around investigative flashbacks in a whodunit form which doesn’t always chime with the impressive rawness of its action and setting.

Clive Barker

Clive Barker was another no-holds-barred horror fan, but he had come up first through a theatre group and then through the writing of the Books of Blood (1984–5), his literary career at this point greatly boosted by an endorsement from Stephen King. Soon Barker was writing scripts, including the monster pic Rawhead Rex, but, evidently, he was so disappointed with the result that to his great credit he held out for direction on Hellraiser (1987). This was a script he adapted from his novella The Hellbound Heart, and even adorned the manuscript with his own sketches to make sure from the start that the key characters, like the lead Cenobite (an extra-deminsional demonic being), would be realised in the way he wanted. This, alongside his determination to direct, was a crucial, courageous and important stand on principle at a critical point both in his own development as an artist and within the troubled UK film industry. Ultimately it would be the making of his career.

Hellraiser was produced for somewhere around £500,000 (perhaps £2 million in 2024) and, while its story – about the tortured human victim of some alien race of sadomasochists and his need for flesh – bordered at times on sadomasochist pretentiousness (and nothing is more pretentious than S/M pretentious), the tone and the starkness of its imagery gave it formidable impact. The UK music press (then a major force) loved the film and helped to make it into what became a huge hit here, all the bigger since there was nothing else. Indeed, the year it was made saw no other UK horror production of any kind (quite unimaginable now as we will see later in this chapter). Subsequently, it went on to storm the US too, taking around $14.5 million dollars, which although only 72nd for the year, is a mark-up of about 1,400 per cent on its small budget. This was the best a UK horror had done there in a long time.

Hellraiser (Clive Barker, UK,1987).

Inevitably then it spawned innumerable sequels and a reboot but, apart from Hellbound: Hellraiser II, all of them were made in the US; indeed, for the original film’s US release much of the UK cast were evidently dubbed by American actors. This was one reason it was to have little influence on UK horror cinema, and indeed in horror cinema as a whole it stands slightly apart. For its stylistic influence has, in many ways, been less on movies than on the visual arts. There the film had a huge influence, its imagery was ransacked by post-punk artists like Damien Hirst, and one critic discussing Hirst recently referred back to its source in Clive Barker’s ‘medieval torture-garden aesthetic’. All of which tends to underpin a suspicion that, despite (or perhaps because of ) its postmodern stylishly tacky aspect, Hellraiser is more hit art movie than it is horror. Barker did make one more film in the UK, an American production for Fox, Nightbreed, which was not well- received. He subsequently took up residency in the US, where his career continued apace.

As can be seen, therefore, though many talents persevered and flourished, the last two decades of the twentieth century were rough going in British cinema and – once we take out the works of the three names above during this period – it is an appalling fact that in terms of horror there was really almost nothing left at all in those years. Some of the titles listed in the English horror filmographies that do exist for this period are essentially American (and uninteresting as well), and some are not horror at all except in the most elastic meaning of the word.

I suppose, though, since I had an involvement with it, I should mention one other 1980s horror film, Dream Demon (or in the original higher budget and different version Dream Demons), which arose because Palace were commendably keen to crack the horror market. In its original form it was very much about dreams and reality and it was somewhat influenced by Nightmare on Elm Street, though we tried to reverse most of the premises of the latter. Our demons were possessed tabloid journalists (plus other things), our two heroines were a princess on the run from the palace and an American girl punk, which seemed at the time like a good horror team. The show, as originally written by myself and Chris Petit (with Richard Rayner coming on board later) had quite a high projected budget, lots of special effects and very nearly got made three times: once with an American company which fell apart just as they were committing the money, then with EMI until the company was suddenly and unexpectedly sold to Cannon. Even Cannon wanted to make it – their production head said (though it may have been kindness) it was the only script he inherited he wanted to shoot – but there was no way the script could be made for what they could afford. After that it was lost to us, and we moved on, expecting to hear no more.

But later, thanks to heroic efforts by the producer Paul Webster – who has gone on to much bigger and better things – a film was made. In order to achieve this, the budget was vastly reduced, and the story had to be totally changed with the script rewritten from scratch, meaning it had almost no resemblance whatsoever to what we originally wrote. Was I upset? No, I had been very disappointed when the earlier productions fell through. But by this time, I was merely amazed at Paul’s tenacity and delighted to be getting principal photography money at all. So, there was for once no rancour (especially since I knew the director and the writer, Harley Cokliss and Chris Wicking). But we took no credit, simply because there was almost nothing left of our film at all and nothing that would have been my choice. So, it is certainly impossible for me to offer any kind of fair or interesting judgement of it. I only saw Dream Demon once and have never been back, because I know I’d just keep looking for what is not there.

The experience was illuminating on one level though, for now I could see personally just how hard it had become at that period to mount horror in the UK. Indeed, it made my admiration for what Clive Barker achieved, at this difficult time, all the greater. Here was, after all, a project we had tried to make as commercial as possible, with a script that was by no means all mine and which – after many drafts and lots of teamwork, including input from American director Aaron Lipstadt who had come in from Los Angeles – we all thought solid. It featured a young American lead and big sequences, lots of surprises, including effects we had tried our utmost to make original. No producer could have worked harder than Paul. Yet in the end, at what in my view was the most promising distributor in town, it had proved utterly impossible to force this beast through the eye of the needle into production. And all those surprises, twists and effects – in fact essentially the whole story – had to be jettisoned. What did get through was not only quite different (on that, as I have said, my opinion a is worthless), but also inevitably lacked most of the original production values. And given this was conceived as an effects film, that alone can hardly have helped its chances. It was a salutary lesson. And I am all too aware many of the films discussed here have probably gone through the same sort of baptism by fire.

Video Nasties

Any understanding of UK movies in the 1980s must of course grapple with the sudden unease produced by the new video technology which now made films available at home on a widespread basis. This occasioned the release of various formerly banned Italian and US exploitation movies, and the ‘video nasty’ controversy began in 1982.

The whole thing had started with a spectacular own goal when Go Video, the distributors of the already controversial 1980 Italian film Cannibal Holocaust, wrote anonymously to Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association complaining about their own film in an effort to boost publicity and generate sales. Whitehouse and her followers responded in spades, sparking a public campaign.

This fit of moral panic, fuelled as always by the tabloid press, echoed in many ways the original revulsion against Hammer. There were calls for legislation, which followed in a botched fashion as did police raids on video shops. Horror fans, whatever their age, often have something of the teenager about them and may well flock to what they are told is ‘bad’ for them. So consequently, an allure of glamour surrounds the titles on the original list of videos that were removed, some by police action.

Kim Newman analysed the phenomenon in a Sight & Sound article (May 2021) and it is notable that not a single title, of the 17 he mentions, is British. Almost all of them are now freely available and few seem that interesting – but it did much to discourage distributors and producers from backing horror production at the time.

The 1990s

So as the 1990s dawned, the prospects for UK horror seemed very bleak. And they did not improve. Without wasting time debating exact qualifications, approximately 114 British horror films were made in the 1970s at the end of the boom. For the 1980s that comes crashing down to a mere 21 or so titles. But in the whole of the 1990s there would be even fewer: the number is in the low teens and even that includes some very limited releases.

One of the higher profiles was the technically British science fiction piece The Lawnmower Man, from which Stephen King had his name removed. More controversial was the arty homemade 1994 horror Boy Meets Girl, made for £13,000 by Ray Brady. In this a man goes back to a girl’s flat, starts watching a porn movie and wakes up to find he’s been tied up and is at the mercy of the woman who brought him there – and soon another woman who has decapitated the first. What is remarkable now, watching Boy Meets Girl, is how closely in so many ways it prefigures Saw, with a series of vaguely sadomasochistic torture games inflicted on a victim who – though not completely innocent – is no more guilty than the average person. Even the line ‘I thought we’d have some fun’ seems to prefigure Saw’s tag line ‘Do you want to play?’ Yet despite these similarities, Boy Meets Girl lacks any of the crowd-pleasing elements that make Saw (and its sequels) so watchable. The antagonists are out in the open almost from the start, providing little opportunity for real tension or suspense. And it contains none of the later film’s mysteries and reversals and puzzles. Of course, it is true that even the first Saw – enormously cheap by industry standards – had a budget getting on for a hundred times what Boy Meets Girl cost. But in the end, this is surely less to do with money than approach. Leaving execution to one side, a filmed chamber-piece of this kind has to work almost like an ingenious series of clever comedy gags – albeit gags of a nightmarish and scary kind – or it quickly flags. And unless you are a genius it is terribly hard, if not almost impossible, to achieve this kind of tour de force as a lone voice. Saw had been the result of an intense and long collaboration between Australians James Wan and Leigh Whannell.

Then in 1995 came Haunted, which looked odd when it arrived but in fact on one level turned out to be a little ahead of its time. Sussex resident James Herbert had been writing English horror fiction since his best-selling The Rats in 1972, but none of the books were ever made into films in the UK until this comparatively lavish version of Herbert’s 1988 ghost story was optioned by the English actor Anthony Andrews. The executive producer was Francis Coppola and the resulting film, co-written by its director Lewis Gilbert with Tim Prager and Bob Kellett, is of some interest. At first its 1930s country house setting and its cast of Andrews, Kate Beckinsale and Aidan Quinn, ably backed up by John Gielgud, seem to spin off the Merchant Ivory school of British ‘heritage’ filmmaking. Indeed, the whole first section of the film, in which a handsome American psychologist played by Quinn arrives at the large old house and is drawn to Beckinsale, while her apparently incestuous brother Anthony Andrews looks sourly on, feels like something out of the novels of E. M. Forster or Evelyn Waugh. Then strange events begin to occur and it gradually emerges all is not as it seems.

Lewis Gilbert was in fact a veteran UK filmmaker who had begun in the 1940s – making Reach for the Sky among others – but who, throughout a career in the UK spanning 40 films, had somehow avoided making any fantasy or horror at all, even at the height of the boom (though he did make three James Bond pictures). So, it was even stranger that he should now finally have to plunge into the world of the supernatural and spooky shock effects. The effects are indeed among the film’s worst elements for, unlike the effects of, say, a Nightmare on Elm Steet, which are an integral part of the story, these have nothing much to do with the plot: they are just somewhat silly window dressing and greatly detract from the mood and atmosphere. The gas-jet fires in particular look entirely fake, but, in any case, fire has now become such a cliché in any film of this kind that it is hard to use effectively.

Haunted (Lewis Gilbert, UK, 1995).

So, in places, Haunted has a very heavy-handed feel. Yet the ghost element in the story is not badly done. There are good performances – from Beckinsale especially – and the plot does look forward in places to The Others. Yet The Others, as we shall see, would be a landmark and a turning-point, whereas Haunted is an occasionally entertaining yet awkward and somewhat obscure dead-end. Why? One reason seems to be that The Others was so supremely confident of its narrative and characters (admittedly with good reason) that it had almost no special effects at all, and the film worked far more interestingly and intensely as a result. By contrast, Haunted’s gas-jet fires and other tricks are entirely irrelevant to the far more serious revelations on which the story is based. With the benefit of hindsight, the makers would have been far better to strip them out and concentrate on the plot twists, which could do with more thought. But, to be fair, this would probably have been commercially impossible in 1995. Nobody at that point (before M. Night Shyamalan and Alejandro Amenabar proved otherwise) could conceive of a fright movie that worked without such mechanics.

The final revelations of Haunted, which deserved more credit for originality than it got, are extravagant, emotional and at times unexpected. But also, unlike The Others, they are easy to mock and in places very hard to swallow. Among other things, they imply that ghosts can even manage the transportation of human luggage from a railway station to a house.

A ray of light did appear in 1996 with Mute Witness made for somewhere around £1 million by Anthony Waller, directing from his own screenplay. Waller – a commercials director and National Film School graduate – had taken full advantage of the end of Communism to shoot a film in Moscow. Indeed, the action is largely played out to great effect in an old crumbling movie studio. For the plot Waller concocted a classic variation on the woman-in-jeopardy theme, with Marina Sudina as a woman without the power of speech who stays behind in a studio after hours and accidentally witnesses the Russian mafia making a snuff movie. A frantic chase follows, one of the very best in recent fright movies, and at its strongest the film boasts action, suspense and a unique sense of place well worthy of Hitchcock. It was a terrific debut.

Waller’s follow-up An American Werewolf in Paris, while perfectly accomplished, seemed less original by comparison. But he returned to horror in 2009 with the semi-supernatural thriller Nine Miles Under, based on an internet hoax (and urban myth) about a massive drilling operation which penetrated the earth’s core under the Sahara Desert and may (or may not?) have somehow connected to some kind of demonic hell. It is a wild and challenging premise, treading the same kind of ground between madness and supernatural experience as Solaris and Jacob’s Ladder while exploring nightmarish visions. Waller attacks some of it with gusto though there are credibility problems, especially in the set-up and the hero’s lack of scepticism when faced with the very unlikely survivor of a massive drilling disaster. Waller has since made a supernatural fairy tale thriller The Piper but, as I write, apart from the occasional festival outing, it remains unshown.

Another filmmaker, who managed to break through against the odds in the 1990s was Julian Richards, the Welsh director/writer and National Film School graduate who may well be the kind of young horror movie-maker Hammer needed at the end, but could not find. In other words (judging from interviews), he seems to be enthused by the idea of low-budget horror and full of ideas. His 1997 debut Darklands was a compelling Satanist thriller, in the Rosemary’s Baby/Race with the Devil mould, set in industrial Wales (the film even quotes the last line of Rosemary’s Baby at its climax). The Wicker Man seems to have been a big influence too, and there are some nifty aspects to the plotting as when local journalist (Frazer Truick) finds his relationship with an attractive colleague is not what he thinks at all: indeed, he is being set up for paternity and sacrifice. The film is horror savvy but never makes the mistake of being tongue in cheek, often managing to find a genuinely convincing urban context for its horrors.

Following Darklands, Richards moved on to the thriller Silent Cry written by Simon Lubert, in which a young mother faces a hospital/police conspiracy involving the abduction of her newborn baby. The film is well cast and often affecting though, in contrast to Darklands, the detail of its conspiracy is unveiled early and very openly, putting the audience far ahead of its central character, something that probably works better in a TV serial (where you can follow all kinds of other strands) than a movie. It seems to me that the absolute classic movie conspiracy thrillers (Coma, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and others) take their cue from the famous dictum of the founding father of the genre, novelist Wilkie Collins (author of The Woman In White): ‘Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait!’ In his next film, Richards attempted something quite ambitious with The Last Horror Movie (2003), perhaps influenced by the video nasty panic of the 1980s, as much as by Peeping Tom and the American Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. For it is essentially the video diary of a psychopath and serial killer. There are impressive aspects to this venture, which starts as a routine American slasher and then breaks off, using the conceit that its narrator has taped over the slasher movie with the horrific footage of his own exploits. The gimmick was intended to be that the killer has planted the tampered video in a store and is ready to kill the viewer as it is being watched, a neat concept, worthy of the legendary US filmmaker William Castle who specialised in such extra-cinematic tricks and stunts. But the idea was spoiled by the fact that shortly after production, video was replaced by DVD, ruining any such illusion.

Even so, some of the critics were too harsh, for Kevin Howarth is persuasive as Max the narrator, whose ‘day job’ is wedding photography and there are some striking sequences. But it is true that – for all its postmodern tricks and attempts to blame the audience – once the opening gambit has been played, some parts of The Last Horror Movie feel slightly strained in their mockery of bourgeois sensibilities. The result is not perhaps a film you want to see more than once, but UK horror still needed this kind of experimentation. It is only if you play around with the form, as on the other side of the world the makers of Saw did, that you stand any possible chance of striking gold. The Last Horror Movie has grown a minor reputation, at least among fans, and there has been talk of a sequel.

Meanwhile, Richards moved on to Summer Scars (2007), which is I think his best British work, going far beyond a mere wish to shock into delicate and edgy territory. The film is a beautifully acted and taut study of a group of working-class pubescent Welsh kids, who are spending a school holiday larking in the woods, when they encounter a mysterious (soon to become menacing), older man. There are echoes here of the much more innocent Bryan Forbes movie Whistle Down the Wind and, in an odd way too, the film prefigures some of the themes of the Jez Butterworth play Jerusalem.

Evidently it was based on an incident from the director’s childhood when he was briefly a hostage, threatened with a gun by an older adult. And there is something completely authentic about Summer Scars: it is only 73-minutes long, and relatively free of big action sequences or major horror thrills, but still conveys with lingering intensity the awful power that an adult can wield over young teenagers, especially a damaged adult. In a sense this is the opposite of James Watkins’ Eden Lake (discussed later), and indeed of all of the hoodie horror films, in which hooded youths threaten adults – for here the adult is the danger, not feral children. And the young teenagers’ pain and confusion, as they begin to sense their predicament, is electrifying. The kids are refreshingly real, with convincing mannerisms and character tropes – anyone can recognise their flashes of bravado, followed by uncertainty, rage and soon terror. Evidently, in order to achieve this, Richards cast ordinary kids from a Welsh school, while Kevin Howarth is chillingly recognisable as the menacing self-obsessed drifter. Summer Scars won several prizes but deserves more attention than it has received and, as of now it is Richards’ last British film, though he has gone on making movies in the US.

Prowling some of the same territory as Richards’ Darklands and made two years later, in 2000, was The Calling, an elegant American/German film set in the Isle of Man but shot in Devon and Cornwall by Richard Caesar. The budget of The Calling, which starts with a large-scale Satanic ritual in a highly photogenic cove at night, is unknown but I would estimate it cost at least ten times what Darklands cost. Yet its story, which is a combination of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, could only possibly work if both these classics were entirely erased from our memory. Even then it would probably seem a little oddly constructed since so much is flagged up-front. Indeed, at times this quite engaging film almost seems to be set in some parallel universe. For could there really be a smart young American heroine so ignorant of modern popular culture that she decides not to make anything of the fact that her husband has led her to a druidic cove with strange writing and inscriptions on her wedding night and, as midnight tolls, subjected her to a demonic kind of date rape?

Of course, it is easy now to forget that – pubicity apart – the first audiences of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen had no idea from the first act where they were being led. And think too of how skilfully Rosemary’s Baby’s writers – novelist Ira Levin and filmmaker Roman Polanski – contrived to make their Satanists convincing, recognisable and motivated, if not even a little sympathetic! Rosemary’s husband works enormously hard to please her and us, which made sense for he was an ambitious actor in need of a break. As for Rosemary’s Satanic neighbours, the unforgettable Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon) is motherly, gossipy, nagging and controlling, in exactly the way neighbours can be, while the coven leader Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer) is wise, charming and convincingly knowledgeable besides being just a little fussy and self-regarding. The fact we knew, or felt we knew, such people was in the end one of the things that made Rosemary’s Baby so chilling and authentic. By contrast, in The Calling, the heroine Kristie’s husband Marc – a TV chat show host – is so cringingly superficial, hollow and loveless you cannot imagine any wife could take ten minutes of him without running out of the house screaming, while the female coven leader in the background has no discernible personality at all. There are some surprises in The Calling – which has a big resurrection moment at the end that might have worked quite well in another film – but finally they are just not enough, and they do not surprise enough.

The 1990s was proving a very tough time for anyone trying to get into UK horror filmmaking. But at this tricky period Genevieve Jolliffe proved a pioneer of feminist horror.

The Calling (Richard Caesar, US/Germany, 2000).

She had started out as co-writer and producer of the 1993 thriller White Angel, a somewhat slow-moving piece about a cross-dressing male serial killer who blackmails a woman crime writer to write a book about him. ‘Makes Psycho look like an old Ealing comedy’ was the eccentric opinion of a writer in the New Musical Express, but in fact, the film borrows somewhat uneasily from Psycho in places, while its suburban houses look a lot more like Ealing than Psycho ever did. The script also suffers from having too many people with guilty secrets which, after a time, is as self-defeating as having two bombs on a plane. But it does not lack ambition and Urban Ghost Story, Jolliffe’s directing debut (which she wrote with Chris Jones co-writing and producing in 1998), is a much more assured affair.

Urban Ghost Story tells the story of a desperate family suffering poltergeist activity in a Glasgow tenement. The film is elegantly shot (mainly in fact in London) and this time round the tagline on the DVD from Variety (‘Ken Loach meets The Exorcist’) makes more sense. For Urban Ghost Story is as much about the plight of a family as it is about a ghost, and though it is frightening in places and reasonably absorbing, it succeeds quite well in presenting multiple perspectives on the ‘visitation’, which could be demonic possession but could just as well be psychological pressure on the young heroine in a sick old building. Urban Ghost Story has a fresh eye and the script is worked through better than most, making good use of props like a pair of sunglasses and the recurring theme of the girl’s pet goldfish. There are a few cliches of the tenement-type, it is true, and despite strong performances this does not quite lock the audience into the characters or find a payoff for them. But, in the genre desert of its time, it was hugely encouraging and it is a pity – especially with other women filmmakers moving into the field as we’ll see below – that Jolliffe has not followed it up.

Paul Anderson

Given the low level of production, it is hardly surprising how few filmmakers from the UK managed to get a break in horror or its related fields in the 1990s. But one talent who bucked the trend was Paul Anderson (latterly credited as Paul W. S. Anderson to avoid confusion with the Paul Anderson who made Magnolia). A graduate of Warwick University, who loved action and science fiction of the Blade Runner school, Anderson succeeded right up front in developing a calling card via the high-adrenaline Channel 4 1994 movie about ram raiding, Shopping, which also incidentally saw the debut of Jude Law.

The fact that Shopping was hugely controversial only raised its profile and, unusually for a Channel 4 movie at that time, it showed what its director could do with action. Almost uniquely in the context of the UK movie business, this enabled Anderson to skip about three stages and go straight to an American studio deal – not where UK directors usually broke through in those days in drama or period adaptation – but right at the heart of Hollywood genre filmmaking, via New Line’s $20 million videogame adaptation Mortal Kombat. After this grossed at least six times its budget, Anderson had arrived as a bankable Hollywood filmmaker. Over the next decade he would become a leading figure in the tough, formerly exclusively American field of fantasy and action adventure with Event Horizon, the spirited zombie-themed Resident Evil, and the enterprising and enjoyable science-fiction composite Alien Versus Predator. All of these helped to make Anderson successful, and in 2005 he returned to the UK to produce, but not direct, an English ghost story, The Dark (discussed below), starring Sean Bean whom he had used way back in Shopping. Since then, he has continued in multiple US action horror franchises like Death Race and and many more Resident Evil sequels.

Anderson’s trajectory is spectacular but also revealing. The fact is that in 1994 in the UK there was nothing for him to stay for, even if he had wanted to. For the 1990s was tough not just for UK horror and fantasy filmmaking but for all UK genre filmmaking. In British Horror Cinema (Routledge 2002), Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley quite correctly identify the lack of any true British horror identity around this time. But I disagree when they go on to lament the ‘bitterly ironic state of affairs’ that the British horror films that did get made were no longer successful enough to be marketed as being British. It seems to me, even at its most successful, the British horror film never was marketed as being British. The crowds who flocked to the early Hammer movies were entirely uninterested in the fact they were British, they just knew they were thrilling, which is exactly how it should be. National success at a genre is generally, with a very few exceptions, an intuitive, unconscious process, not an overt one. Myths work because they work. Only the critics are much concerned with exactly where and how they originate.

Following the election of the New Labour government of 1997, tax breaks for film in the UK were now at last back on the agenda and things slowly began to change. Already American money had been flowing back here, encouraged partly by lottery funding and partly by hits like Four Weddings and a Funeral. Even so, horror was slow to benefit. This was partly because the form had been disregarded here for so long that it had almost been forgotten. But there was another reason. For we should not forget the fact that at this point internationally too, horror in its essential form had not been in the best of health. By the 1990s its appeal even in the US had become so narrow that it was seen almost entirely as a form for post-pubescent teenage boys. In fact, the genre had effectively ossified into a debased version of all the Schauer-Romantik elements Britain had triggered in the 1950s.

In this respect it is indeed almost incredible to recollect that during the last decade of the twentieth century – and I am thinking now of meetings I had as a screenwriter – for a time we were driven into a position where, unless a requisite number of teenagers were violently murdered, any horror or supernatural story would be deemed unfilmable. Not only was this somewhat tedious, in narrative terms it was pure nonsense. You do not have to be very sophisticated to grasp that there are other themes and narratives that can scare audiences, and that if you force people to see the same plot too many times, it ceases to have any kind of emotional impact whatsoever. At which point the whole genre you are building around it starts to become suspect. That was what was happening to horror.

What was even worse, the rigid straitjacket of the ‘slasher’ was being imposed on a genre that had once been celebrated for its variety and, at its peak, covered many different kinds of narrative from the historical to the psychological to the supernatural to the speculative. I am not saying there is anything intrinsically wicked about the ‘slasher’ format (though at its worst it did produce some dreadful films). But once it became a precondition for finance it began to squeeze every ounce of creative life out of the genre.

And the result was utterly predictable. For much of the 1990s, as the ‘slasher’ movie finally exhausted itself, horror production even in America was reduced almost to nothing. In 1998, for example, the number of horror movies reaching wide international release from any source was a measly six titles. Naturally none of these films came from the UK, but America was hardly distinguishing itself in the field either. Most of the tiny number of titles saw the eking out of ancient franchises, including the truly terrible sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, the latest Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, the essentially comic parody Bride of Chucky – and two stalwarts plugging away: Robert Rodriguez quite enjoyably with The Faculty (which reworked Invasion of the Body Snatchers into high-school slasher form); and John Carpenter with the somewhat-tired Vampires.

Genius was required, for directors and writers to prove they could break out of this straitjacket and scare audiences without resorting to gross violence. And, as so often in Hollywood, it was people from outside the system (and also, in some cases, from outside America) who emerged to point the way forward.

PART TWO:

THE NEW BOOM

M. Night Shyamalan was one of the first there in America with The Sixth Sense, released in 1999. It was reported at the time, that when the Disney management viewed this twisty, supernatural thriller they were at first so unimpressed they decided to allow the studio’s production deal with Shyamalan to lapse. Later on, when the film began to cause a sensation, they were forced to bid against competitors to woo him back.

The Others from Alejandro Amenábar followed, perhaps, in many ways, an even bigger breakthrough – for it cost just a third of what it cost to make The Sixth Sense, and who could ever have predicted that a small ghost story, set on the Channel Islands in 1946 with a mainly English cast and without a single violent moment, would prove to be an international blockbuster? Yet The Others is menacing, witty, beautifully performed, amazingly atmospheric and (unlike The Sixth Sense) its twist – which had never quite been done before in this way – was surely quite unguessable, at least in all its ramifications.

What really staggered Hollywood about both these films was that, although they were supernatural thrillers aimed at adults, they contained little gore or violence and were accordingly certificated so that younger teenagers and older children could also see them, being awarded PG and 13 in the USA (15 and 12 respectively in the UK).

Suddenly, the straitjacket of the slasher was no more; a new wave of horror hit and one that, as the audience showed, was popular with a wider demographic than the genre had recently seen.

Of course, as well as an opening out, this was only a rediscovery of something that had once been known pre-Hammer, but had somehow been completely forgotten: namely that audiences can be scared by suggestion and story not just by gore or violence. Quite soon this rediscovery would be buttressed and supplemented by the arrival of a new wave of horror from Japan, a country that, thanks to its culture, had always been more open to ghostly themes and was now exporting modern versions of them via Japanese talents like Takashi Shimizu and Hideo Nakata, and films like The Ring and The Grudge. Taken together with other developments, this signalled a complete revolution of themes, a revitalisation of the whole genre and one long overdue.

Inevitably some voices were raised at the time complaining that many of these horror films were not horror at all because they lacked the gore, violence and overall impact to claim the description. But in my view this attitude was just as mistaken as those who bayed at Hammer more than sixty years ago, complaining their movies were showing too much. It is just the same old argument in reverse. In fact, in some ways the tyranny of the ‘slasher’ was almost as limiting as what had existed before Hammer. Grand Guignol or Schauer-Romantik is not the essence of horror, just one major aspect. Indeed, the fact that so much more recent horror is aimed at and consumed by women, that it has broadened its audience vastly – and now as we shall see is being driven forward by women filmmakers – is something to celebrate.⁷

The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, Spain/US/France, 2001)

So, as we moved into the twentieth century, horror now opened out. Violent R-rated or 18-rated horror continued to flourish and was still highly successful. But at this point all the horror themes expanded. A horror film could again be about a strange video tape (Ring); a woman whose child is deemed never to have existed (The Forgotten); a machine that picks up the voices of the dead (White Noise), a doctor’s daughter’s mysterious imaginary friend (Hide and Seek); or, a hospice nurse in Bayou country who becomes perplexed by the behaviour of an old woman towards her dying husband (Skeleton Key). All of these films arrived at the start of the new boom in the noughties, all of them were frightening to a degree, and only one of them – the story of the imaginary friend or Hide and Seek – was ‘R’ in the US (15 in the UK).

Of course, none of these films were British, but the scene in Britain was itself changing rapidly, while British talent was also moving to the US: Geoffrey Sax with White Noise, Andrew Douglas with The Amityville Horror, Ian Softley with the impressive Skeleton Key, while Dark Water – the cross-over Japanese hit set in Manhattan – was bizarrely peppered with UK actors, another trend that would suddenly erupt in the new century.

To assess this early stage of the twenty-first-century boom, we can make a comparison to the old horror’s vintage year of 1960, which was probably the height of the first postwar horror movie boom, Phil Hardy’s Aurum Horror Film Encyclopedia reveals there was a choice of 14 titles on UK release that year. They included Psycho, Peeping Tom (amazingly, premiering within weeks of each other), Brides of Dracula, House of Usher, Taste of Fear, and several more. Taking as a comparison the year 2005⁸, as the new boom was building, that had at least 25 major horror releases, far more than was on offer in 1960; 2006, had even more, at 28. But this was only the start of the flood. For, by the 2020s, once streaming was in full flow, it would become almost impossible even to measure horror movie releases in quite the same way, with an annual number well into three figures. By 2022, as we’ll see later, streaming companies alone were unveiling around 80 new horror movies per year, not including TV series.

One of the early breakthroughs in the new century was Marc Evans’ atmospheric and twisty My Little Eye (with a script from David Hilton and James Watkins). Five young people sign-up to live in a deserted house in hostile terrain watched by cameras. This was the first decent horror film to utilise the highly promising subject of Reality TV and showed a lot of originality while delivering several real scares. It was shot in Canada and Jonathan Rigby, in his book English Gothic, spotlights a startling exchange in the DVD commentary between director Marc Evans and co-producer Jon Finn (best known for producing Billie Elliot). When discussing the use of the Canadian landscapes, Evans reflects: ‘Somehow horror films belong in America’ (a perfectly legitimate point, given the continent’s sheer scale), but Finn replies amazingly, ‘Horror doesn’t really have a home in the UK. Traditionally it’s never made any money.’ Which I suppose reveals what should not really surprise us, namely that you can work successfully in an industry without having the slightest idea of its history.

An even bigger breakthrough, that same year, was Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later. This concerned an apocalyptic virus unleashed on the UK and was in some loose respects the reincarnation of Hammer’s old I Am Legend project, given that Richard Matheson’s screenplay for Hammer had differed substantially from his book, putting greater emphasis on the idea of a plague. Boyle had in fact succeeded in mounting the first contemporary UK film to take up the themes of the zombie apocalypse movie, and the resulting cross-over was rewarded by attention from audiences both serious and popular. Even so, it had been a pretty courageous move on his part, for the press love to pigeonhole directors, and Boyle was moving outside his profile so 28 Days Later was not entirely well received at first by critics who disliked its grungy feel and the lack of characterisation. But Boyle and Garland had cleverly captured the post-9/11 mood, their tone relentlessly downbeat and pessimistic; and, even if some of the performances were a bit uneven, the film built up a huge following and was a considerable hit in the US, earning five times its budget on theatrical release alone.

Boyle and Garland subsequently initiated one of the more ambitious UK science fiction films in many years with Sunshine (2007), about an inter-planetary expedition to try to re-ignite the dying sun. Ably backed up by the ever-reliable Cillian Murphy in the starring role, it is a majestic, suspenseful if somewhat downbeat quest movie, set entirely on a vast sun-shielded spaceship. The detailing and scenic aspect of the setting is terrific: remarkably, it was filmed entirely in a London studio. But the surprise nemesis in the story – a fugitive religious maniac from an earlier expedition – proves a let-down. However, as we will see below, Alex Garland would move on to a major new career in movies and become one of the most significant UK horror/fantasy filmmakers of the new century.

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, UK, 2002).

Meanwhile, as the first decade of the century progressed, UK horror and fantasy was starting to come back from the famine. In the wake of The Others there were, for example, several UK-produced ghost stories; The Dark, mentioned earlier and produced by Paul Anderson, was one of three movies of the time set in isolated British seascapes with American female leads (in this case Maria Bello), who experience the loss of a child and get tangled up with ghosts and/or ancient religious cults. All these films go for a rich, green look with lots of photogenic action around clifftops and rocky coves. The Dark used the Isle of Man as a stand-in for Wales; but Half Light starring Demi Moore, made at almost the same time by the US director/writer Craig Rosenberg, used Wales itself, which masqueraded as Scotland. Meanwhile – as already discussed above – The Calling, with Laura Harris starring, was filmed, somewhat unusually, in Devon and Cornwall, even though its story was actually set in the richly subsidised movie terrain of the Isle of Man.

All three of these bay-ghost films had a substantial input of German or US money. Half Light, which starts far too much like Don’t Look Now for its own good, but turns into a reasonably twisty supernatural narrative with quite strong performances, cost around $20 million. The Dark, directed by John Fawcett, who made the US cult horror Ginger Snaps, is modest by comparison. It was shot for considerably less than a third of Half Light and gets very good value from its budget. Based on a novel called Sheep by English horror writer Simon Maginn, it concerns a child in modern times who is haunted and perhaps drowned by ghosts connected to an ancient cliffside suicide cult. The film’s downbeat twist ending is strong, playing like The Others on the interplay between a dead world and a living one. But it must be said that the narrative is sometimes awkward in tone, and the whole story goes badly awry about a third of the way in, when a wounded ghost child appears and yet is substantive enough to be taken to hospital and subjected to physical tests on a lacerated scalp. This is so preposterous (and so unconvincingly developed, given that the authorities appear to take zero interest in her circumstances) that it comes close to unbalancing almost everything that follows.

A more exclusively British horror movie, from around the same time is Nick Haam’s The Hole, from a script by Ben Court and Caroline Ip based on Guy Burt’s 1993 novel about a school prank underground that (at least apparently) goes wrong. It’s a noirish story with an oddly European feel and was well enough made to take Hamm to the US to do Godsend with Robert De Niro. This was De Niro’s first contemporary horror film which, despite its contemporary cloning theme, evoked all the plots from The Monkey’s Paw onwards, in which grieving parents bring a beloved child back from the dead with disastrous results. But the film was not well received and Hamm moved on to other genres.

Johannes Roberts is another filmmaker who broke into UK horror in the early 2000s with low-budget films (like Hellbreeder and Darkhunters) before, in 2005, making Forest of the Damned, which is a strange cross between Vampyres and The Blair Witch Project. It is a beautifully filmed mythic story which works intelligently in the adult fairy-tale genre, using an isolated forest setting to tell the story of a car full of teenagers who encounter a group of predatory, otherworldly sirens that hypnotise their victims and feed off them. Roberts set himself the task of finding actresses who could play beautiful, yet vicious, angels, and did pretty well, also impressing with his forbidding woodland locations. It is true his films at this stage had a slightly Euro-feel (they often seem not to be precisely located anywhere), but this does not hurt the central conceit of Forest of the Damned one iota. Indeed, it adds to the creepy atmosphere of the piece, using the isolation of a European forest rather as so many US filmmakers have used the notion of Texas or the swamplands of the Bayou country. It is only (as so often in films around this time) the unsympathetic banality of the menaced teenagers who let the film down. But visually it is terrific, with many good sequences and real scares.

Roberts moved on to an impressive career following Forest of the Damned. Right after it he made F, (2010) one of a cluster of films at the time that came to be known as ‘hoodie horror’⁹ and were attacked for demonizing the working class because they showed middle-class people being terrorised by underprivileged kids.

Owen Jones, in his book Chavs, is particularly vituperative on the subject and it is true that horror has sometimes in the past stigmatized people who are different – because difference can easily generate fear. But, if you analyse the output of the major horror studios such as Universal in the 1930s and 1940s, or certainly Hammer in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, disability or poverty is much more often a badge of courage and decency than depravity. And generally, the tabloid press, who were also in Jones’s sights, seem a more deserving target.

F though, does come quite close to Daily Mail territory, imagining a cantankerous teacher (David Schofield), critical of youth and delinquency, whose nightmare comes true when he is trapped in his school late at night and hooded assailants start murdering everyone in a series of attacks. The film would seem to draw inspiration from John Carpenter’s classic Assault on Precinct 13 and is effectively tense in places, but the attackers are so quasi-supernatural that it’s quite hard to see it corrupting anyone as a political or class statement, especially when its unlikely hero is a flawed and troubled middle-aged man. The argument becomes more consequential when we get to the film Owen Jones denounced most vociferously, Eden Lake, which I discuss below in the section on James Watkins.

Subsequently, Roberts has largely worked in the US on action-adventure horror such as the effective vacation nightmare movie 47 Meters Down (about two women trapped underwater in a shark cage). Making great use of its relatively tiny budget to maximise the underwater thrills and action, this became a big hit, spawning a sequel. Roberts also did a sequel to the US slasher hit Strangers and helmed the recent reboot of Resident Evil as well as directing a segment of the American found-footage anthology V/H/S 99.

The Descent (Neil Marshall, UK, 2005).

The biggest commercial British horror success of the noughties was Neil Marshall’s The Descent, an epic adventure involving women potholers and ghouls. Not only was the film technically highly impressive, Marshall also tried hard to make something more interesting out of his team of threatened potholers. He was partly successful; indeed, the film’s first half, which has no monsters at all, was unexpectedly almost more interesting and more exciting than its second. But The Descent went on to do extremely well. In fact, if we exclude 28 Days Later which had a slightly higher budget at $8 million and grossed about 40 per cent more in worldwide theatrical, it ranks among the most successful UK horrors of recent years. Although it never was, as some claimed at the time, the top-grossing British horror ever. 28 Days Later was a bigger hit and, in any case, inflation makes comparison with older titles very difficult, given the fact when Hammer released their classics, movie audiences were twice as high as they are now.¹⁰

Unfortunately, the 2009 sequel The Descent: Part 2, directed by the original film’s editor did only about a quarter of the first film’s business and the franchise ended there. Marshall, who was not involved, disavowed it, being quoted by New York’s Vulture magazine as saying the sequel, ‘was totally unnecessary. The first film resolves itself, whichever ending you choose … the second film didn’t pick up from either ending.’

In those early years of the new century, after the Communist era ended, Eastern Europe started to prove important to horror both as a subject and a location. Movies like Eli Roth’s Hostel set in modern Slovakia, and David Moreau’s Them set in Romania (the first American, the second French), are both effective horror thrillers about the ordeal endured by complacent westerners who – taking their world and their norms for granted in parts of Europe that have suffered massively during the Cold War – then pay a terrible price. The UK movie Severance,¹¹ though as we have seen far lighter in tone, explores exactly the same subject; indeed, its opening premise – a complacent bunch of westerners lost, with their luggage, in an East European forest – mirrors Dracula Prince of Darkness. The theme of a threatening alien place, misunderstood by complacent (and often hedonistic) young westerners would now become a prolific sub-genre all on its own, sometimes referred to as the ‘Paradise-Lost’ trend of backpacker horror. Its origins probably lie in Alex Garland’s novel The Beach (filmed by Danny Boyle) in which happy-go-lucky travellers appear to find a promised land, only to see it disintegrate into terror. Often the setting is a tropical island, or South America, but often too it’s Eastern Europe and there is surely a major irony in the fact that the same Transylvania, which once provided an inspiration for old-style gothic horrors, has now become a source of more contemporary anxieties and meanings. At times, as with the Hostel series, it is almost as if Eastern Europe is taking on the same kind of mythological weight as a place of terror and anarchy that Texas often held for the American horror movie. And it may be noted that, as a theme, this is right at the heart of the Gothic tradition, which from Mrs Radcliffe to Dracula Prince of Darkness was precisely about benighted travellers undergoing an ordeal that challenges their beliefs as they travel east across the European continent.

There were also, in the noughties, important horror and fantasy films coming out of Europe like major filmmaker Peter Haneke’s Hidden/Caché (made in 2005 the same year as Descent and Hostel), a gem-like mystery with something of David Lynch about it and a frightening and prophetic political undertow. Similarly, in Lemming, writer/director Dominik Moll (now a major award-winning European director who recently made Night of the 12th) gave us a stripped-down tale of what seems to be supernatural possession with absolutely none of the usual props, making it even more startling. These films were only marginally commercial, but they were, for the most part, big critical hits which showed something new was stirring in the horror film, a semi-drama arthouse flavour, no doubt reflecting the predilections of talented filmmakers who had grown up with horror. This strain – call it indie horror drama – was to develop into one of the major international horror categories of the current period, especially in Britain, as I explore below.

BRITISH HORROR: THE LAST 15 YEARS

As already noted, the massive horror movie boom that began around the end of the twentieth century has accelerated, so far largely unaffected by economic crises or even Covid. It is impossible to say how the current changes in the whole industry may affect the future (see the last section of this chapter), but currently the genre retains a firm grip on the multiplexes at a time when other genres – like the crime thriller, medical drama or disaster picture – have largely moved to streaming. And, of course, horror continues to thrive in streaming as well.

In order to illustrate the scale of the change, I would point out that when this book first appeared in 1973, a volume specialising in British horror movies could hope to cover almost every title made even if some were unavailable to view. So, for the 1973 edition of Heritage screenwriter David McGillivray expertly (and generously) put together an exhaustive list of around 230 British titles comprising almost everything in this genre in the UK, completed over nearly 50 years since the birth of sound. Most of these were covered in the text and, if we missed a few lesser titles, you could have counted them on your hand.

Naturally there are many more titles now than there were then, but the current massive boom and the changes in production have taken us far beyond that. From my calculation, right now, that original edition’s total of 230 British horror/fantasy features since sound is now currently being generated here every four or five years! The figures for international horror production are of course much greater. How has this happened?

It seems there are a number of factors. Firstly, the horror genre has become more respectable, meaning that the ordinary low- or medium-budget horror film has expanded with the BFI, the BBC and Channel 4 welcoming the subject, albeit in a slightly more sophisticated form, in a way they never did before. But, while a whole new school of indie horror has indeed emerged, this is not remotely the whole story. One fundamental shift in the technology of film production turbocharged this proliferation of British horror and fantasy films – and that is digitisation. The digital revolution means that certain costs, most notably those involved in the creation of the film itself, have dwindled while, particularly if you are making a micro-budget horror for a streamer, the formerly huge selling costs of a movie release have almost vanished. In the old days, even straight-to-DVD releases had to be marketed but now streamers take care of all that. Camera costs and lab costs and print costs and equipment costs are massively reduced (some costs are actually eliminated), while directing, cinematography, editing, art direction and more, can all theoretically overlap. As several roles are fulfilled by one person, we have entered the era of micro-budget – that is, features costing a maximum of £50,000 and in many cases far less.

This extraordinary new development means that there are now dozens of British horror titles (cropping up on streamers and DVD, and even in cinemas) that most people will never have heard of. The output is so huge – almost like paperback novels – that, in order to get as many films and horror filmmakers into this book as possible, I have had to make certain painful decisions. In the end, for example, after due consideration, I decided against revisiting Alex Strickland and Mark Jenkyn on the grounds that – while these two talented filmmakers have significantly referenced it – horror doesn’t form part of their main artistic raison d’etre and they are discussed very extensively elsewhere. Ultimately, it seemed more important (and more in keeping with the spirit of the original Heritage) to find room for those UK micro-budget filmmakers who are currently creating multiple British features right at the heart of the genre in plain sight with distribution throughout the world, but who remain largely unknown and have often never had a single review outside of fan sites. Even then, there are so many that I can’t possibly cover all of them.

Given the sheer volume of titles over the past decade-and-a-half, since the last edition of this book, a merely chronological approach would not make much sense. It is probably best to try and divide the entire output of UK horror into the industry’s own budget categories in order to give some idea of the range involved. First ‘indie horror drama’ with finance from BFI, BBC or Film 4 and others, second micro-budget – a whole new thing on its own as I outline below-- and finally film-makers at the higher end who are conttinuing to make a career largely out of horror. Of course such categories are in no way iron-clad, there will be overlaps and anomalies, while the third category could easily have included additional names, who I happen to have already discussed earlier in this book.

1.

Indie Horror Drama

This kind of movie barely existed at all when I first started chronicling the UK horror film at the tail-end of the original boom. Intriguingly it reflects the fact that horror has now emerged as a respectable subject for serious independent films in Britain, looking to film festivals for a primary launch¹² and often perhaps a small cinema release prior to streaming.

In this category the titles tend to be backed with finance from the BFI (previously the Film Council), or the BBC, or Film 4, generally with low-to-medium budgets,¹³ which means that many of these films, unlike the micro-budget category, get noticed and get reviewed. Some might call this ‘elevated horror’, in the sense they generally seek to do more than merely thrill and often contain social commentary or contemporary themes (though many of the best horror films always had this relevance even if it wasn’t foregrounded).

There have been major critical hits here and small commercial successes, while most of the films discussed are of encouragingly high quality. Several of the titles come from critically acclaimed female filmmakers. Among the most notable of these are Rose Glass (Saint Maud, 2019), Corinna Faith (The Power, 2021), Charlotte Colbert (She Will, 2021), Prano Bailey-Bond (Censor, 2021) and Romola Garai (Amulet, 2020). All these are debut features and all have brought a strongly feminist sensibility to the field. This represents a major breakthrough for British horror since it is true, as previously noted, that in the past the area has occasionally been ghettoised and thought of as a male preserve.

Feminist horror of course has a history, the three most commercially successful titles (made by men) were released at the start of what is sometimes known as the ‘second-wave feminism’ of the 1960s: Repulsion (1965) in which male abuse and loneliness leads to psychosis and violence in a young and alienated French woman; Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which imagines a male-led Satanic cult controlling a woman victim’s pregnancy; and Carrie (1976), in which a repressed adolescent girl avenges bullying and abuse with her own psychic powers. All of these themes could be taken either literally, or as metaphors, and occasionally find echoes in the films discussed below, especially the last notion of a supernatural force coming to the aid of a victimised woman.

Rose Glass’s Saint Maud, is I think by general critical consensus one of the standout titles here and it has echoes of Repulsion, even as it seems wholly original. This is the story of a lonely Welsh carer in the desolate seaside town of Scarborough, who seems to be suffering from religious psychosis and wants to save the soul of a worldly irreligious dying patient. The film is extraordinarily well directed with many haunting sequences, but impossible to discuss without revealing its ending, so there will be spoilers in what follows.

Rose Glass cites the compelling if deluded character of Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver as a key influence on her story and talks of how she wanted to give him a female religious spin while adding the atmospheric intensity of films like Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly. Morfydd Clark gives a haunting performance as Maud and there many horror tropes in this intimate and subjective experience of her world, including one genuinely horrific Exorcist-like encounter with the devil.

Evidently, the whole idea first evolved as a dialogue between Maud and God, with no other characters involved – and this makes sense, because the plot has some similarities to Lars Von Trier’s ground-breaking Breaking the Waves, even if that is a much more male and sexualised version of a similar story. In Waves, Bess talks to God about her desperate wish to save her dying lover, here Maud talks to God as she desperately attempts to save the soul of her dying female patient. And in both films, the main character hears the voice of God as their own voice, slightly disguised, suggesting that this is perhaps not a genuine religious experience. The ending of Saint Maud, too, seems to come down on this side, closing, as it does, with the shocking reality of Maud’s apparently agonizing death, while the ending of Breaking the Waves seems much more ambiguous and mysterious, climaxing surprisingly with what seems to be a genuine miracle.

At one point, during my limited involvement in the scripting stage of Breaking the Waves, I asked Von Trier why he was intending to use Emily Watson’s whispered voice as God and not some other voice? He said he wanted to retain the possibility that Bess was talking to herself, so as to keep both avenues – belief and non-belief – open. That ambiguity certainly makes his ending with phantom bells – which look real and are heard by the crew – enigmatic. In contrast, Rose Glass indicates fairly strongly in her interviews that, at the end, we are watching a religious hallucination and the last shot of Maud’s death is intended to jolt the viewer back to reality.¹⁴

Saint Maud (Rose Glass, UK, 2019).

Yet what is exciting to me about a film like Saint Maud – apart from its sheer skill – is its ambiguity. Yes, the heroine is essentially a dangerous madwoman, but it’s also true the audience is sufficiently caught up with her and her world to feel outrage when she is mocked, sometimes cruelly, by her more cynical patient. And, as for the ending, it shocks certainly but is it so cut-and-dried? How do we reconcile the elegiac shot of saint-like peace and light on the beach, as onlookers kneel in awed wonder – and Maud seems to reach a maximum of happy fulfilment in close-up – with the screaming sudden pain of the final few seconds? Of course, we understand the first vision plays out in Maud’s mind so yes, if we had seen this aspirational daydream as she prepares for her immolation, then it is clearly just a dreamy aspiration and the final horror would be crystal clear. But that is not the way it is filmed: the split-second cut from the uplifting vision to Maud’s gruesome, despairing agony has the jarring effect that, for the viewer, both events seem to exist almost simultaneously. It certainly does not feel like a time cut. But then how could Maud be enjoying the beatific vision at the same time as she is screaming in pain at the moment of death? What is the true meaning? Has she awakened from the vision to the horror? That seems just as hard to credit, for the short cut at the end shows Maud clearly at the point of death – she would have been in agony for long minutes before this moment. Oddly too, while the beatific vision on the beach is in full daylight, it seems these final seconds happen in the dark of night – for all around her is black. Ultimately, the ending stands as a conundrum, intended explicitly, as Glass has said, to leave the audience unsettled, however you read it. And I would in fact argue it demonstrates powerfully and successfully how the film works throughout, a compelling marriage of inner and outer. For, if Glass had merely showed us the external reality of Maud’s world without the inner reality, the result would have been unwatchable.

Following this major success, the filmmaker has moved on to bigger budgets and her next film is American (the film is described as a ‘romantic thriller’). Some have argued that her beautifully made and intriguing shorts, on top of Saint Maud, show a proclivity for ‘body horror’, a sub-genre term (coined by Phillip Brophy in 1983) that has always seemed to me too elastic for practical use. Most horror films from Night of the Living Dead to Carrie, via Frankenstein, include some uncanny distortions of the human body, as do many thrillers; while David Cronenberg, often cited as the leading ‘exponent’ of body horror, makes plenty of films with none of it at all. From her shorts and feature, I would just say Rose Glass is bringing a welcome and extremely well-judged feminist sensibility to a certain kind of psychological horror, though obviously, we can’t tell yet if this is the genre where her future lies.

Corinna Faith’s striking The Power (2020) wholeheartedly embraces the idea of horror as social metaphor. The setting is a rundown London hospital during the time of the miners’ strikes in the 1970s, and the consequent three-day week, when power had to be rationed, meaning whole areas of London were without light for several hours in the night. Faith explores the sexism, prejudice and bullying of that fraught time through the eyes of a young nurse with a chequered history. Her film paints a convincing and hellish picture of the embedded sexism of hospital life, which seems all too painfully authentic, though the authoritarianism on show here perhaps evokes the 1950s, more than the winter of 1973–74, for the latter was a time when the word ‘sexism’ was in frequent use and The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer, 1970) was already a bestseller. But then perhaps such things were yet to filter through society in general and Faith works her story well, creating a real sympathy for the novice nurse Val (played by Rose Wiliams). Val has suffered past abuse and now endures a horrific night in the hospital during the power cuts, fighting the bullying authorities, cowed nurses and an anarchic supernatural force which finally turns out to be mainly on her side.

There is always a danger with horror metaphor that, where it looms too large, it may undercut rather than reinforce the meaning. Here the supernatural is a source of fear but also of power and revenge. Paradoxically Rosemary’s Baby asked us to swallow far more in terms of its supernatural apparatus, but there the audience could easily accept it because the demonic evil seemed just a magnified expression of all the male manipulation and patriarchal cruelty Rosemary had experienced. In contrast, The Power does take the risk of making the supernatural into an easy way out as – with three apparent deaths and a full ongoing police investigation – the heroine and another victim escape to freedom. But this is still one of the most original and impressive indie horror films of recent years.

Oddly Charlotte Colbert’s She Will has much the same theme of supernatural female empowerment as The Power but, despite its magnificent Scottish setting and what must be a higher budget, not to mention the imprimatur of Dario Argento on the credits, it is – while stylish – much less dramatic. Alice Krige plays Veronica, an ageing movie star who, accompanied by her aide (Kota Eberhardt), is seeking convalescence from an operation at what turns out to be a highly eccentric Scottish artistic retreat. Gradually it becomes evident the place is on the historical site of a gruesome mass witch-burning and Veronica finds herself empowered by the spirits of the dead, evoked by a sticky dark congealing black stuff swelling up from the ground. Intriguingly the Scottish writer John Buchan – son of a a Scottish Presbyterian minister – described in his biography how as a child he always literally thought sin was a substance just like this, the jet-black charcoal of his surrounding woodland.

Elegantly photographed by Jamie Ramsey She Will has memorable aspects but makes a few false moves: it is hard to believe that in this day and age even the most eccentric Scottish artistic retreat would celebrate witch-burning. And, though the film works as an elegiac feminist meditation on life and ageing, there is something just a little too convenient about its heroine acquiring a nocturnal superpower (for in the end that is what it is), enabling her to avenge herself on the director (Malcom McDowell) who once abused her.

Dario Argento, the master of giallo – that Italian fusion of horror, erotic thriller and whodunit which thrived in the 1970s and 80s – also looms large in the directorial debut of Welsh filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond. She evidently showed Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria and another giallo classic, Luciano Fulci’s The Beyond, to her cinematographer Annika Summerson, in order to demonstrate the look she wanted for her film.

Bailey-Bond had hit on the compelling story of a somewhat inhibited young woman, appropriately named Enid Baines (Niamh Algar), working as a film censor during the troubled period of the 1980s, when the moral panic about video nasties swept through Britain and newspapers regularly featured headlines about the uncut horror movies suddenly available. In retrospect, this can now be seen as a time of intense transition, especially in the way films would be consumed, marking the startling new freedoms that electronic media would bring.

During this febrile period Enid, who has lost a sister in mysterious circumstances years earlier, becomes increasingly upset by her job, giving rise to sequences in the censor’s office that seem amusingly authentic – in fact, they precisely echo the in-house squabbling and paternalistic rage found in the BBFC files quoted earlier. The real-life censor Audrey Field – horror’s implacable foe over a period of decades – was clearly quite as troubled in reality by horror as Enid is here, though Field retired in the 1970s, mercifully just avoiding the video nasty scare and the new cinematic freedoms, which would have appalled her.

Many of the most amusing sections of the first half of Censor play almost as if they are taken from the files: ‘I only trimmed the tiniest bit off the tip of the genitals’. But then the film takes off into darker and more violent realms with Enid invading the world of low-budget slasher production and finally succumbing to psychosis.

This ending has divided critics, some think it the best thing in the film, others prefer the comedic satirical first half and feel the ending contains too-familiar echoes of other psycho-horrors, like Repulsion. There is, I think, a credibility problem about the action in this final section though there is much to admire on the way.

Amulet (2018), the last of these directorial debuts, proved a quite extraordinary and unexpected directorial and writing debut by the successful actor Romola Garai. This film falls into no easy category, in fact it has not even been widely reviewed. Yet its central idea is highly original, its theme topical and its scares genuine, in fact one early on – involving a dead object in a bathroom – made me jump more than any other recent horror I have seen. Later, I discovered horror afficionado Mark Kermode had a similar reaction to the sequence.

The story involves an immigrant Tomas (a wonderful performance from the Romanian actor Alec Secareanu) fleeing from memories of war, who seeks refuge in an old and crumbling London house where Magda (Carla Juri) lives with a feral woman shut in the top attic. Outside the house all is anti-immigrant hostility, but inside he soon discovers there are even worse things.

What is so clever about Amulet (helped by an ingeniously deceptive performance from Imelda Staunton as Tomas’s kindly patron) is that it unfolds in an entirely unexpected and scary way so that you really don’t understand the full horror of the threat, or of the message underlying it – involving male sexual violence – until well into the film. But this is absolutely not an art movie with a few horror tropes, the story has a full-blooded supernatural threat at its heart which is both original and yet poetically persuasive. It is a film which recognises the power of horror as adult fairy tale in a way that is all too rare these days. In fact, of all these horror debuts by women filmmakers, I think Amulet is the one that should have garnered much more attention than it did though it has been widely critically praised.

What about other key films in the British indie horror drama category? I would include Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011), White Settlers aka The Blood Lands (Simeon Halligan, 2014) His House (Remi Weekes, 2020), Possum (Matthew Holness, 2018), The Girl with All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy, 2016) and Ghost Stories (2017) from the team of Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson. The last, was effectively the first British portmanteau horror film cinema release since the glory days of Amicus (though, discussed below in the micro-budget hardcore indie genre category, there is the 2009 Bordello Death Tales made for £100,000).

Kill List caused something of a sensation when it appeared in 2011, launching a major career for its director and writer Ben Wheatley. A mysterious, violent and unsettling horror thriller, the film – co-written with Wheatley’s partner Amy Jump and backed by the Film Council, Screen Yorkshire and Film 4 – is deliberately obscure in places, cutting exposition to the bone and editing each scene into short impactful moments which may sometimes puzzle but rarely bore.

Kill List (Ben Wheatley, UK, 2011).

The plot, which seems to involve a kind of Satanic death-cult, concerns a couple of needy ex-soldiers, Jay and Gal, hired as hitmen, who find their assignments increasingly bloody and also nightmarishly strange. The best and most memorable moments, which probably sealed the film’s status, come in the extraordinary finale where Wheatley utilizes the full-blown Satanist horror of his namesake Dennis, to give us an extended knife-edge series of climaxes – but with absolutely none of the old dualist certainties and reassurances of a Dennis Wheatley work like The Devil Rides Out.

It is true (here are necessarily major spoilers) that the film’s refusal to engage in any explanations does, by the end, lead you to question the logic of much of what has come before. Indeed, some have postulated that it must all be a fever dream: if not, how and why would even the most ruthless conspirators bother to plant a locum at Jay’s GP to utter a few enigmatic remarks? Though it might also be argued the story is about a spreading, secret religious cult of some apocalyptic kind so that more exposition would have undermined the premise. Despite this uncertainty, Kill List remains highly effective and impressive even if the slight hopelessness of its characters and relentless pessimism does perhaps limit the appetite for repeat viewing.

Since its launch, Wheatley has largely varied his work between action and black comedy, alongside highly original unplaceable films, some far more obscurely mystical than this, like the period A Field in England.

Simeon Halligan, who started out as an art director, before directing and co-writing the beast-hunt movie Splintered, is something of an exception in this category because his horror movies have tended to be backed by commercial sources rather than the BFI, or others, yet they are certainly not micro-budget. Splintered, for example, is listed as costing over £2 million.

White Settlers (aka The Blood Lands), 2014, was a well-paced and relentless rural horror action film that strongly resembles the violent-interloper theme of Straw Dogs. A couple, Sarah and Ed, played by Pollyanna McIntosh and Lee Williams, buy their dream house, just inside the border of Scotland, in the so-called ‘middle lands’, where historically the English and Scottish murdered and raided each other over hundreds of years. Soon the couple find themselves facing an invasion, at first unseen, then all too physical.

McIntosh, who bears some physical resemblance to the legendary horror icon Barbara Steele, has established quite a reputation in horror, and went on to the hit US series The Walking Dead. Here, she gives a terrific performance as the victim of a night of frenzied violence and hide-and-seek chasing, handled expertly by Halligan. On that suspense level, the film is accomplished, but, unfortunately, the threat at its heart – the masked intruders – are just too stereotypically redolent of old-school Scottish barbarism and the ending does not quite persuade.

But Halligan, who helped found the Manchester horror festival Grimmfest, certainly shows adeptness at the genre. He has since made the award-winning Habit (2017), backed by Creative England: an unfairly neglected and original semi-vampire horror, which shares some of the same themes as the 2022 US movie Bones and All, but is far better. With excellent performances from Jessica Barden and Eliot James Langridge, among others, it tells an intriguing story of a brother and sister, affected by a childhood tragedy, who find themselves adrift in urban Manchester, until he is tempted into a kind of non-supernatural vampire cult. The underworld stuff perhaps moves too far into fantasy territory, but the film’s emotional appeal is highly affecting and the good news is that Halligan has several titles in active development, including Past Life, which was announced at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

One of the most noted UK indie horror debuts of recent years came with His House (2020), from Remi Weekes, which is very much in the social realist horror mode, though with a highly original supernatural plot. It mirrors the horrors, deprivations and guilt of two fleeing and vulnerable refugees from Sudan, Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Masaku), who – after a traumatic journey – are trying put down roots while living in a dismal and dilapidated house on the outskirts of London. Facing hostility on all sides, Bol wants to prove they can assimilate, while Rial fears losing their identity, and this tension soon morphs into a strange haunting by what is described as an ‘apeth’, or ‘night witch’ – somehow connected to the tragic loss of a little girl in the course of their journey, who they had falsely claimed was their daughter.

As the house around them becomes a place of horrors, His House provides a uniquely compelling answer to the perennial question of all haunted-house stories: why don’t they just leave? For, as everyone around them makes clear, they are lucky to be housed at all: ‘It’s bigger than my house’, one of their social workers asserts sulkily. A highly contemporary retooling of the supernatural guilt/revenge genre, the film ended up on Netflix after a very successful festival run, picking up several prizes, including a BAFTA.

If His House qualified as serious drama horror with a focus on the dangers and tensions of dislocated newcomers, Possum from Mathew Holness – backed by the BFI – places an equally powerful focus on the dark, forgotten rural heart of England. This pessimistic and extremely haunting story stars Sean Harris as Philip, a lonely Norfolk misfit and former puppeteer, terrorised by a grotesque puppet of a spider.¹⁵

Set in East Anglia, Possum features some of the most remarkable cinematography of Norfolk and Suffolk since Jonathan Miller’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You, but its story of an outcast is miles away from the class certainties of M. R. James. In fact much of it comprises intensely visual storytelling, with only sparse dialogue. Holness has stated he wanted to emulate silent cinema, especially the classic German expressionist films and he succeeds triumphantly. For, despite its seriously haunting puppet, Possum is much closer to expressionism at its best than to the ventriloquist-dummy/Dead of Night school of horror. There is little relief in the film but it completely convinces, especially the character’s terror, while the resolution feels all too painfully authentic, making it one of the most effective and hauntingly visual British horror films of recent times. In some other titles, abuse seems just a convenient trigger for evil, here it is appallingly credible and vivid, making Possum an indie drama horror, which deserves to be much better known than it is, though it is not easy viewing.

Colm McCarthy’s (and writer Mike Carey’s) The Girl with All the Gifts was backed by the BFI and Creative England, but, unusually for this category, it is just as much hardcore genre as it is drama. The film is an original and well-thought-out dystopian zombie tale with added touches of Losey’s The Damned and The Last of Us video game (now, itself, dramatised successfully for HBO).

Mike Carey’s ingenious script, adapted from his own novel, begins in a mysterious underground school where the infant pupils show an ineffable politeness, even as they are restrained by the military and, at times, treated like monsters. One of those pupils is Melanie (a prize-winning performance from Sennia Nanua), who shows every sign of being a sweet and thoughtful little girl. Until gradually, we come to understand she is a hybrid, who might determine the world’s fate.

There is a lot of action, but this still has more empathy and audience appeal and suspense than many other recent UK movies and the ending is unexpected in a way you do not see coming. Its director Colm McCarthy has just made Bagman (a US horror movie in post-production at time of writing) as well as the UK fantasy TV series Half Bad, adapted from the bestselling novels by Sally Green, which had some of the same refreshing empathy and energy as Girl and was written by Joe Barton (see the section on TV below, pp. 317–22).

Ghost Stories (backed by C4, BFI and Screen Yorkshire), from the team of Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, is based on their successful play (performed all around the world) about Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman), a psychical investigator of hauntings. The film is much more ambitious than the play and its first half is outstanding – a truly beguiling set-up in which the psychic investigator reveals (initially through a suggestive home movie) how his childhood was wrecked by his father’s religious beliefs. Following this strong opening, he is sent on an eerie quest by a hard-bitten sceptic to investigate three disturbing cases. All three of these ‘hauntings’ concern parents and children, and two are set in the wonderfully atmospheric lost corners of a dreary desolate England, the third being more upscale. Paul Whitehouse, in the first story, is unforgettably strong as a damaged, aggressive, father haunted by his catatonic daughter, indeed his charged opening scene, in a deserted seaside pub, is one of the best in the entire film. Also splendidly cast are Alex Lawther, as a terrified teen in the second story; and Martin Freeman, as the wealthy father of a nightmarish child, in the third. The play was something of a fairground ride, but the film is far bleaker and more substantial, focusing highly effectively on mental pain – in fact it could almost have co-opted the title of the 1973, Amicus portmanteau film Tales That Witness Madness (though it’s much better than that was). One childhood flashback to bullying, involving race and disability, is seriously horrible and quite unforgettable. But unfortunately, the final reveal, when it comes, does seem a bit too familiar, given the film’s intriguing set up.

Three further British horror films (two made abroad and one in Scotland) need to be mentioned, that, as commercial, medium-budget ventures, are on the fringes of the indie horror genre category. Corin Hardy’s Irish-UK The Hallow, partly backed by the Irish Film Board, is an effects-driven, 2015 folk horror movie set in an isolated County Galway cottage, in which a couple and their baby are threatened by mutant fungus-like creatures that come out of the woods. The film had a full cinema release, scoring high marks for its effects – in fact, Hardy dedicates the film to the effects ‘giants’ he reveres, such as Ray Harryhausen. Its fairy-tale, changeling plot is much more interesting than some of the later micro-budget fairy-story horrors discussed below, while it deserves praise for the massive work that clearly went into its suspense sequences and woodland night shoots. On the downside, its main characters sometimes lack conviction, while the script’s combination of hostile ‘Straw Dogs’ neighbours and deadly creatures has the paradoxical effect of making the action less frightening. It’s an odd fact that horror can fail to engage if all around is total threat – such stories need hope and nuance, as well as shock and fear. But the film won awards and demonstrated such talent that the US horror legend James Wan hired Hardy to do The Nun, from the Warners Conjuring franchise. This was not much liked by critics but became a massive commercial hit, grossing $366 million on a $22 million dollar budget. Hardy has since worked on Sky TV’s Gangs of London and is currently set to make his third horror film Whistle (which is set in Canada and sounds like a high-school comedic updating of the classic M. R. James story Whistle and I’ll Come to You).

The second example that doesn’t quite fit the category, is Sacrifice (formerly The Colour of Madness), 2020, from the writer/co-director team of Andy Collier and Tor Mian, a fully indie film shot largely and highly effectively in Norway. Sacrifice is Lovecraftian horror, which makes full use of some great locations in its story of an American couple, both in fact played by UK actors (Ludovic Hughes and Sophie Stevens), returning to the isolated and superstition-ridden Norwegian community he had left in childhood. She is pregnant and echoes of The Wicker Man and Midsommar folk horror are here, but the film fortunately steers a path away from them in places. Some scenes like a creepy dinner party, with US actor Barbara Crampton on top form as a mysterious Norwegian local, are powerful, as are the set pieces. It is true the hero’s dawning craziness arrives a little too fast, since, unlike Rosemary’s Baby, we never quite feel the strength of the relationship in the first place. But then one of the oddities of the US horror hit Midsommar was the excruciating relationship at its centre¹⁶ and there is enough flair and originality here to make it a pity the film arrived in Covid, inevitably receiving less attention than it deserved.

Finally, and briefly, an indie horror which has drifted out of sight, and is not available for streaming as I write, even though one of its leads Deridre Mullins won a Scottish BAFTA and it was nominated for a jury prize at another festival. The Dark Mile (2017) is a real rarity from director Gary Love and writer Gaby Hull, a kind of folk horror chase movie filmed entirely in the Scottish highlands, and often on water. It tells the story of a gay female couple trying to recuperate from the traumatic loss of a baby as they are also (apparently) pursued by one’s male ex-partner. A mysterious boat with weird aspects follows their boat, and evidence of pagan and occult activity keeps dogging their trail, alongside more obvious local hostility until they are caught up in a desperate struggle for survival. There is a quite unexpected twist concerning a local (Sheila Hancock) and, though a little overdone in places, it impressed me when I saw it. Unlike the other indie titles above though, I can’t see it again afresh to make further comment and remain a bit baffled as to why it has slipped so far below the radar,

2.

Micro-budget Indie Genre

The second and also easily the most prolific, category of new British horror is micro-budget indie genre. This is very high concept material where the titles and genre formats are incredibly important, but budgets are far lower than the indie horror dramas above or the established horror filmmakers in the third category below. I’ll try and offer an overview of this completely new and remarkable field before delving into the quality of individual titles.

Some of these micro-budget films are one-offs, or crowdfunded, but most are privately financed by very small production companies without backing from UK television, or the BFI, or any well-known movie financier. Instead, their main source of finance (apart from direct commissions) comes from specialist distributors in all the digital fields which have expanded so massively, including free ad-supported streaming platforms, rental streaming, subscriber streaming, outright consumer purchase and DVD.

Just as with the B-movie-makers of old, like AIP and Roger Corman and Hammer, the mainstay of this market is quantity of product and also title, the latter for algorithmic reasons and search engines as much as audience appeal. Most of the films’ titles are specifically designed to evoke generic horror. That means the inclusion of words such as ‘dark’, or ‘devil’, or ‘haunting’, and perhaps even more blatantly, uncopyrighted buzzwords from past horror hits like ‘Amityville’, or ‘Jurassic’, or ‘Conjuring’, or ‘Exorcist’ – as with Amityville Scarecrow, Jurassic Island, Conjuring the Genie, or Exorcist Vengeance.

These films are often 75 to 85 minutes long – occasionally longer – but, they are still features, just as the classic 1945 B-movie Detour was a feature, though it ran only 66 minutes. That masterly B-movie, ultra-low-budget though it was in its time, cost around a million dollars to make in today’s money, which is vastly more than is spent on the micro-budget indie genre films below. One of these filmmakers reckons that they are making films for a tenth of what it cost the old B-movie specialists like AIP and Empire – an important factor being that technology can now put more on the screen at lower cost than it ever could before. One small example of many: in the old days only big-budget movies could afford a helicopter for aerial shots, Detour certainly couldn’t – but, now, drones are easily accessible and probably even overused.

What then exactly is the nature of the gold rush in this whole strange market, which is currently generating product on a massive scale in the UK? It would seem that the volume of demand has arisen because the distributors (often in the US) need internationally acceptable movie genre fare to feed the streamers worldwide, while the streamers require such titles in serious volume to bulk up their movie offerings.

The streamers themselves do not necessarily pay the distributors much for non-exclusive airing, sometimes even as little as a few thousand – or even it has been claimed a few hundred – dollars per movie. But, as we have seen, there are an increasing number of outlets – including rental, purchase and free streaming with ads – who will buy rights to such films in very large packages. So in order to meet this massive and (at least for now) accelerating demand, distributors in the US have at times been asking trusted British producers for as many genre projects fitting the algorithm as they can deliver! Pre-sell on title, theme and generally script, is often essential while, if the product looks and feels American, that can be so much the better, something British filmmakers can probably do more easily than most, given the common language.

But the category also includes cheap films which have truly started from the ground up – bits of money grabbed from unlikely sources. ‘It is difficult especially if you don’t have the bank of mum and dad which a lot of us do not have,’ reflected one of the most prolific micro-budget genre filmmakers Louisa Warren, in an interview on Britflicks. She described how she even amassed tips from hours working in a restaurant to help fund her films. Now she can lay claim to 21 features including Curse of the Scarecrow with more on the way!

The output here is indeed startling with multiple ‘studios’ running assembly lines of product. Scott Chambers (of Jagged Edge Productions, Proportion Productions and various other tiny companies) seems to be the pioneer of UK micro-budget genre. He was born in 1991 and started out as an actor in the National Youth Theatre, he landed a small part in Holby City before winning praise and an award for the movie Chicken (2015), directed by his friend Joe Stephenson, who later made Doctor Jekyll with Chambers co-starring (discussed under Hammer below).

Chicken, a very early example of micro-budget – financed in 2015 with money raised from individual stakeholders – is an effective and lyrical slice of rural neo-realism about a learning-impaired 15-year-old boy called Richard, living with his brother in a Norfolk caravan. Like the method stars of old (for example Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire) Chambers made this unique part his own on stage and then transferred it to screen, giving a near-unforgettable performance. The film slightly overdoes itself at the climax – as the trade magazine Variety noted in an otherwise laudatory review – but even so. Chambers’ extraordinary performance reaches heights of pathos rarely seen in recent UK cinema. The film did not get wide release outside the festival circuit but it won prizes.

After this wholly impressive non-horror debut, Chambers segued into a whole new career, temporarily adopting his middle name in order to produce, as Scott Jeffrey, a massive series of micro-budget genre movies with tiny budgets, often writing and directing but also occasionally filling every other role from costume to make up, to casting, to location management, even acting small parts in a few.¹⁷ As a result, he has produced or exec produced (and often written and directed) thirty-nine internationally streamed features since 2018 alone including several franchises built around non-copyright horror tropes – Conjuring …, Scream …, Amityville …, Exorcist … – plus many others.

With such a prodigious output Scott Chambers (whose films I’ll discuss in detail later) seems reminiscent of Roger Corman, the king of twentieth century exploitation, who also started very young (after training as an engineer), acted in his earlier films and completed 30 films as producer or director by the time he was 32. But Chambers seems to have spectacularly beaten Corman’s record, for now just 32 himself, he can claim as producer a total of 114 films! And it must be stressed these are not amateur home movies, they are on streamers everywhere. Such a staggering statistic shows in itself just how much digital and streaming have changed the industry and it seems as if Chambers was one of the first to grasp this.

Only now an entire field of filmmakers has followed him, several of whom (though not all) worked with Chambers himself. Take for example Rhys Frake-Waterfield a close partner of Chambers, who helps run the Jagged Edge label. Frake-Waterfield started out helping with special effects on Chambers’ creature features, then began directing with a comedy horror about a deadly Christmas Tree The Killing Tree and – after making a couple of other action films – had his biggest success as director with the Chambers produced Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, which is almost unique for micro-budget in achieving cinema release in some countries. Frake-Waterfield was director, writer and co-producer on it but also boom operator, editor, location manager, drone operator and visual effects!

Then there is Steve Lawson, not a Jeffrey associate but another ambitious genre indie filmmaker, who has made around thirteen horror films in the last two years, completing six as both director and writer within the past twelve months including The Mummy: Resurrection, Ripper’s Revenge and The Wrath of Dracula.

Almost all these films were, it seems, being made in around ten days, some a bit more and some less (though as I write budgets and schedules appear to be creeping up). And streaming is shaping the whole form: Cupid (featuring a deadly arrow-shooting supernatural flying demon, and discussed later) was written and directed by Scott Chambers for streamer-release to coincide with Valentine’s Day 2020; and Nutcracker Massacre from Rebecca Matthews (a pseudonym for actor Becca Hitrani, another prolific woman director/producer in this category), was created to hit streamers just in time for Christmas 2022. Nutcracker Massacre also seems to have got a sanctions-busting cinema release in Russia!¹⁸

With many exceptions, actors on most of the films seem to earn about a modest £150 a day (way lower than the low-budget SAG agreement minimum in the US) which means you can have a starring role and earn little more than £1,000. But many may well not be paid at all: a CV of one regular performer in these films states her willingness to work for nothing in certain circumstances and quite obviously the dream of a lead role in a feature, that has world streaming release, might be sufficient motivation for many actors. There is also for all participants in these films, before and behind the camera, the lure of getting their show-reel much improved, so I think we can be pretty certain much voluntary work has been done in all departments. One producer reveals how much money she saved when she asked people to bring pack lunches to the set!

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (Rhys Frake-Waterfield, UK, 2023).

The total budgets here are rarely public, but seem to range from £10,000 to £50,000, though Pooh, at the very top end, was made for under $100,000 and remains an exception alongside Host from Rob Savage (see below). At the very lowest-budget end, a found-footage ghost story like The House in Sherwood made by the ghost story specialist Richard Mansfield and available to stream on Amazon is listed as costing £250 but that is certainly unusual.

So, the B-picture seems to be back with a bang and in a very different form, probably cheaper than it has ever been in movie history. This is a whole growth industry right under our nose, making far more films than Hammer and its rivals at their peak years, yet with few people aware of them at all. For the titles do not get much reviewed. Indeed, most of the ones I have seen have received no reviews of any kind on Rotten Tomatoes – even Variety does not seem to review them. Fan sites specialising in DVD and internet releases like Nerdly and Dark Eyes of London are the only ones that consistently cover the field at all, and they deserve a lot of praise for it. The only film titles in this huge field that appear to have been widely reviewed so far are Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey and Host.

So how have those two micro-budgeters, which did get widely noticed by critics, fared? The answer is a divided picture. On the Rotten Tomatoes site covering Pooh, fifty-four reviews are currently negative and only two faintly positive, which is something of a negative record given, as I have noted, the site usually errs on the side of generosity in its grading of reviews. It is true Host did far better with the critics, but then Host is slightly different from many of the other films in that it did receive production money directly from the horror streamer Shudder, upping its budget accordingly.

So, critics are certainly prone to be condescending about these films. But then Hammer and AIP were once subject to exactly this kind of condescension. And some of these titles cover the same subject matter as they did (like period gothic and monster pictures) while there are plenty of contemporary horror franchises among them too: in the past three years Chambers has, for example, produced Tooth Fairy 3 (deranged supernatural killer though with ambiguities), Conjuring the Genie 2 (demon genie grants wishes that go wrong) and Dinosaur Hotel 2 (a big-money gameshow in which women are prey to dinosaurs). Simon Oakes, former head of Hammer (in its second movie-producing era) would have killed for such an abundance of product, but not on these kinds of tiny budgets and, we assume, tiny returns. Even Hammer’s cheaper 2014 sequel Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death had a budget of around £13 million!

So, what exactly are these films like?

Given the massive effort by all involved, it is important to answer this fairly. But it’s also not a very easy task, rather like trying to assess the entire output of a Hammer or an AIP or a Monogram from scratch. Firstly, we need to be clear that, as indicated, these films are being made for a tenth of what Hammer (or AIP) spent, even allowing for inflation. Which means that despite the massive advantage of drones and digital and modern shooting techniques with smaller crews, there is still likely to be a difference on screen. Maybe there’s no reason why a budding director cannot overcome this and make a classic – Roger Corman after all founded the career of several great directors including himself on low-budget fare. But given the pressure of this kind of output, far more than Corman faced, it is fairly obvious that in such work, generally unreviewed by critics, quantity may well affect quality.

Certainly, one strange aspect of the output, especially the earlier ones from Scott Chambers, seems to be a sort of tacit reluctance to admit which country we are in! There will be a setting, and it’s usually a part of the UK with a big house or a small house or school or wood or a church (the locations get more plentiful later) but the characters often turn out to be at least 50 per cent American. Sometimes this is explained by back-story (‘it’s been x years since our family moved across the pond’), but not always. So, there is a mid-Atlantic aspect to many of the earlier films in the category. Sometimes, in fact, the films go the whole hog and pretend they are wholly set in America and made in America. Vampire Virus (2020), for example, not from Chambers, but from another of the more prolific exponents of UK micro-budget indie horror, Charlie Steeds, is a lesbian vampire clubbing movie of a familiar kind set fairly convincingly in the US though, in fact, shot entirely in the UK with largely British actors.

In any appraisal, the Scott Chambers studio, the originator with the highest output, is probably the best place to start. It was probably a mistake that the first Chambers production I looked at was Amityville Scarecrow (2021) directed by its cinematographer Jack Peter Mundy and written by Shannon Holiday (that name may well be a pseudonym and certainly sounds like one) in that the film turned out to reflect some of the worst aspects of micro-budget.¹⁹

There are good films here, as I discovered, especially from Chambers, and even his very first production Fox Trap (2016), which he wrote but did not direct, is a serviceable and enjoyable, if slightly predictable, slasher. But Amityville Scarecrow seems a negative algorithmic creation if ever there was one. The show’s nemesis is a lumbering and murderous scarecrow, possessed by a dead serial killer with a nasty history. The title cunningly doubles up on two horror franchises: Scarecrow, a slasher supernatural revenge trope since the 1980s, and Amityville which became a horror staple after the supposed haunting of a Long Island house in 1975. But the latter is a cheat, for ‘Amityville’ here turns out to be the name of an abandoned caravan park on rural land, which an American family have inherited.

What follows is some very dull family back-story and lots of exposition in dialogue, flat characters, then demonic scarecrow attacks, screaming, suffering and blood. There is a tendency, as in all the least-interesting Chambers studio films, to dwell endlessly on reaction shots to pain. This is unpleasant but, despite the titles and some of the selling, only a few of these films (like Pooh: Blood and Honey, or The Final Scream) are full-on video nasty horror and rated 18. Many, like this, are rated 16.

After seeing Amityville Scarecrow, I went back to the the first two films in this franchise Curse of the Scarecrow and Bride of Scarecrow from director Louisa Warren²⁰ (written again by Shannon Holiday), which are simpler and better, less weighed down by dialogue though none of the scripts are very compelling. The best of the three films (and it would seem it was made after ‘Curse’ which has the air of a fledgling effort) is Bride of Scarecrow in which a failing radio phone-in host (played with some gusto by Claire-Maria Fox who has done around eight Chambers films) inherits an old farmhouse and finds it suffers the scarecrow curse – meaning multiple deaths and a tragic ending. I can’t claim these are films I would urge anyone to rush to see, but Bride of Scarecrow has a perfectly polished look and a few good moments even if it is slow in places. Amityville Scarecrow and Curse of Scarecrow feel more awkward.

One strange mystery though does remain about Amityville Scarecrow. Namely, what country are we in? From the cars and their number plates, prominent on screen, not to mention the caravans and the countryside, this is clearly Britain. But half the cast, at least, are playing American and, though there is very little geographical reference of any kind, one of the dead mother’s family describes how the mother ‘purchased this land to reinvent it and then she moved us to the UK and sat on it for 20 years.’ So, is the land in the US or the UK? After multiple viewings, I can only conclude we’re supposed to ignore the evidence of our eyes and somehow accept we are in the US. For, when the two main girl characters ring the police, an armed American policewoman with a US accent appears, looking most out of place, and quickly becomes a victim!

It is a bizarre moment and there is an interesting aside to it. The part of the cop here is played by one of Chambers’ regulars Antonia Johnstone, who (at least until 2021) often doubled for the company by doing small parts and costume or production management, even directing one feature! That is typical of the studio, which often seems to work as a kind of collective. And, following her role as a police woman here, Johnstone turns up a few months later in almost the same small part again in another Chambers movie The Curse of Humpty Dumpty, this time playing a British police-woman.

At this point you might assume from such petty economies we are truly in z-picture territory and there is nothing worth seeing here at all. But now comes the twist, because the strange thing is that Curse of Humpty Dumpty (see below), despite its title, turns out to be one of the company’s best films. Written and directed by Chambers himself, it is superior psychological horror with a shifting story and a very spooky doll at its centre. The world of micro-budget is not, it turns out, homogeneous at all, in fact there are some major unexpected surprises.

Going back to the start of his short career in years, but very long in terms of movies, Chambers’ worked in many roles on his films from 2016 to 2017 before writing/directing The Bad Nun in 2018 (a film I have been unable to track down) and then The Last Scream in 2019. The latter is unlike anything else I can find in the entire repertoire and never merited a sequel. The film starts with a casting call and the heroine Kia being asked if she’s aware the role is unpaid – bold dialogue, since we may well be wondering if the same is true of what we are watching. After being fired by her agent, she’s recruited for another starring role at an isolated location and ultimately finds herself in the clutches of a mad film crew setting up the ultimate snuff movie.

Given that the major issue of whether people are being exploited, or even endangered, looms large over the entire (often secretive) micro-budget field, this makes the film pretty loaded. And finally in a bloody climax, more graphic than any other I have yet discovered in the Chambers studio’s work, or indeed in recent UK horror, the heroine does get her revenge, disembowelling the director – a ‘me too’ horror moment if ever there was one. Then in the final shot, still traumatised, she watches the snuff film on a laptop screen and turns to stare directly at us, the viewers.

OK. This is not Peeping Tom, it is not even The Sorcerers, but the film is highly effective in places and there is definitely an awareness here of the dangers of identification and voyeurism. Even so, while it has considerable resonance and Kate Lister can be proud of her lead role, The Final Scream is not among the Chambers films I’d finally recommend. It is highly memorable and in places powerful but feels perhaps just a little bit too close to torture porn, especially with a filmmaker doing the torturing, The first hour of manipulation when Kia thinks it is a real film, and we know it’s not, is certainly effective but has uncomfortable echoes. The Harvey Weinstein story would break in the New York Times on 5 October 2017, just days after shooting ended and you do wonder if that is why there have been no sequels. Notable too that, while the Chambers stable uses the same actors repeatedly – some of them very good indeed, like Nicola Wright who has done some of her best roles for the studio and is still acting for them in 2023 – the star of The Final Scream Kate Lister never worked in any of their films again. But then she is Australian and her most recent work has been in Australian movies and TV, so it is probably wrong to read anything into this.

Meanwhile, if you strip away the movie-making theme, The Final Scream seems to lay the ground-work for one of the most repeated plots in the Scott Chambers studio playbook: namely ‘girl group in jeopardy’ which is of course an ancient slasher format. None of the studio’s subsequent films in this group are nearly as edgy as The Final Scream, several are quite anodyne. And, leaving aside The Final Scream which stands rather apart, none represent the studio’s best work which seems largely to be in the ‘haunted’ and ‘demon’ category of their huge catalogue, notably those on which Chambers takes a writing credit.

Take for example Cupid, a demon movie, written and directed by Chambers a year after The Final Scream in 2020. This strange and even witty confection has some of the makings of a cult classic. Starting with an admittedly overlong animated prologue, which explains the film’s bizarre take on Graeco-Roman mythology, it features a flying feminist attack demon, nominally summoned around Valentine’s Day to inflict mortal wounds on unfaithful lovers but also on pretty much everyone else.

The plot, set mainly in a school, is clearly influenced by Carrie, and triggered by a truly nasty act of cyber bullying before a Valentine’s Day dance. The demon is quite strange-looking, and its furious mission to kill off the idea of love on Valentine’s Day has a cynical appeal, while its apparently unstoppable violence gives the film a crazed energy without (until the climax at least) heading into slapstick.

Once again it’s true we are in a very mid-Atlantic setting: the school looks and feels English (the cars are clearly British) but around half the staff and half the pupils – including the principal – appear to be American! ‘That was, like, seventh grade,’ says one of the girls, in a line that would be meaningless in any English comprehensive. But then if a film as good as the 1962 Night of the Eagle can feature a slightly odd mid-Atlantic educational establishment (Hempnell Medical College), perhaps we should not be too worried. I am not suggesting Cupid is as good but the teen soap element here is actually far stronger than in many other UK films. And I can happily accept the hybrid feel if it enables performances as lively as Sarah T. Cohen playing the conniving American bully Elise (in real life Cohen has American and British nationality, having been discovered for a 2016 TV drama by filmmaker Mike Newell, who made Four Weddings).

Of course, there are problems, some performances are uneven and the climax moves too knowingly into black farce, risking the conceit. But, even so, this has punch and it seems a pity there was no sequel when something as lame as Amityville Scarecrow already has a follow-up.

After Cupid, Chambers directed an action picture and one of his creature features Don’t Talk – a British riff on the hit A Quiet Place. Here the team is inevitably at a special effects disadvantage but Conjuring the Genie (Evil Genie), his next fully fledged horror as director and writer, turns out to be another of the studio’s stronger outings. Once again, we are in the world of an evil demon but demons don’t quite demand the same level of CGI as a dinosaur or monster. A really nasty-looking mask with creepy sound and lighting can be just as effective and here the mask works well enough most of the time. The setting is university and home with less manic tropes than Cupid, and there’s a solid, quite satisfying story involving teenage angst, hopeless parents and magic wishes that always backfire.

The film also gets safely away from the mid-Atlantic with only two of the characters being American, perfectly plausible in this college setting, though this time Sarah T. Cohen plays English, just as effectively as she played American in Cupid, while the English Megan Purvis plays American – reinforcing the output’s strong repertory feel. The pace sometimes flags but it’s helped by some originally macabre ideas (like the aspiring model who is turned into a grotesque dancing doll) and Chambers directs his cast with a more measured style than in Cupid, using long and intense, method-style close-ups. That may not be to everyone’s taste, but I thought it worked well, especially when we arrive at the life-and-death dilemmas of the two leads.

So, all in all, it looked suddenly promising for the studio but sadly Scott Chambers’ next film Cannibal Troll – written by Chambers and co-directed with Rebecca Matthews/ Becca Harani – has less to recommend it. Yet again here – as so often in the studio’s numerous ‘girl group in jeopardy’ films – a gang of young women (this time a hen party) are caught in the woods struggling against a creature for survival. Compared to Conjuring, there seems much less care over detail, even the opening captions have a glaring spelling mistake, while the whole plot is slightly ridiculous: a defrocked vicar living by a woodland church appears to witness daily a ‘mythological creature’ (i.e. a man in an Orc-like suit) slaughter and cannibalise people, but does absolutely nothing about it except to cower and utter angry warnings to passers-by. In some wilderness of Texas or Canada this might just have an ounce of credibility but in the highly domesticated English countryside it feels absurd, all the more when the creature seems to live in a furnished house!

Incidentally, as is often the case with these films (other than The Final Scream), the story set-up and the title make Cannibal Troll sound much more lurid and exploitative than it is. Certainly, there is violence and gore (including here a horrible birthing sequence though mother and baby are OK) but the characters are fairly gentle, in fact the future bride comes to realise she is gay, something which – to the film’s credit – is handled in an entirely romantic way with no obvious sexual titillation,

Chambers moved on to direct several monster and action movies in 2021 and then, as mentioned, provided another surprise on the upside with The Curse of Humpty Dumpty which has been generally praised by its few reviewers. The title is unfortunate, making it sound like another attempt to milk some nursery character. But this is a measured and intriguing film, based partly around the idea of a strange, possibly demonic, doll. And the doll (though immensely creepy) is only one feature of the story for surprisingly, though there are plenty of scary moments, this may not in the end be a demonic slasher at all but more of a psychological thriller with major horror moments. Is it about a quasi-supernatural cult or about psychosis? We are never quite sure but this ambiguity works to the film’s advantage.

The story begins by exploring what seems to be senile dementia, but turns out to be something worse and more horrific, involving an earlier incident that remains mysterious. One internet reviewer felt it was inappropriate and cruel to utilise dementia like this in a horror movie at all. And the film does play on the fear of the illness, but then movies and books have been milking the fear of madness ever since Gaslight. And here there is patently something else going on.

The handsome setting is a large and well-appointed country house in which two quarrelling daughters try to unravel the mystery of their mother’s dark visions with the mother strongly played by Nicola Wright (who works in these films a lot but has much other experience in TV and film). There is, as I have indicated, a pleasing ambiguity about the plot – is it conspiracy, possession or just madness? – and the Humpty doll has a truly haunting feel, almost worthy of Dead of Night, though its ugliness strains credibility in places (could it ever really have been a gift?). The script plays cleverly on our uncertainty about the doll’s exact role – throwing in some invented mythology of cult worship – but, in the end, the strange back-story only enriches the film’s ambiguity and its impact.

So how does this micro-budget work stand up against say Hammer’s psycho pictures? The answer is pretty well. It is persuasively acted, handsomely shot and well enough written with quite a few locations: big old house, swimming pool, roads, shop etc. I would rate it as a much better, and also more frightening, film than say Hammer’s Paranoiac And the only micro-budget giveaway is that scenes seem to play a little longer than perhaps they might in a movie with more resources. But this does not really hurt since (with a few exceptions like the hospital diagnosis at the front) the pace is sustained well and the horrific moments impress too with Nicola Wright’s pretty amazing performance holding its centre. So micro-budget clearly does have its rewards. And it is only unfortunate that the later sequel The Legend of Humpty Dumpty – not from the same team – moves back into much more familiar slasher territory.

After this, by the Spring of 2021, and still working at breakneck speed, Chambers was back to demonic action thrillers with Exorcist Vengeance starring Robert Bronzi (a Charles Bronson lookalike) as a gun-toting priest with a tough line in exorcism. The film, co-directed with Rebecca Matthews/Becca Harani is a hybrid: part action, part supernatural, part slasher and part whodunit, meaning the family at the centre have to wrestle with a possessing demon but also a possible serial killer! Most of the usual actors are present including Nicola Wright and the strands all eventually merge but not to any great effect. Chambers followed it with Beneath the Surface (2022) a shark movie which he didn’t write and then an action adventure. Currently he is back to producing various horror fairy-tale subjects which no doubt hope to capitalise on the same novelty success the company had with, what has proved to be its breakthrough picture: Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.

Pooh, directed and written by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, with Chambers producing, remains the company’s biggest hit to date and the film that put micro-budget on the map in a way it never was before, which may be a pity as it is not the best by any means. The plot – in which a group of girl students rent a vacation home and find themselves threatened by feral creatures – sounds on paper almost identical to the studio’s other fare in this vein like Cannibal Troll. But Frake-Waterfield’s direction and script are slightly different. In some ways its action is more accomplished, there is a more professional suspenseful feel, no doubt partly because the budget is higher with more shooting time. But the action also has much more of an exploitative sexual vibe (a woman’s clothes are ripped off during one of the attacks), something accentuated by the fact we are never convinced for a minute these assailants are creatures, they seem more like murderous male psychos in masks. So for me, despite its supposed link to childhood, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has, if anything, too little fairy-tale and seems just like a more aggressive and violent return to the old, and now somewhat tired, slasher model while lacking the relevance or the impact of The Final Scream.

Even so, it grossed five million dollars from its tiny budget, meaning not only Bambi but Peter Pan and other now non-copyright children’s characters are being lined up by Scott Chambers and Rhys Frake-Waterfield for the same treatment. Can these work? It is certainly true that the fairy-tale and the horror genre have the same roots and much in common from Perrault and Grimm via George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis to Enid Blyton (at her best) and Angela Carter. The good fairy tales are never, and were never, anodyne. Even the idea of Peter Pan might work, simply because so many of its elements are close to horror: Barrie’s unexpurgated and rarely shown last act (in which Wendy has grown up and can’t let Peter see) regularly shocks RSC audiences when it’s performed. But unless the Chambers studio takes a different approach to Pooh, which seems highly unlikely given the distributor will want the same again, it’s hard to see this going very far. Barring a break-through I suspect the use of uncopyrighted nursery characters will be looked back on as a brief novelty, just like the mash-up craze²¹ which ended abruptly after the massive box-office failure of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

But that does not and should not mean the indie horror stable that gave us Pooh is done. For there is clearly real talent here with the better scripts coming from Chambers himself, at least in the categories I have covered. And one other film from the studio needs to be mentioned, namely The Candy Witch from 2020 running unusually long at 94 minutes (length seems to be a good sign with this studio – Conjuring the Genie and Curse of Humpty Dumpty are also over 90, longer than the usual output). This was written by Chambers but directed by his co-producing partner Rebecca Matthews/Becca Hirani who has 65 producer credits and has directed or co-directed at least nine films.

The Candy Witch is the story of a family, haunted by the ghost of a supposedly abusive nanny, who call in an internet ghostbuster team. The candy witch herself turns out not really to be a witch at all or an abuser but an oddly noble, if vengeful, character, played effectively by Kate Lush, alongside Abi Casson Thompson who has starred in around ten of these films including Cupid. Like that one, Candy Witch dates from the mid-Atlantic period of the studio’s output and the family in the story – though living in England –are mainly American. But that does not seem particularly outlandish here and the narrative works well, with some good twists and a clever reveal. It will be interesting to see whether Matthews does more work like this, her last directing credit was Nutcracker Massacre in 2022, though a haunted hotel movie, The Elevator, is on the way..

The Scott Chambers studio may be the most prolific, but it is still only the tip of the iceberg in micro-budget indie horror so what about the rest? As yet, few British micro-budget horror filmmakers have moved on to big Hollywood movies but Rob Savage managed it thanks to Host (2020), made for the admittedly high-end budget of $100,000 during lockdown. Savage had started out at in his teens by writing directing and photographing Strings in 2012, a moody study of teenagers, which cost only £3,000 but had an impressively fluid European visual style and a powerfully alienated feel. The film deservedly won an award and Savage followed it up with Host, modestly financed by the horror streamer Shudder.

The story here is simple and beautifully executed: during Covid lockdown five teenage girls and a male friend decide to conduct an internet seance on zoom which slowly descends into fear and chaos. A slightly similar plot had worked really well with the hit American horror movie Unfriended in 2014, which had a group of chatting high school friends who were joined by a dead girl. In Host the idea of an online séance is equally effective, the interaction between the teenagers seems completely real with much of the action clearly improvised and the cast using their real names, proving just how far UK horror has come since the feeble earlier attempts at teenage banter. Savage also cleverly employed the Blair Witch technique of unleashing actual scares and unexpected footage on his hapless cast, making the performances extremely convincing: Jemma Moore is a stand-out while, in a very deft touch, the séance is led by a slightly insipid Scottish spiritualist (played wonderfully by Seylan Baxter) whose reassurances have a chilling air of corporate hospitality and only make things far worse: ‘It’s called possessed,’ she says sweetly, ‘but that does not need to be a negative thing …’

Host (Rob Savage, UK, 2020).

Host proved to be a big critical success, even getting a limited movie release in a few countries and was deservedly nominated for several awards. As a result of those two micro-budgeters Savage got a deal with Blumhouse and – though the first movie Dashcam was a disappointment, featuring rapper Annie Hardy racing crazily around London in a dashcam footage movie, that was generally felt to be overkill in every respect – he went on to an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Boogeyman set in Louisiana. Fully US-funded, and at $35 million costing 350 times what Host cost, his career shows how far, in just two years, a micro-budget hit can take you.

What of the other filmmakers in this hugely crowded field? The closest in thematic territory to Hammer is the talented Steve Lawson, who is making massively different films from the Chambers stable and most of the others. Not only has he tended to go for period gothic subjects, he has also used his limited resources to build the films around dramatic development and polished dialogue rather than action.

This makes for a very distinct tone and some will find it too play-like but it can work for a narrow canvas. Lawson’s Ripper Untold (2021), for example, avoids the more difficult areas of the subject with a fresh take on the Ripper murders, focusing on the now common assumption that the Ripper persona was in fact probably a creation of the press. We see the action mainly from the perspective of the journalist Stubb (Chris Bell) but also the doctor conducting the post-mortems (Jonathan Hansler), who is having difficulties with drink and his marriage. There are few exteriors and little action but the mood and lighting and performances are strong with Hansler, in particular, pitch perfect. I did guess the ending but only very late on and it is an intriguing new slant on the story, being a kind of Gaslight in reverse.

After it, Lawson went on to do Jekyll and Hyde, which offers a fresh period take on the Stevenson story. The sets are as textured as ever but I found it just too slowly paced to hold the attention and the fact we think we know the story, even though it ends with a surprise, did not help. But Lawson followed it with a much better film, a new angle on the Mummy genre The Mummy: Resurrection (2022), made in ten days, largely at Haden Hill House Museum in the West Midlands.

It is astonishing to think that a film like The Mummy: Resurrection, costing a few thousand pounds, can exist in exactly the same consumer space as Universal’s 2017 The Mummy, budgeted at $125 million! Lawson’s entire budget probably amounted to less than a day’s catering on the Hollywood movie and, in any other consumer field, that would make The Mummy: Resurrection almost the equivalent of counterfeit goods. But the irony is that – though The Mummy: Resurrection is a fairly modest talky Victorian short story – it is, in its limited aspirations, arguably more successful than the 2017 movie with Tom Cruise that notoriously killed off Universal’s Dark Universe franchise.

This is not to make huge claims for Lawson’s film which does not have quite the same originality as Ripper Untold and feels more like a period Twilight Zone, or Inner Sanctum short story, reflecting Victorian greed and class politics. But it remains a refreshing addition to the Mummy genre, which was – apart from the original – one of Hammer’s least interesting franchises. The relatively modest action in Lawson’s film takes place largely in a Victorian house and holds the attention for, despite a slightly overwrought ending, there’s an impressive authenticity about the period and the characters, not least the script’s awareness of the class system that operated so ruthlessly in Victorian society.

At times, it is true, budget constraint can make Lawson’s work feel like very old-school ‘quality’ TV drama. Epic subjects, like his Dracula stuff, don’t lend themselves to it so well – their canvas being just too big for his miniaturist style. But his best films, set it would seem mainly in Victorian London, have the advantage of structure, well-drawn characters and quite innovative stories, making them stand out from much of the rest of the field.

Another prolific horror director in micro-budget is Charlie Steeds – a big fan of 1970s US horror and directors like John Carpenter and Lucio Fulci – whose output via his company Dark Temple Motion Pictures has been remarkable and varied. Starting with the action film Deadman Apocalypse made for £25,000 in 2016, he has written, directed and personally shot as cinematographer no less than ten films since, working in various genres, including action horror like Escape From Cannibal Farm (2017) the clubbing vampire movie Vampire Virus (2020, set in the US but shot here) and the comic Victorian period A Werewolf in England (2020).

Steeds’ ambition and enterprise are obvious (he builds many of his sets himself ), even if they have not always been matched by his resources. But one film that stands out is the British ghost story An English Haunting (2020). Whether accidentally or not this feels very much like a clever reimagining of the classic M. R. James story Lost Hearts, in fact its action could almost be taking place thirty or so years after that story’s narrative.

Set in the 1960s at the isolated but magnificent Clemonte Hall (actually Shuckburgh Hall in Warwickshire), the plot concerns an impoverished and alcoholic mother who arrives with her grown up son to care for her estranged and dying father. Mysteries proliferate, not least the discovery of some scary recording tape – used in slightly the same way as the creepy Super-8 home movies of Sinister – while the troubled relationship, between the guilt-ridden mother and son, adds texture to the horrific revelations and to the full-on Satanist denouement of sacrifice and possession.

An English Haunting was made as recently as 2020 but that is now ancient history for Steeds. Almost immediately after it, he shot two confidently directed historical horrors, milking good locations, though sometimes with the handicap of talky historical exposition. These were Haunting of the Tower of London (2022) and Werewolf Castle (2021) – both using Caldicot Castle in Wales.

Then he went on to the hugely ambitious Lovecraft-inspired period Arctic epic Freeze – shot partly in Norway and also aboard Brunel’s historic iron passenger steamship SS Great Britain, moored in Bristol. The story chronicles a doomed Victorian rescue voyage and an encounter with monstrous fish-men who intend to take over England, the kind of film in fact Hammer toyed with, but could never see a way to make. Much of this ‘frozen white nightmare’ is elegantly done, a real labour of love, but in the end, for a film so adventurous, it is a bit dialogue heavy. The story is very loosely drawn from Lovecaft’s great arctic horror novella At the Mountains of Madness, ²² which Guillermo Del Toro famously tried to film for $150 million in 2011 (it would be far more today), until Universal pulled the plug. No doubt working on a shoestring (though not always showing it) there is considerable beauty in Steeds’ labour of love and you can’t help being awed by his dedication but perhaps in the end this menacing subject, set as it is in the arctic wastes, needs more money and specifically more contrast to match its bleakness.

Steeds went on to make Gods of the Deep, an underwater sci-fi film (unseen, as yet) before moving to America to script and direct the American horror movie Night Harvest set in 1970s Tennessee. His ability to switch subjects so speedily is not only startling but highly impressive.

As must be clear from the above, the sheer turnaround in micro-budget genre is happening so fast it can be hard to keep pace and here I can only touch on the most obvious studios and filmmakers. In addition to all these there are also a number of one-offs where the money is raised in other ways so that the filmmakers are not necessarily having to meet the demands of a distributor and an algorithm.

One example from the early days of micro-budget indie horror is the rare portmanteau film Bordello Death Tales (2009). The title is ironic, these are macabre but satirical short films set around a highly improbable and somewhat customer unfriendly brothel at the end of a dark rainy street. The episodes are written directed and edited by three filmmakers (James Eaves, Pat Higgins and Alan Ronald), all of whom play on the notions, foibles and negatives of male sexuality in a way Amicus never would or could have touched (for as discussed Amicus tended to shy away from sex, much more so than Hammer). In the first segment Ripper, a sex killer finds his target demonically equipped to avenge his former victims, in the second Stitch Girl an eccentric and pompous client discovers his perfect partner is a macabre body composite while the third Vice Girl deals quite cleverly with internet sex and a narcissistic politician.

Bordello Death Tales isn’t exactly mainstream horror, more postmodern short fables, which reference horror themes, but it makes a change from the copying of past horror hits and also shows the flexibility that micro-budget material can have. There would surely be mileage now in a similar kind of composite to showcase some of the newer women filmmakers in the field.

As previously stated, crowdfunding can be another major source of revenue for these productions and one of the earliest to utilise it was 2014’s The Sleeping Room, the feature film debut of TV director John Shackleton scripted by Ross Jameson, Alex Chandon and Shackleton himself (who also co-wrote and produced an earlier 2011 social media horror thriller set on a plane The Panic Button).

The Sleeping Room, which is a contemporary ghost/possession story, is strong on visual atmosphere and was shot entirely in Brighton, starting with the heroine’s discovery of a secret room in a dilapidated former Victorian brothel. The film’s thematic territory is highly original, its hauntings being triggered by the sleazy Brighton of the late Victorian and early Edwardian era and by the very earliest makers of porn and snuff movies for slot machines. Historically this is quite a cunning combination for early filmmaking did indeed thrive in 1890s Brighton at exactly the time when the town’s reputation was it its raunchiest, symbolized here by an evocative Mutoscope²³ peep machine with flickering titled cards. In fact, many of the best ideas in The Sleeping Room are slightly reminiscent of the great noir writer and Brighton native, Patrick Hamilton, who created a whole subgenre with Gaslight and often wrote about the town’s low life.

The Sleeping Room (John Shackleton, UK, 2014).

Yet if The Sleeping Room’s historical background is vivid (albeit perhaps a little exaggerated) and original, its contemporary story of a sex worker, kept by a crazed gangster and his partner, seems more old-fashioned, almost like something out of the 1950s. Leila Mimmack has a good and quite subtle screen presence as Blue the ‘call girl’; yet even that term seems a bit anachronistic and surely no sex worker in the twenty-first century is likely to ask a client, as she does, why they can’t get a proper girlfriend? At its best – the images of the past and the early films – The Sleeping Room is very striking and, though barely reviewed, one of the fan sites – Nerdly – was massively enthusiastic, feeling it had the makings of a Hammer-style classic. True, you can’t imagine Anthony Hinds facilitating the script quite as it stands, but then to be fair, he’d have had more time and more money.

Finally, another more recent one-off Afraid of the Dark (2021) has proved you can make a perfectly good suspenseful horror film on a rock bottom micro-budget if your ideas and execution are good enough. This thoughtful psychological horror thriller written and directed by first-timers Jonathon Green and Miles Keyland, backed by a very youthful team, is recorded as costing £4,000! It concerns Hannah (Amy Lally) a teenage schoolgirl, desperately trying to cope with the sudden mental turmoil of her best friend Olivia (played by Boo Miller). One day Hannah sees something mysterious in the woods and then starts to receive a series of strange and threatening messages.

In mainstream higher budget horror, the theme of ‘is this really happening or am I crazy?’ has a very high failure rate. Too often the audience just stops caring, as in the relatively high budget Marc Evans British horror Trauma (2004) starring Colin Firth or the American Secret Window with Johnny Depp (2004), both of which were commercially unsuccessful. If a movie is casting doubt on a lead character’s sanity, then it is absolutely crucial the character has a strong sympathy lock on the audience. That is why the best films in the genre, whether their madness is manipulated (Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, Holt/Sangster’s Taste of Fear) or real (Polanski’s Repulsion) work incredibly hard to achieve such a lock.

Afraid of the Dark is not a milestone, as those titles were, but Amy Lally gives such a good performance as Hannah and the plot is paced so well that it carries a conviction most recent similar stories have lacked, maintaining our sympathy even where it falters in other areas. Yes, its ending is a little mystifying and the mood is very downbeat, but we really understand the loneliness, anxiety and confusion of Hannah and want to resolve the strange mysteries that surround her. The film deserves to be much better known, and I am grateful to David Dent (on the website Dark Eyes of London) for drawing attention to it. Unfortunately the team behind it are yet to make another.

But then that seems to be the problem with micro-budget genre filmmaking. Production may be easier and there is clearly talent here, but the rewards remain uncertain and the future often elusive. Right now the field is certainly thriving but can this remarkable pace be sustained? I’ll come back to this question at the end of the chapter.

3.

ESTABLISHED BRITISH HORROR FILMMAKERS

The third category in the current proliferation of UK horror is essentially the type of film I discussed in earlier editions of this book. Namely, British filmmakers who have managed to get a career out of mainstream commercial higher budget horror or fantasy, often now accompanying it with high-end TV. At the top of this tree is US money, full cinema distribution and press attention, lower down (albeit still with far higher budgets than in micro-budget), filmmakers working with less profile, and occasionally getting cinema release, but still maintaining a consistent presence and often supplementing their work with TV.

Inevitably, at this higher end of British horror film production, there are far fewer films than in the micro-budget category. So far, there is not much cross-over between the two, but that may come and many of the filmmakers in the first indie horror drama category could, in due course, join this group. Included here too, at the high-end of recent UK horror production are the (comparatively) high-budget international movies from the new Hammer studio which, as I write, has just changed hands.

Christopher Smith

Going back to the turn of the century, before micro-budget, one of the great pluses of the mainstream horror boom was that, at last, it enabled some British filmmakers to pursue a career in horror movies (often alongside other films) rather than being forced out of the business as happened painfully often in the 1980s and 90s.

A good example is the career of director/writer Christopher Smith, who was fortunate to make his first movie in 2004 as the ice was breaking. And in doing so he also brought joy to horror fans everywhere by finally returning a ghoul to the London underground in his pacy Creep made for £5 million in 2004 with help from the British Film Council. This is about £9 million in today’s money, an astonishingly high sum by the standards of the last section but then 2004 was just before full digital kicked in.

Creep was an utterly relentless film about a German girl being chased through the tunnels and secret places below London’s streets, demonstrating how little exposition and explanation horror seems to want or need these days. Even the mysterious underground hospital and ruined operating theatre at the film’s climax is never explained, for the days when an expert would have been wheeled in to give us the history (as in the other classic London Underground horror Death Line) were long gone. Here you had to work out what you could from the tearaway visuals which left some a little frustrated and the film was not particularly well liked by critics who found it too raw. But they had to acknowledge several of its chase sequences were riveting and, in many ways, it worked better in terms of edge-of-seat suspense than Death Line did.

Smith’s follow-up, Severance, was about cretinous westerners in Eastern Europe, who stumble on homicidal mutant killers left over from some secret concentration camp. Unlike Creep, which was perhaps just a little lacking in audience relief, Severance has almost too much, moving as it does rapidly into gags. But its comic performances are well honed, especially by Tim McInerney, and there are some memorably surreal moments.

If these two films had been made in the dog days of the early 90s, that might have been it for Smith’s career, through no fault of his own, but at the end of the noughties the pace of production was accelerating and now Smith moved on to something quite ambitious with (at £12 million) twice the budget of these earlier films. Shot in Queensland, Australia, Triangle, which he both wrote and directed, belongs to that twisty, time loop (and often afterlife) genre that includes Dead of Night, the more obscure Night of the Following Day (1969) and (though in a slightly different way) Jacob’s Ladder, meaning that in what follows there must be spoilers or it is impossible to discuss.

At the start of the film a woman, with a troubled autistic son wakes up from a dream and comforts him, before leaving him to sail on her boyfriend’s yacht with some other acquaintances. Gradually the voyage becomes nightmarish and, after a storm, they take refuge on a strange deserted ocean liner, which appears to be inhabited by some unknown murderous killer. Until it transpires we are in some kind of horrific time loop where violent events repeat themselves. The heroine starts seeing multiple images of herself and slowly becomes obsessed by the notion she must kill all the others in order to escape. Eventually she finds herself back on dry land and then in her home, but she is still in conflict with her other old self, horrified as she watches the way it seems to treat her child. And this leads to a tragedy which, we now see, triggered the whole internalised death voyage that forms most of the film.

I’ll confess I have a considerable liking for this kind of story, which has provided some of the genre’s greatest frissons – like Tim Robbins’s tragic ‘awakening’ from happiness to a bath of cold ice in Jacob’s Ladder, or the predictive nightmare at the end of Dead of Night – and the first half of Triangle works pretty well. But problems arise from the point we grasp the nature of the doom loop spiral. At this stage of the film the suspense and tension, which is well handled by Smith with good performances, slacken because the action is getting too weird to take seriously. The ambition is certainly admirable but, even if this was some Marvel adventure, there are limits as to how much you can engage with a heroine fighting multiple copies of herself – and here we know that it must be in her head. The final revelation of what triggered this mental self-conflict is, when it comes, engaging, empathetic and thought-provoking but its connection to the bulk of the story is perhaps just a little too distant.

Even so Triangle got some deservedly good reviews and Smith was able to follow it in 2010 with Black Death, an intriguing and highly ambitious English historical horror film which is probably his best so far and good enough to invite comparison with Witchfinder General. Dario Poloni wrote the script, but Smith is credited as co-writer in most accounts.

Beautifully shot on German rural locations in Saxony, which give it a serious mystical edge, Black Death, set in 1348, explores an extraordinary conflict between faith and disbelief, played out not so much in words as in visceral action.

Eddie Redmayne, cast just before he broke into major stardom, plays the innocent young monk Osmund, who has fallen in love against his vows. Hoping to be reunited with his beloved, he volunteers to leave his isolated monastery on the edge of a marshland and join a party of soldiers led by a papal envoy (Sean Bean) searching for a far off, apparently plague-free village ruled by a necromancer and witch who they are ordered to destroy. The parallel with Conrad’s colonial tale of horror Heart of Darkness, in which the young inexperienced Marlow sets out through unknown territory to confront the mad near-supernatural figure Kurtz, is striking. And, much to his credit, Smith milks the mesmerizing beauty of this dark quest, packing the film with suspense, incident and a cruel streak of violence.

There is also a clever if cynical twist in what they find and evidently Smith fought hard to moderate the original ending of the script and keep it free of supernatural devilry, almost certainly the right decision. But a major trap still arises, which may have prevented this potentially classic film from achieving its full effect. Unlike Witchfinder and, despite the elimination of the supernatural, it still does half-subscribe to the notion of the evil witch-like woman, and – given our knowledge of the persecution of witches – that is hard for a modern audience to take. Also, in a coda, the hero here becomes a cold-blooded avenger, a similar message to ‘Witchfinder’, but there we could completely understand the hero’s impulsive fury in the moment. Here the time cut and the coldness of it, especially since Osmund was an idealistic monk, makes it less understandable and therefore somewhat less effective.

After this ambitious film, Smith did a spell in high-end TV, but then in 2016 wrote and directed Detour, a compelling neo-noir fantasy action thriller about Harper a Californian law student, who blames his unfaithful step-father for his mother’s coma after a car accident. In the midst of his grief, at a bar, he encounters Johnny Ray, a troubled criminal with his stripper girlfriend, and confesses a secret wish to kill his step-father. Next morning Johnny turns up at his house, violently demanding they go ahead with the murder plan. At this point (as in the British romcom Sliding Doors), the narrative seems to split. In one story Harper refuses, in another he succumbs and both stories become increasingly dangerous.

From here, the film moves at quite a pace, echoing Hitchcock and Strangers on a Train as well as the sleazy chaotic violence of Tarantino with more than a few references to great noir classics of the past including the earlier Detour of 1945. The cast are terrific, notably Tye Sheridan (who went on shortly after to star for Spielberg in Ready Player One) as Harper, with the British actress Bel Powley pitch perfect as the sad stripper and Emory Cohen (who starred in The AO and Brooklyn) chillingly out of control as Johnny. Amazingly, most of it, other than the Las Vegas sequence, was filmed in South Africa but it feels completely authentic. And, as in Black Death, there is a very clever twist, this time involving a phone call which is not what it seems at all.

In terms of character though, there might have been a case for making the hero Harper more sympathetic and ordinary at the start as Hitchcock might have done: it never seems quite clear why this conventional law student has a crazed and gabbling stoner as his best friend and the film has its confusing moments, especially in the last act when the plots seem to merge until it is revealed they never diverged at all and it was just a time cut. That turned off some critics though in terms of confusion, it is nothing compared to, say, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

Smith’s last film to be released here, as I write, The Banishing (2020) was shot largely in Yorkshire and Surrey. Inspired very loosely by the famous haunted house Borley Rectory, it concerns a young vicar who in 1938 brings his new wife and her young child to an old British rectory. Slowly we discover the rectory stands on the remains of the cursed site of a much older heretical sect which punished women in horrible ways.

The main originality in this demonic abduction story is the period, for The Banishing is set during the disgraceful period of the Munich accord and the hollow promise of ‘Peace in Our Time’ when Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did a deal with Hitler. This underlying political theme, with the local Bishop a Nazi sympathiser, is unusual and brings freshness to the more familiar story of the child’s demonic imaginary friend, especially since the performances are strong, most notably John Hefferman as the timid, slightly sad, vicar and Jessica Brown Findlay as his wife. Sean Harris also puts in a slightly wild turn, as the local occultist Harry Reed (based loosely on the historic ghost hunter Harry Price) who knows too much for his own good and has therefore been targeted by the pro-Nazi faction in the church.

Smith handles the scares with his usual skill and the Nazi theme is not quite as daft as it might seem – there was a fascist strain in the Church of England in the 1930s – indeed there are records of church services being conducted for uniformed fascists, including a notorious Black shirt Christening at Holy Trinity Church Sloane Square London in February 1934. The film takes this even further, with a rural Bishop who seems to have involvement in demonic Nazi schemes and a direct line to the Third Reich. If, at times perhaps, this comes perhaps a bit too close to all-out Dennis Wheatley Nazi occult territory, The Banishing still confirms yet again just how much narrative originality and imagination Smith has been bringing to British horror.

Alex Garland

The originator of 28 Days Later and its sequels (for there may soon be another: 28 Years Later) first came to attention as a novelist with his story The Beach, though in interviews Garland admits to feeling pretty negative about that first novel. Even so, he would seem to have a knack for spawning horror franchises for, as we’ve seen, the film and novel of The Beach – about a secret and dangerous backpacker’s idyll off the coast of Thailand which descends into violence – has given rise to a whole cycle of films (and books) in the ‘Paradise Lost’ or ‘Backpackers Nightmare’ genre; here young fun-loving western tourists in exotic places find themselves in various nightmare scenarios from psychos or demons or monsters or ancient curses or even harvesters of body organs, the last featuring in Paradise Lost (originally Turistas) set in Brazil. That one actually stole Garland’s geographical idea – unused by Boyle’s movie – of a flooded cave leading to a concealed location. Hostel, Wolf Creek and several others come into the same category but Garland was there first.

After writing the script of 28 Days Later and Sunshine (both discussed earlier), he went on to adapt the moving, dystopian clone novel Never Let Me Go, but came into his own when he turned to directing with the wholly original Ex Machina in 2014.

Ex Machina is in a class of its own, one of the most accomplished and original British horror films of the new century. It is a near-perfect fusion of old and new, utilising the deceptive simplicity of a classic horror story to deal with the burningly topical theme of Artificial Intelligence.

And if its subject echoes Frankenstein, with many nods to the original novel’s poignancy and its central conundrum, the film’s structure is strangely similar to Dracula. The innocent traveller Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is transported through a foreign land by helicopter (with the pilot quite as awed by his destination as Jonathan Harker’s coachman) to an isolated lair where the mysterious and threatening host Nathan (Oscar Isaac) dazzles and confounds him. The billionaire tech genius host (a perfect modern analogy for the all-powerful Count) controls access to all parts of his threatening domain, constantly playing on Caleb’s fears as he parades his control over the seductive, yet possibly lethal, female creatures he’s created in a way that makes comparison with both classic horror works irresistible. ‘I’m like her dad’, he says at one point, of one of his creations.

The sheer ambiguity and threat of Nathan’s character is brilliantly achieved, very physical, and a little excessive in drinking and manner, but incredibly sharp. On first viewing I wondered why Garland had not made Nathan more like a boyish Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs but I now see just how easily this might have risked the character descending into a standard evil techie. Instead, Nathan has an off-puttingly physical and yet cerebral, presence that keeps you guessing throughout. A boyish genius would have been instantly suspect but, as Nathan swills beer and mouths ‘great guy, instant pals and so on’, with cruel sardonic relish, he is not merely intimidating, but also oddly vulnerable, so you really cannot quite work out what his true designs are. Meanwhile, Gleeson (who stunned with his recent performance as Sam the troubled serial killer in the Disney streamer The Patient) is perfect as the sympathetic yet still formidable Caleb. Indeed, nothing in this castle of secrets (Bluebeard being another reference) is as it seems – least of all the robots – so hauntingly portrayed, especially by Alicia Viaknder, who pleads for help just like the lost beautiful vampire in the Hammer Dracula.

Exploring the destructive aspects of male sexuality, as well as enormously serious and contemporary philosophical questions, Ex Machina remains the most perfectly realised and important British horror for decades, and it catapulted Garland, in one movie, to A-List filmmaker.

He followed it with Annihilation an epic science fiction movie set on the Florida coast of America, budgeted at $40 million (around twice what Ex Machina cost). Based loosely on a novel by Jeff VanderMeer, the film strongly echoes H. P. Lovecraft’s classic The Colour Out of Space in which an area of land (here ‘the glimmer’) has been contaminated by something extra-terrestrial so that nightmarish biological and genetic changes are taking place. Shooting his locations to rather amazing effect, in the UK not the US, Garland approaches the subject with the utmost seriousness, delivering a dark and haunting story in which biologist/former soldier (Natalie Portman) is briefly reunited with her husband (Oscar Isaac), who has been transformed by the zone and is close to death. As a result, she is motivated to lead a group into ‘the glimmer’ to solve its mystery. The enigmatic ending of the film has been compared in its intensity and ambition to Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 and it is a pity that, owing to some reported last-minute jitters by the backers Skydance, the film ended up being released largely on Netflix. This was less than ideal, given it has a visual, almost abstract, ending, clearly designed for the big screen, as Garland tried to convey a sense of alien contact.

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, UK/US, 2014).

Yet, from another perspective, you can understand Skydance’s anxiety. Ex Machina was anchored by its compact story and the sympathetic character of Caleb. In Annihilation, by contrast, there is a bleakness in the characterisation of the central character Lena, which makes it slightly harder for an audience to relate to her quest.

Even so, Annihilation offered further proof that Garland is an exceptional filmmaker. And for his most-recently-released British film he went back, albeit in a contemporary and postmodern way, to a gothic folk horror staple, the lonely woman in jeopardy in a creepy English village and its countryside.

The story concerns Harper (Jessie Buckley), a woman in the aftermath of an abusive relationship with her now dead husband, who seeks refuge in a gorgeous English country setting (exquisitely rendered by cinematographer Rob Hardy) and finds all the men in the village increasingly threatening: these include a dim, somewhat shambling, landlord; an over-intense vicar; a policeman; and even a grotesque, naked stalker, who keeps popping up like some pagan Jack-in-the-Green. Accentuating the air of menace, all these men – even the stalker – are played by the same actor, Rory Kinnear, who renders each one so differently that a device, normally associated with comedy, works well here as threat. The flashbacks to Harper’s abusive relationship are also incredibly powerful, with a phenomenal performance by Paapa Essiedu.

At the film’s violent climax, all the men terrorise Harper, perhaps most notably the vicar who tries to rape her while quoting Yeats’ poem about rape, Leda and the Swan. And finally, in a sequence apparently inspired by the Japanese Manga cartoon Attack on Titan, we witness a whole chain of these men (partly mutilated), giving birth to other grown men, the last of which is her dead husband, possibly offering closure of a sort.

Many found this ending, of what is an otherwise fascinating film, baffling. Was it all a hallucination? Garland is on record as saying it would be wrong to conclude the climax is all in Harper’s mind but, if not, how can we reconcile all this with the final shot where Harper greets her girlfriend and life apparently goes on? There is clearly much potent meaning in the film’s horrific distillation of toxic masculinity and male vulnerability. It relates to Harper’s husband’s death – a harrowing sequence – but, if the fusion is not in her mind, then how and where? Or, maybe, the director just means we should not underestimate the reality of Harper’s experience. The enigma over this ending may have contributed to the film’s muted box-office performance but, even so, the film was sufficiently fascinating to cement Garland’s standing as the most exciting British director of horror and fantasy since Terence Fisher – though the massive contrast between their work perfectly illustrates a changing genre and changing times (the only tiny resemblance being an extraordinarily deft use of colour). In terms of content, the filmmaker Garland’s work recalls most is possibly Roman Polanski, and Men is, at this point, probably the most overtly feminist updating of Repulsion we’ve yet seen.

Meanwhile his latest, Civil War, is every inch an Anerican film, in which breakaway US states fight a dictator of a President and we follow the experiences of a group of war photographers (including Kirsten Dunst), capturing hair-raising action. There are some very tense scary sequences and we can only hope in years to come it will still be classifiable as fantasy.

Ciaron Foy

Hitchcock, when asked about his predilection for horror (since, even without Psycho, he would still be one of horror’s founding fathers), generally repeated the not particularly convincing story of how as a child he was locked up in a police cell on his father’s instructions to teach him a lesson. Was this true, was his creativity unlocked by childhood trauma? He kept much of his early life private so we’ll probably never know, especially since a genius for horror can just as easily be founded in a child’s response to scary stories as some biographical incident.

But one extremely talented filmmaker who was certainly imspired by an awful event is the Dublin filmmaker Ciaron Foy: Foy grew up on an estate and, at 18, was subject to a terrifying attack by a gang who beat him with a hammer and threatened him with a filthy syringe held to his throat.²⁴

For a while after this he suffered from agoraphobia, unable to leave his home, until a few months later he heard he’d been accepted for the Irish National Film School and resolved to weave the horror of what had happened into his life-long love of genre. Eventually he would make his breakthrough film Citadel (2012), about a man’s fight against monstrous feral kid-creatures in a condemned tower block.

Foy’s true story will have a chilling resonance to anyone who has seen Citadel. For the film contains (spoiler alert) one of the scariest and best directed moments in recent horror movie history where a woman and child, trying to negotiate a shadowy underpass, are suddenly and horribly attacked. Few filmmakers could bring their audience back from such a supremely dark moment but Foy somehow succeeds and finds a resolution. For this is not hoodie horror in the usual sense, it is about abandoned mutant creatures, even if they may well stand as a kind of metaphor for the hopeless and unloved, living through violence.

Just three years after Citadel, Foy was directing (though not writing) Sinister 2 for Blumhouse and in 2019 he made Eli for Paramount and Netflix before moving on to high-end TV, including two episodes of The Haunting of Bly Manor (discussed under TV) Now there are plans for two horror films he will write and direct, including one set in his home country of Ireland, where Foy evidently still lives, close to where Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.

James Watkins

After co-writing My Little Eye and other screenplays, James Watkins made a spectacular leap forward with his debut as director the prize-winning Eden Lake. It is about a nursery teacher Jenny (Kelly Riley) and her boyfriend Steve (Michael Fassbender) whose romantic weekend at an English lakeside beauty spot turns into a violent nightmare. In one sense therefore the film can be seen as a kind of domestic reworking of the ‘Paradise Lost’ genre where an idyllic escape turns to horror. And, rewatching it, I was struck by just how expertly and subtly it paces the couple’s slow edge-of-seat journey into hell, a ride well worthy of Hitchcock in its build-up of terror, from their first transgressive drive through a hole in a fence to the gradual escalation of incident. The chase sequences are directed with a quite amazing eye for suspense, like the phenomenally tense moment, where the gang stand in a lake-side hut with the trapped couple half-submerged in water below them, a sequence as strong in its way as the classic cave scene in Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Of course, that analogy might fuel the ire of those, like Owen Jones, who complained in his book Chavs that Eden Lake demonized the British working class. But while I agree with much of that book’s thesis, I think Jones is utterly wrong on this point. In the first place, once you study the film’s progression of violence, starting from the point when the couple are facing nothing worse than loud music, it is Steve himself who triggers what happens by somewhat pompously and pointlessly asserting his superiority. He has confused ideas about masculinity (referenced repeatedly in the dialogue) and keeps flaunting his own foolish macho posturing as Jenny tries to control him. This is nothing like, say, Straw Dogs where a middle-class man defends his property and his woman from a savage rural underclass. Steve and Jenny have no more right on this private land than the kids do and, as matters escalate, Steve is consistently portrayed as hot-headed and arrogant, even breaking into a private house in search of revenge as Jenny desperately tries to stop him.

In his discussion of the film in Contemporary British Horror Cinema, Johnny Walker maintains that Steve and Jenny are portrayed as ‘people we should aspire to like’ but he is only half right. It is Jenny who is the real heroine with whom we empathise and who, by the end, has become the focus of the film. Again, the contrast with Straw Dogs is revealing: there the hero is fighting for possession of his home and his woman, giving the audience no other choice for identification, unlike Eden Lake where Jenny is drawn unwittingly into an absurd male struggle for supremacy on neutral territory.

Of course, Brett, the bullying leader of the pubescent gang – brilliantly played by Jack O’Connell – is indeed revealed as a disturbed and horrifying sadist, manipulating and terrifying those around him. But why should we be so squeamish about such characters lurking in the English hinterlands in a horror film when we are happy enough to uncover them in Eastern Europe, South America, Australia, Sweden or any of the multitude of locations where the ‘Paradise Lost’ genre is constantly played out? And ultimately (spoiler), in an electrifyingly constructed final sequence, we uncover the real monster and the cycle of abuse the boy has endured. For Watkins adds an incredible last shot of Brett, which at once stirs cinematic memories of another highly disturbed alienated movie character, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. That film had its controversies but nobody I think ever complained that it unfairly demonized the dispossessed of New York.

Eden Lake is an amazing debut, winning multiple awards, and fortunately the attacks did not seem to hurt it so Watkins’ career was well and truly launched. In due course the new Hammer Films (whose other output is discussed below) chose him to direct their high profile return to the period horror that had once made the studio’s name, The Woman in Black, based on Susan Hill’s ghost novel.

This is the tale of a Victorian solicitor called Arthur Kipps on assignment to the old empty and spooky Eel Marsh house at the end of a causeway. The place turns out to be haunted by the spectre of a woman who lost her child and, when her ghost is seen, a child dies.

It is not the easiest story to adapt because the subject matter, though strongly atmospheric, is also quite sad and there is not all that much action. ITV had made a TV movie of the book in 1989 with a script by none other than Nigel Kneale of Quatermass fame. (effectively his last produced film script). Kneale did Hill’s story straight and the film was reasonably well received but made little lasting impact.

There had also been a highly successful stage adaptation which neatly side-stepped most of the problems: its writer Stephen Mallatratt radically reimagined the plot as a play within a play, showing Arthur Kipps recruiting an actor to stage his story. This enabled the production to milk the ghost-train thrill of the woman in black’s sudden appearance in the theatre in odd places and at unexpected times. But it is near-impossible to transfer such an approach to a feature film.

Watkins was therefore faced with quite a challenge but the script by Jane Goldman (with Watkins contributing) made some very sweeping changes that solved some of the problems. In the first place the story greatly expanded the ‘curse’ so that it is causing real social upheavals in the tiny village close to the house, meaning Kipps is facing violent opposition from the locals. Also Kipps himself is no longer, as in the novel, a lawyer on a routine assignment but a tragic character, struggling to protect his only child. He has lost his wife in childbirth and now is under desperate pressure to make this commission work, or he faces penury. These added touches give the story real poignancy as does the casting of Daniel Radcliffe who – fresh off Harry Potter – turns in one of his best performances as Kipps, making him seem genuinely driven but with a palpable sadness. Visually much work has also gone into the spooky and spectacular old house at the end of a causeway, in fact its hallway – by design or intention – looks extremely like the great Hammer designer Bernard Robinson’s spectacular set for the hall and castle of Hammer’s first Dracula.

At times, it is true the film has to work its haunted tropes very hard to keep up momentum, most notably in a long 13-minute dialogueless night scene at the end of the first hour which sometimes threatens to run out of stream. But, thanks to Watkins, and the great visual texture provided by cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones, it holds the pace. One other potential pitfall was the inherently depressing nature of the material. It is true horror films now threaten children in a way they never did before, but there is a limit to the amount of parental tragedies an audience can take so the unexpectedly ‘up’ ending here, though perhaps a little brazen, helped corrects the balance. Consequently, Woman in Black was a huge hit, grossing more than seven times its $17 million budget worldwide.²⁵

Some indication of the scale of this achievement may be offered by glancing quickly at the film’s sequel minus Watkins or Goldman. The ending of the original had ensured Daniel Radcliffe could not return, so Hammer used the original novelist Susan Hill’s idea of updating the story to World War II with child evacuees sent to haunted Eel Marsh House.

The problem with this approach is the real driver of the original was not children per se but parental guilt, personified by Radcliffe’s stand-out performance. Trying to make up for his absence, the new script gives us not one but three characters suffering from separate family traumas: a teacher whose baby was removed after birth, a traumatised airman who was deemed a coward and a boy whose parents died in the blitz and is now reluctant to speak. It is too rich a mix and the result – for all its ghostly paraphernalia – is just depressing and silly, lacking focus, though to be fair it is quite hard to see how the impact of the original could ever be matched without its hero. The sequel cost almost as much to make as the first but unsurprisingly did much less well, evidently ending the new Hammer’s first and so far last franchise.

Meanwhile. after his very successful adaptation of Woman in Black, Watkins moved on to high-end TV (McMafia, The Ipcress File) and an action feature The Take, But he is now returning to horror, filming for Blumhouse and Universal his own scripted remake of one of the most original European horror films of recent times, Christian Tafdrup’s See No Evil, (discussed at the end of this chapter). Given its (albeit middle-class) echoes of Eden Lake, the combination seems shrewd, though some recent reports suggest the actors’ strike may have affected shooting.

Hammer’s Resurrection

In the last months before the publication of the second edition of New Heritage (2007), as mentioned above, a completely new incarnation of Hammer had been launched with much fanfare. It was backed by a team of experienced producers and sales agents including Guy East and Nigel Sinclair and headed up by producer Simon Oakes, known before this point mainly for producing TV series like The Adventures of William Tell and Chillers, a multi-starred anthology series adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s short stories.

This new version of Hammer appeared, certainly at first, to have more resources and flair than any of the previous attempts to re-ignite the brand. It launched with a massive party at the Cannes Film festival in 2007 and announced a serious investment programme, which would mine the Hammer library but also mount ambitious new horror films. Has this promise been fulfilled in the fifteen years since?

In one sense certainly it has in that the new Hammer made seven theatrical movies since it came into being. Such an output would not of course have impressed Sir James Carreras when Hammer was averaging nine titles per year but in terms of movie release (if not streamers) these days are long gone and, given these were high budget features, it is an impressive record even if heavy promotion of the studio’s name has been reserved for DVD rather than theatrical. The company also had a huge hit with The Woman in Black (discussed above). But what of the other titles?

Hammer had kicked off rather boldly, in terms of form not content, with After the Rave, a vampire internet serial about a British soldier on his way to the Iraq war who’s searching for his girlfriend and finds a vampire cult. It was made by German video director Matthias Hoene (who also directed the comedy horror Cockneys Versus Zombies) with even a small scene for veteran Hammer vampire queen Ingrid Pitt.²⁶ But it went out on the ill-fated platform My Space, not even airing its final episode (with Pitt) till the DVD came along.

So it was largely forgotten by the time Hammer launched their first proper movie release, Let Me In, a sensitive remake of the Swedish 1980s-set vampire movie and novel Let The Right One In. Hammer had originally offered the director of the original, Tomas Alfredson, the chance to direct an English language version but he refused so the job went to the highly rated US filmmaker Matt Reeves (director of Cloverfield) who switched the original film’s locale to New Mexico USA. In the original film, like this remake, a bullied abused boy meets a vampire girl who becomes his protector. The theme of the vampire as a sympathetic doomed outsider had some provenance in the subject’s early days, given Byron’s personality cult, and more strikingly Le Fanu’s semi- tragic invention of the haunted Carmilla, but it was generally minor and in most outings the vampire remained a monster. Now though the theme has gained considerable prominence with several movies portraying vampirism as a sad affliction or disability. At worst this can result in a dull self-pitying narrative but not here (or in the original Swedish film) where Reeves builds a strong identification with the boy Owen (played by Kodi Smitt-McPhee). Though some railed against the idea of any remake at all the result was widely praised with Stephen King, calling it the best American horror film in 20 years, even if its box office appears to have been relatively modest.

The new Hammer’s first wholly original title, and their next release, was Wake Wood, directed by David Keating and written by Brendan McCarthy a folk horror piece set in rural Northern Ireland, about a couple who discover a pagan ritual that can bring their dead child back to life. This was an emotive, if minor, exploration of the theme of flawed resurrection, which has been a literary horror staple, since W. W. Jacobs’ story The Monkey’s Paw in 1902. There was a romantic version of the same idea in the 1972 British movie Neither the Sea Nor the Sand but the theme, echoed recently by Scott Chambers in Conjuring the Genie, undoubtedly has its most famous movie outings in adaptations of Stephen King’s book Pet Sematary.

The tone of such stories is often more tragic than horrific with grief inducing a desperate but doomed attempt to reconnect with the loved one. Wake Wood has good performances and some emotional intensity but did not attract much attention outside the fantasy film festivals, where it won several nominations and a prize.²⁷

The only other original UK based movie the new Hammer made was The Quiet Ones (2014) from American director John Pogue, who has tended to specialize in US action with a dystopian flavour like Quarantine 2: Terminal. Though, as an alumnus of Yale, Pogue did explore that university’s propensity for secret societies and initiations in his script for the hit The Skulls (which he wrote and produced).

The Quiet Ones (John Pogue, UK, 2014).

The Quiet Ones also has a university setting, in this case Oxford, and was supposedly based on some parapsychology experiments in Toronto in 1972, but, in reality, little more than the period was retained. Jared Harris plays a monomaniacal Oxford Professor, determined to prove the supernatural does not exist, and sets about it in the kind of way you generally only find in horror movies. He takes charge of patients who are seriously mentally ill and tries to show he can cure them by isolating and destroying their ‘evil’ alter egos.

The idea any leading university would license such experiments seems preposterous and pretty soon the story degenerates into a chaotic hunt-the-demon with endless murder and suicide, not much helped by some wild over-acting, which offers a reminder of just how restrained the old Hammer horror stars were. It is true Olivia Cooke does put in an impressive performance as the disturbed girl Jane Harper but the film appears to have stayed on the shelf for two years and (though there were exceptions) was not well reviewed when it finally appeared, a bit of a let-down for Hammer after the success of The Woman in Black.

That leaves two original Hammer titles, made in the US, neither though with US directors, The Resident in 2011 and, Hammer’s last release to date in its Simon Oaskes era, The Lodge, which premiered at Sundance in 2019.

The Resident is a fairly standard stalker film starring Hilary Swank as a single woman who rents a strange apartment in New York from a personable but enigmatic landlord played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan (an actor best known as Negan, the villain from The Walking Dead). Directed and co-written by the Finnish director Antti Jokinen, best known for music videos, The Resident feels quite energized at its start as a woman ER doctor finds an unlikely dream rental in Manhattan with a charming landlord. But its structure turns distinctly odd, suddenly zooming back in time around a third of the way through to change POV and follow the stalker. After that, the pace slackens with the action becoming more mundane as it builds to a predictably violent and drawn-out fight at the end.

Perhaps for this reason it seems to have been barely noticed and not very widely shown: only 31 critics are quoted on Rotten Tomatoes (as against 197 for The Woman in Black). And the film grossed $5.7 million worldwide against a $20 million budget, making it presumably a money loser. Christopher Lee, the old Hammer’s main star, puts in a late screen appearance in the film, playing a not particularly interesting role as the landlord’s grandfather but this was by no means his last part. Lee would make another 12 films before he died in 2015, thereby securing in his long screen life the somewhat astonishing total of 213 theatrical features, not even including television!

The new Hammer’s second last feature release to date and its other American outing from 2019 is a very different kind of film altogether, being far more ambitious. Recognising that Goodnight Mommy,²⁸ the 2014 Austrian horror film, co-directed and co-written by the aunt and nephew team of Susanne Wuest and Severin Fiala, was one of the most unusual horror films in years with its macabre and extremely violent fairy-tale domestic theme, the company mounted the duo’s first (and so far last) film in English.

The Lodge, set mainly in Massachusetts has some of the strange macabre adult fairy tale flavour of Goodnight Mommy and the same dark outlook. It is not easy viewing and starts slowly but by the halfway point it becomes mesmerizing.

The plot has a resemblance to the earlier film, in that it concerns two children engaged in a strange duel with a mother figure, in this case a mysterious step-mother (Riley Keogh), who has a history as a cult member, and joined the family after their real mother’s suicide. Hoping to promote togetherness at Christmas, the father takes the family to their remote lodge in Massachusetts before being called back to the city on business. As snow storms erupt around the lodge, and the children are trapped with their step-mother, strange things start to happen though for a long time it is impossible to work out what is causing them or why. As in the earlier film after a slow and slightly tantalizing start, the audience is taken on a very scary and violent ride with a real sense of snow-bound isolation.

The Lodge is worth seeking out and many have not seen it so I am not here going to offer massive spoilers. Its plot is wholly and impressively original (unlike the duo’s earlier film which copied a major plot device from Tom Tryon’s horror bestseller The Other) so I will just say that ultimately it does emerge as a very superior and darkly twisted entry in the Gaslight genre, while making the original Hammer’s excursions in that field (almost all by Jimmy Sangster) look positively cosy by comparison. The film drags slightly at times – Variety recommended a ‘stealth-trim’ of ten minutes – and the ending may just be a little too dark for its own good. But there is a real fascination about a genre movie which is not only genuinely haunting, but manages to make even a sophisticated modern audience utterly unsure of their ground. So little wonder it won festival prizes and many critical raves.

After releasing The Lodge however, the company went silent. Then in August 2023 came news. All the bank accounts of the new Hammer had been frozen and the company was entering receivership. For a few days it seemed history was repeating itself, yet not long ago the company had seemed flush with money, so what had happened? Apparently much of the problem was down to losses by the parent company Exclusive on the non-Hammer and non-horror Ron Howard movie Rush, about Formula One motor-racing. That film is considered a marginal hit, but was it? Universal and other majors thought the project too risky and passed, at least as far as up-front money was concerned, while Exclusive were last to the table, evidently taking out a large bank loan. Presumably those costs were not covered, and though the budget of The Lodge is not disclosed, it was probably high, especially since – in a praiseworthy decision – the makers decided to shoot scenes in their narrative order to bolster Keogh’s mesmerizing performance. Then the film was released on the eve of Covid and was not profitable.

Only a few weeks after news of the receivership, came better news that Hammer has been bailed out by the billionaire theatrical backer of many hit musicals John Gore (an apt name for a Hammer boss). As a result, the Hammer website became active again for the first time in four years and Gore restored Hammer’s name to the delayed Doctor Jekyll which was originally shown at Frightfest 2023 with no mention of Hammer on the credits.

The transition of Hammer into a John Gore company marked the end of the Simon Oakes era for the company though, despite Doctor Jekyll’s credits, it was Oakes himself who had a hand in setting it up. The film cannot, therefore, really be claimed as the launch of a new Hammer. For that we will have to wait till Halloween 2024 or later as Gore has stated he intends to try and have a horror film from Hammer out every Halloween.

Meanwhile Dr Jekyll, essentially the last of the Oakes era, proved an odd kind of film, spirited and twisty with full-blooded performances but not really horror except in its grand guignol score and deafening sound. Jekyll is played by Eddie Izzard as a dark wealthy female recluse with menacing secrets, though there is a contradiction between the opening news headlines, which declare her as transsexual, and later flashbacks to her childhood as a little girl.

But paradoxically, and far from Robert Louis Stevenson, the film it reminded me of most, was the earlier collaboration between filmmaker Joe Stephenson and actor Scott Chambers, Chicken (2015). For here again we have an affecting dysfunctional relationship between two brothers – the younger (Scott Chambers), troubled with good intentions, the other (Morgan Watkins) dominant but treacherous – which comes to a head in a final climactic sequence. This time though it lacks the high-octane intensity of the earlier film, and, though Stephenson continues to show flair as a director, when we finally here reach the big reveal, there seems little to choose between the good and evil side of Dr. Jekyll, rendering the whole frame a little moot.

So how do we finally judge the Simon Oakes era of Hammer which has now come to an end as John Gore steps forward to take over? Despite much effort and a few commissioned scripts (The Abominable Snowman) they never did mount a single remake from their library, Jekyll being essentially an original. But then in one way ‘the Hammer library’ was always a bit of a misnomer since the old Hammer often did not retain much meaningful ownership in their films.

The Lodge, the last film fully released under Oakes, was perhaps not a commercial success, but he should be praised for undertaking it. Only by such brave moves were they ever likely to strike gold. And he can chalk up a big hit with a major horror director in The Woman in Black. There had been other owners since the Carreras days of course, but almost all their plans, announced over the years as in the Roy Skeggs era, came to nothing. Only Oakes managed to make movies as opposed to announcing them, meaning he did, to his great credit, provide a second Hammer era, lasting sixteen years. We will now have to wait to see how the third era proceeds.

The Television Explosion²⁹

We are now so used to TV and streaming providing a huge proportion, of genre subjects, it’s easy to forget how new this is, little more than ten years. Back in 1973, when I wrote the first Heritage there were occasional TV horror/sf series and dramas but more in the US than here. There were memories of Quatermass but most UK television executives actually ruled out horror and science fiction as acceptable subjects – except perhaps for children’s fantasy, adaptations of classic authors, a few series and the occasional BBC ghost story at Christmas.

These ghost stories, though, were something of a triumph, almost always well produced high points of the television year and generally more filmic than more run-of-the-mill TV drama. Many of the BBC’s adaptations of M. R. James were outstanding, the masterpiece being Miller’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You (already discussed). And it was only while writing this new edition that I came across a worthy successor to Miller’s adaptation, namely Luke Watson’s 2005 BBC Christmas adaptation of the lesser-known M. R. James story View From a Hill.

In View, Watson and writer Peter Harness, beautifully capture the world of James, its mannerisms, muted class antagonisms and repressed terror. The original’s plot may not be quite as strong as Whistle but the detail is superbly done, with much the same feeling of repression as Miller had evoked, in a story of an inhibited historian (Mark Lethen) who arrives to investigate the strange collection of a country squire (Pip Torrens). Having given us, one of the best of all recent BBC ghost stories Watson is certainly a director and writer to watch and he has since made for TV The Drowning and, in 2023, the eco-horror The Swarm.

Historically, the main BBC director of James has been Lawrence Gordon Clark, who offered excellent work in this field throughout the 1970s, such as Warning to the Curious (1972) and The Stalls of Barchester (1971), a typically beautiful distillation of James packed with atmosphere, also giving us Charles Dickens’ The Signalman in 1976. In recent years, Mark Gatiss has ably taken up the mantle, also providing adaptations of other writers of creepy period stories such as Conan Doyle.

The most original and polemical modern original ghost story of the early UK TV era was surely Don Taylor’s classic The Exorcism, which even became a successful stage play. It was written and directed as a Christmas event but eventually went out as part of the Dead of Night strand on 5 November 1972. In this 50-minute film, the guests at a middle-class dinner in a country cottage at Christmas become terrified forced witnesses of an awful historical injustice, with a stand out performance by Anna Cropper as the medium through which horrible past events are revealed. Fortunately, The Exorcism can now easily be viewed via streaming where almost all these ghost stories are at last available.

But not quite all. For one of the very best and most ambitious BBC TV ghost stories of the 1960s, Someone in the Lift, seems be not only irretrievably lost, but virtually obliterated from the record! Based on L. P. Hartley’s dark story about a child in a hotel at Christmas. who has a premonition of violent death, this went out on BBC2 on Christmas Eve 1967 from the director/writer team of Ian Keill and David Campton. The film, seemed to me one of the very best and most experimental of all BBC ghost stories, but it seems to have slipped through the cracks completely. Set in the 1950s at a grand hotel at Christmas, it was told visually and structurally almost entirely from the direct point of view of a child who is the central character of the story, rather as Spielberg might have done it in his early days. There was a chilling accuracy and atmosphere in the child’s observation of patronizing preoccupied adults and also of the slightly repressed hedonism of Christmas, leading up to a stark tragedy.

Of course, much British TV drama has been wiped, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too shocked, but how is that the film has been so completely forgotten, without even published reviews? It seems the fact it no longer exists, and seems untraceable outside of the listings at the time, is because it occupied the slot of the nightly talk show Late Night Line Up (billed by them as ‘a special film for Christmas Eve’). But it was shot on film, so is it possible it still exists somewhere?

The TV ghost stories are important in the history of UK horror because at this point on TV there was so little else. But the first major shift came in the 1980s and 90s, following the collapse of the commercial end of the UK film industry. Gradually British genre subjects gravitated away from the cinemas as TV drama expanded to embrace higher budgets and increased genre production in a major way. Nothing like the bigger TV/streamer budgets of today of course, which can equal or exceed movies, but still considerably higher than television drama budgets had ever been before. By that point in the 1980s and 90s as film rather than tape started to be used in TV genre, it became clear that if you ran the old Hammer budgets (for Dracula say) against the inflation indices, they came very close to what was being spent by British broadcast television on high-end or period thrillers. Though of course it was still as hard as ever to match Hammer’s production values.

One writer/director who started out in this era, working between TV and film, with a real devotion to the genre is Joe Ahearne. He persevered in the tough days of the 1990s to give us the stunning television vampire series Ultra-Violet, which imagined, much more coherently and scarily than Blade, a world in which vampires were a secret race. Ahearne (who also won a BAFTA nomination for his work on Dr Who) was not able to get his feature of Ultra-Violet off the ground but has since made several tight and original thrillers with horror aspects for TV and film like The Replacement, in which a woman on maternity begins to sense her replacement is plotting to take over her whole life.

Horror though remained largely unloved by UK TV producers until the 2010s, when the advent of streaming changed the whole perception of the genre, enabling far higher budgets for major shows and far longer runs of episodes in serials. There are now so many British TV series and shows of interest to horror fans it would take a separate book to do them all justice – Dr Who and its spin-offs already have several such volumes. Many of the leading British TV genre writers, from Steven Moffat to Mark Gatiss to Jed Mercurio, have clear connections to horror, even though the prime British TV genres remain crime and comedy.

Perhaps overall the biggest TV horror breakthrough of the twenty-first century was HBOs Game of Thrones (and its prequel House of the Dragon) a sex, sword, horror and sorcery epic, shot largely in the UK from 2011 and now often described as the most watched TV show of all time. Without a proper tally of streaming audiences, who knows if this is true, but we can be reasonably certain it marked a massive turnaround in cultural taste, especially when two other (albeit American) epic horror fantasies, Stranger Things and The Walking Dead, generally appear second and third on the same list.

Seventy hours and fourteen minutes long, and costing $1.5 billion to make, Game of Thrones certainly seemed to indicate that a seismic cultural shift had taken place. Its fusion of horrific history, supernatural legend and dynastic struggle erupted in 2011 to mark an unprecedented hybrid of various genres. Originated by the American George R. R. Martin, but made largely in the UK, with UK actors and occasionally UK directors, the show is absolutely steeped in the most gothic aspects of British history and myth.

The books and scripts draw not only on our most cherished mythology like Beowulf and King Arthur and Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe but also the most sensational and luridly horrific historical events of our past from the massacre of Glencoe to the alleged crimes of Richard Crookback and the venomous feuds around the War of the Roses.

Martin (who is of British/Irish descent and wrote scripts for TV shows like The Twilight Zone) evidently conceived the whole idea on a visit to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumbria, partly in reaction to the endless rejection of his fantasy scripts in the pre-streaming days. Echoing the perennial frustration of so many fellow genre writers, he decided to give up writing TV and movies altogether and devote himself to novels, based on his obsession with English and Celtic history, fiction he was quite sure could never ever be filmed.

Hardly surprising perhaps then that, in order to get this new genre mix right, HBO actually had to scrap most of the show’s first $10 million pilot, effectively starting over again, rejigging many strands and even recasting. But the eventual result from showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss contained extraordinarily strong elements: the wall of the night watch guarding against monsters, the shocking ‘red wedding’ (based on the Glencoe massacre which has echoed down through so much Gothic literature) and the prophetic dreams and magical duels of Celtic mythology.

There were also rich characters: the horrifyingly sadistic boy king Joffrey Baratheon, (Jack Gleeson) portrayed like some male pubescent version of the legendary Countess Bathory, the shrewd and ground-breaking ‘imp’ Tyron Lannister (Peter Dinklage), and Cersei the demonic incestuous queen. (Lena Headey). Clearly the show was an indication, not merely that TV horror had finally escaped from its ghetto but that the whole field has blown wide open. Massive budgets, international casts and long intricate story-lines (as with Penny Dreadful, The Walking Dead and many, many Hauntings). have expanded the medium in a way that would have been utterly unthinkable before. So that in addition to all else, the narrative possibilities of cinematic storytelling have now massively multiplied.

Ironically, the first edition of Heritage speculated whether British horror might one day adapt the greatest English myth-cycles of all, meaning those of Malory and Tennyson in an Arthurian cycle. At the time it was said more in hope than anything else and plenty of people commented it was a ridiculous notion. Somehow now though, with the huge success of long-running, massively budgeted, epic series, it feels perfectly possible, though admittedly it is adaptations of more recent epic writers like J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and George R. R. Martin that have supplied such a need.

The development of high-end streaming certainly means that the opportunities for horror have never been greater and, while the zombie apocalypse genre found in The Walking Dead and its sequels, has been largely an American subject (deriving quite clearly from Night of the Living Dead and Richard Matheson’s classic novel I Am Legend), many others like Penny Dreadful feast on British gothic themes.

But unfortunately, though there is much to celebrate in this new freedom, there is also a downside. Penny Dreadful had some great episodes but also sometimes ignored at its peril the age-old maxim, dating from the Universal monster rallies of the 1930s³⁰ (and now again obvious in the Marvel universe) that the more fantasy themes and characters you cram into a story the less effective they may become.

In this respect the American horror writer Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor is relevant, a sprawling 2020 Netflix adaptation of Henry James’ celebrated ghost story Turn of the Screw, the book about a nanny and two haunted children that gave us the early British horror classic from director Jack Clayton The Innocents (1961), one of the great UK movie ghost stories with trail-blazing performances from all the cast, most notably the children Pamela Franklyn and Martin Stephens, alongside Deborah Kerr as the governess and Flora Robson as the housekeeper.³¹ That was 100 minutes, this lasts 8 hours, 23 minutes and by the end has morphed – as the climax itself announces with the lines: “You said it was a ghost story. It isn’t. It’s a love story.” – into a long and quite sad gay love story, with most of the last hour taking place in North America where the entire series was shot.

Set mainly in 1987 (though it feels almost more like the 1950s) with flashes back and forward, it is a very strange show, having essentially very little to do with the James novella, but containing so many ghosts you begin to lose count, and even using narration to explain some of the more complex possessions. Variety’s TV critic Daniel D’Addario concluded that, ‘after some nine hours it’s fair to wonder what, exactly, the journey had been for.’ Some critics were more positive and there were good performances while the last hour, which is essentially a meditation on loss, is quite emotional even if you question its relevance. But the truth is, since the whole enterprise is only marginally connected to the classic ghost story, it might have been better to jettison James altogether and create something wholly original. The most disturbing stuff for me here I will confess was not the ghosts, but the real-life concern that nine-year-old Amelie Bea Smith, who is one of the best things in it, seemed to be enduring an awful lot of tough action scenes without a double.

The Haunting of Bly Manor (Mike Flanagan, US, 2020).

Two British horror writers – credited as co-producers on Bly –, are Michael and Paul Clarkson (known as The Clarkson Twins), who later launched a very promising career in TV with one of the most distinctive and distinctively British horror series of recent times: Red Rose, which they created and wrote.

The show’s premise apparently arose originally out of a pitch to Hollyoaks: it is about a group of northern teenagers on the verge of college, who begin to be persecuted by an evil computer app. Almost all the action takes place in the Clarksons’ home town of Bolton and there is a real energy here with good, sometimes exceptional, performances plus some major scares and surprises, including the bold and emotive death of a central character after two episodes.

The show’s sheer ambition occasionally lets it down – a few of the songs feel wrong³² and the teen banter can have a slightly strained tone – but these are small gripes when the overall ensemble is so good and there are so many successful realist touches on serious subjects like parental alcoholism, bereavement and mental illness.

Red Rose is certainly horror but, in the end – spoiler coming – turns out not to be a supernatural show, being closer to elements of the American teen suicide novel/drama 13 Reasons Why and also the movie My Little Eye. The kids prove to be victims not of a ghostly algorhythm but of a sick online game, run by a psycho. This works to great effect when we assume the players are elsewhere in the world (which some of them are). But at its climax when we are told ‘They’re all over Bolton’, it does starts to feel a bit less convincing.

Even so Red Rose is still one of the most original horror serials to come out of Britain in years. And it’s a shame there seems to be no follow up.

Another new horror voice on British television is Joe Barton creator of The Lazarus Project which makes an interesting comparison with Red Rose. Neither series could possibly exist without video games. But while Red Rose imagines them as a vehicle for crowd cruelty, The Lazarus Project actually reflects video game-play itself, projecting an action story in which a team of people have the power to keep resetting the world to their last save point in order to avert its destruction. The plot is in fact a kind of macrocosmic version of the deservedly acclaimed American Blumhouse horror hit Happy Death Day (2017) where the heroine keeps reliving the day she is murdered. But The Lazarus Project grafts it on to an action format, with a secret organization dedicated to world saving and a renegade supervillain (Tom Burke) who claims rather implausibly (if conveniently for plot purposes) ‘The world wants to die.’

Lazarus which is returning, is at its best with the personal story of its hero George (an excellent Paapa Essiedu) who, having lost his wife, wants to turn back the clock to get her back. But this affecting plot, with some great dramatic sequences, sits rather uneasily alongside Sky’s cool-action format, familiar from other shows: ‘We have a little tradition’, says our hero’s attractive female guide. ‘Every time we save humanity from being wiped of the face of the Earth we go for two-for-one cocktails and karaoke.’ In rather the same vein the outfit’s agents swig beer and indulge in sexy banter on a rooftop as they watch atomic explosions at the world’s end before waking back up six months earlier.³³

But Barton is a very talented and innovative writer, so it is no surprise to find, from interviews, it was the human story that interested him most; he milks it to keep us watching and to raise interesting moral questions. If you can reset the world, who are you helping and who are you hurting? What about the children who are born and now may never be? It will be interesting to see how this emerges in the next series, and Barton deserves massive credit for coming up with such an effective premise and an entirely new spin on the action format. As a result he is much in demand and looks like being a key player in British horror (though he is doing many other subjects as well).³⁴

Given this great abundance of projects, we can conclude without question that broadcast television and the streamers on both sides of the Atlantic now largely accept horror as part of the standard repertoire. And this is in no way confined to the Gothic but encompasses all the themes of horror movies from the psycho thriller and supernatural and dark drama to every conceivable kind of modern myth and legend as well as the new ‘mad doctor realm’ that is digital science and AI. Barring some cataclysmic failure of the new streaming models (something that is currently the subject of much speculation), we can assume that all these narrative strains will continue to evolve. Though we have gone so far and so fast from famine to feast, there is perhaps bound to be a market correction.

The Future?

As I concluded the first edition of this book way back in pre-digital 1973, I observed the most hopeful signs for horror’s development were films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead, both immensely powerful testaments to the fact that horror themes could be merged subtly yet inextricably with subversive and complex social/psychological/political ideas. Clearly such ideas had always been an implicit component of horror: the Mary Shelley (and Karloff) Frankenstein, for example, was as much a moving tract against the savage conditioning process which society imposes on its new members as it was a simple attempt to arouse fear. But the newer films seemed to point towards the possibility of an increasingly sophisticated and flexible approach to such material. And to some extent these films did signpost the future of horror and how it could push into new areas, as is now demonstrated by a British horror movie as good as Ex Machina.

More recently the horror film that has taken me most by surprise, is Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (currently being remade by one of British horror’s rising stars James Watkins). This 2022 Danish film – about a horrific intervention by one family into the life of another – stuns because its motivation flies in the face of logic, yet still it remains incredibly powerful. In structure, it is a conspiracy story like Rosemary’s Baby, albeit on a small scale. Yet by the climax the conspirators are barely bothering to hide what they are doing – there is little concealment – nor is there any obviously conventional motive for why they behave as they do. But somehow it still persuades you to the point where I even wondered if this was some allegory of political populism, exposing, as say 1984 did, a kind of human acquiescence in the face of power and cruelty.

Will there be more like this and how precisely are we placed now as we move through the third decade of the new century with all these monumental changes and the sheer volume of horror showing no sign of abating? Certainly, I could never have dreamed that in 2024 I would be writing about British horror movies with titles like The Mummy: Resurrection or Wrath of Dracula! The micro-budget industry has proved a startling phenomenon and is generating endless sequels. But there’s also no real sense as yet these are breaking through meaningfully with the public. Streaming clearly makes life easier in some ways for the filmmaker with its almost instant reach, but it can also make serious cultural impact harder to achieve.

Speak No Evil / Gæsterne (Christian Tafdrup, Denmark/Netherlands, 2022).

So, will the whole micro-budget industry start to lose impetus and grind down under the sheer weight of its endless product? Right now, the field is clearly being sustained only by incredible individual effort. One prolific horror micro-budget filmmaker recently posted he has not had a single free day in more than two years. Some think AI scripting will turn out be the future here because of its cheapness, and it’s true some of the very worst scripts could probably be generated by AI. But I am still not convinced that, even in this area, AI will in the end be much more than a screenwriting tool.

Trying to look forward, I think there will be micro-budget hits but also unfortunately too there are probably bound to be scandals for as a field it is dauntingly unregulated. We have to hope The Final Scream does not prove an augury of some massive future filmmaking tabloid headline.

The real astonishment remains that UK horror – once in the late 80s almost utterly dormant (and then not even particularly healthy elsewhere) – has risen so spectacularly from the grave and is currently teeming with life in every category of budget and every conceivable platform and outlet from the multiplex to video games to streaming and micro-budget.

Meanwhile, the massive changes I have outlined in this book are still being felt sharply by the movie/TV industry as a whole, both in the UK and throughout the world. Many of us recall watching in shock as tech destroyed great swathes of value in the music industry, leaving only a tiny handful of remunerated artists. That history is directly connected to the fact that – while writing much of this book – the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild were on strike to try and avoid a similar fate. As a WGA member, that offered me more time to write and both strikes are now settled on what look like favourable terms. But big questions still remain about how all these massive changes will affect movies and TV down the road? Are we going to see yet another seismic shift? To everyone’s relief big movie hits were still appearing in cinemas in 2023 but overall can the glut of product reported in this book continue?

Not, I would assume, quite as it is now. Looking at the cinema and TV industry overall it seems clear that, until quite recently, there were major filters in place which directed leading titles to the audience, via ad campaigns and promotion, backed up by weekly reviews and recommendations in the media. This enabled most consumers to be fairly well aware of what was around. The sheer volume of new product now means that is no longer at all true except possibly for a few elite releases. As streaming movies jostle with cinema releases, these filters have been effectively removed, leaving an absolutely massive block of product for audiences to decipher with relatively little help except for frenzied inhouse drum-beating on multiple streaming channels and conflicting noise from all sides, including social media. Under the assault, even the press has been reduced to regularly running lengthy, and unconvincingly researched lists, like ‘the 50 best movies on Netflix right now’ – that is 50 movies covering only one of the seemingly endless outlets over a short period! I am not sure this is sustainable in the end. There seems likely to be a major contraction.³⁵

And it will surely be accompanied by audience fatigue, leading to a shift of themes and providers. But the latter has always happened, it is just the way that genre stays relevant. And it does not alter the fact, obvious everywhere, that horror has become mainstream, surely now too broad to go away again. From fairy tale to ghost story to gothic to dystopia to the modern questioning of our whole mental identity triggered by AI – it looks like such cinematic themes will always renew. Their role is as vital as the old Gothic stories because they provide, as nothing else can, what the human imagination needs to survive change.

1.Quite recently in 2021 the poem was given yet another cinematic outing in a revisionist version by the American indie director David Lowery.

2.There are now, in the 2020s, some signs of revival in the Blu Ray/DVD market, rather like the revival of vinyl in music, but it is still relatively minor compared to what it was.

3.As an example, the international takings of the original Omen movie are four times higher than that of the original Hellraiser, even ignoring the inflation effect which would almost double it again. There may be an argument for Hammer’s Frankenstein movies or Dracula movies as more successful, but the data is hard to interpret, and in some cases missing.

4.The Omen spawned several sequels, none involving Donner and none of anything like its quality. It also had a remake in 2006 which is a pale re-tread of the original film, adding absolutely nothing and taking quite a lot away. Then in 2024 came The First Omen, a prequel set in a creepy Catholic orphanage in Rome in the early 1970s, though more in the tradition of Exorcist-type horror than its original.

5.Walker’s last feature to date is House of Long Shadows (1983) a spirited remake of the old fantasy novel ‘Seven Keys to Baldpate’ scripted by Michael Armstrong and starring four of the greatest horror stars Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price and John Carradine who are utlised rather well by its semi-comic dream-like story.

6.Fortunately, as we’ll see, this defect was ultimately corrected with later UK films like Summer Scars, Host, Shaun of the Dead and others.

7.The fact horror audiences sometimes skewed male at certain times in the past is an industry statistic. I am not remotely attempting to define here why this may have been or offering any assumptions about female-friendly content. In this context we might note that since The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Jones 1982), slasher horror movies have been made by women and many films by the newer women directors discussed below contain such elements.

8.As people became more aware of the new horror trend in the noughties, there was some speculation about the underlying reasons. Given that horror often reflects societal anxiety, many wondered if the new boom related to 9/11 and the war in Iraq, rather in the same way that the post-war boom was engendered in the climate of the Cold War. Apart from a few titles, like possibly 28 Days Later (see below) this now looks very unlikely, especially since the boom has continued at such pace. There has been absolutely no return to the desert of the late 1990s or, in the UK, to the rock-bottom period between the spring of 1996 and the end of 1997 – the roughly two-year period that saw no UK horror films, of any kind, released in this country.

9.These included Cherry Tree Lane (Paul Andrew Williams, 2010) and Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008) discussed below.

10.To add to the difficulty, streaming audiences were not really being measured at all, at least publicly – though in 2024, thanks to the strike demands of the Writers Guild of America, this has possibly started to change.

11.Not to be confused with the Apple sf TV series of the same name.

12.In this respect we should note that, while in the last century major film festivals, other than Sundance, were not that welcoming to horror, now – not only are they happy to take quality horror – there are around thirty film festivals devoted exclusively to horror and fantasy films.

13.It is hard to call them low-budget any longer, given they have far higher budgets than the new micro-budget category.

14.Though, to clarify, she also states that she welcomes other interpretations.

15.The puppet was ingeniously designed for maximum creepy effect by Dominic Hallstone and Odd Studios, who have made many of the most memorable recent screen monsters.

16.Ari Aster’s legion of fans will protest this is the point but the relationship is so utterly dysfunctional it does not make repeat viewing particularly enjoyable, for all the film’s visual magnificence.

17.As indicated for most of these films he used his middle name Jeffrey, before deciding in 2023 to revert to his real name Scott Chambers. So, the credits for the films on IMDB are now Scott Chambers, even if the credits on screen may still read Scott Jeffrey. This raises the question whether several other credits on these films are also pseudonyms. Around the time Jeffrey changed back to his real name, another key creative of the studio Rebecca Matthews turned out to be a pseudonym for actor Becca Hirani, who also appears in several of their films. As yet I am unable to establish the identity of screenwriter Shannon Holiday, but it seems likely to be Chambers himself for scripts he preferred not to own. Certainly, the films written under Jeffrey’s own name tend to be much superior to many of the others.

18.The problem of 2023 sanction-breaking in Russian cinemas is not of course confined to micro-budget British indie genre films. Most of the distributors involved are American and claim contracts were signed before the boycott.

19.Some negative comments follow but I want to make it clear I don’t think in micro-budget it is fair to start criticising individuals negatively when we don’t know any of the circumstances under which they were working, especially when any obvious faults in these films may well be down to schedule, time and resources. This is true of all film criticism of course but surely particularly acute here. Also, the credits of these films are often open to question, As indicated, some of the names I pick out here, notably Shannon Holiday, could well be made up.

20.Warren, who had a small part in the Harry Potter movies has so far directed around 21 films and currently lists multiple titles in active pre-production. Through her company, Champdog Films, she collaborated with Scott Chambers on movies like the Tooth Fairy, and some of the Scarecrow movies, as well as action movies such as The Viking War and Virtual Death Match, but now seems to have branched out on her own and is currently like Chambers going all out on horror fairy tales with two Cinderella horrors in the works and a Sleeping Beauty.

21.I would exclude Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novel series from this category as it is much more of an alternative horror history.

22.Oddly a little-known minimalist, modern version of At the Mountains of Madness was made in the UK in 2021 by former Eastenders writer Matthew Cooper for £2,000, using found footage and narration, setting it up as a modern conspiracy semi-documentary.

23.Mutoscopes were often known in the UK as ‘What the Butler Saw’ machines and lasted up to the 1970s.

24.See his interview on the Dublin website Entertainment IE.

25.It is not though as, frequently mis-stated, ‘the UK’s highest grossing horror film since records began.’ This often-recycled claim, is based on a Guardian article that tallied a mere three weeks of box office only in Britain, not the world, and took absolutely no account of inflation. Much more economic research would be needed to establish if Woman in Black is indeed the owner of the title internationally, something very difficult to assess given that the true international box office of past hits like the Hammer Dracula was never properly tallied and box office lists rarely take longevity into account. The list of the top 1000 lifetime adjusted grosses on Box Office Mojo has no UK horror movie on it at all – unsurprising perhaps given it measures gross not profitability while some films towards the bottom of the list were considered mild flops because of their massive budgets.

26.Her second-to-last film before she died on 23 November 2010. The last was the comedy horror Sea of Dust.

27.The directing/writing team of Keating and McCarthy would in fact return to a version of the theme (a pact with witches to save a dying father) in an Irish horror movie Cherry Tree shot in Cork in 2015.

28.The film was later remade by Matt Sobel in a US version starring Naomi Watts.

29.Note:in the discussion of some serials below there are spoilers.

30.Like for example House of Dracula featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man, Mad Doctor and others.

31.By strange coincidence 2020 also saw a very unexpected movie remake of Turn of the Screw shot in Ireland – The Turning. Originally a passion project for Steven Spielberg, and made by his company, it had a long and chequered journey to the screen, finally being directed by music/fashion video director Floria Sigismondi with a script by Chad and Carey Hayes, originators of The Conjuring horror series. Despite a nominally modern 1990s setting and music to match, the film relied on standard and quite old-fashioned hauntings in a very isolated and retro old house, before offering two endings – one with a happy escape, the second with the governess insane and hallucinating. Spielberg was constantly on set according to press reports but ultimately his name did not appear anywhere on the credits. Given only limited release, Rotten Tomatoes currently scores The Turning noticeably low 12 per cent (from 104 reviews) and 15 per cent (from 1000+ ratings).

32.British creators sometimes seem less adept at adding songs to key sequences than their American counterparts. A Sheryl Crowe song in Bly Manor is effective as is almost every song in The Walking Dead or The Last of Us. But the Oasis song at a sad moment near the end of Red Rose felt (for me) misplaced despite its northern associations. Of course, this is massively subjective and one TV critic even attacked the music in Red Rose for being out of its time which seems a bit restrictive.

33.This coolness is in fact a bit illogical in that if they witness the blast they presumably feel the agony of its effects before the clock turns back. In Happy Death Day the heroine does not happily witness her murders, she dreads them.

34.He also wrote The Ritual (2017), a British folk horror movie from the award-winning novel by horror writer Adam Nevill directed by the American David Bruckner, (who later in 2020 made The Night House which is one of the very strongest US horror movies released in the last decade). The Ritual used tropes from Blair Witch Project and Deliverance in its story of a group of four male friends on a hiking trip in a Swedish forest, encountering a cult and the thing they worship. While some of the laddish bonding stuff at the start felt forced, the story’s move from psychological hauntings to a full-blown cult and finally even a wendigo-style monster was handled well and it was brave enough not to have what is now the obligatory down ending.

35.We should note, too, the difference in investment potency between a $100 million movie and a $100 million streamer. The former does not just buoy up its distributor and sell tickets, it generates drinks and popcorn, possible ancillary restaurant/amenity use and even transportation. The latter may help a platform a great deal but nothing more.

Filmography

Filmography of UK-related and European films mentioned in text (including some TV films), plus other British horror and science-fiction films made since 1945, with limited production credits for space reasons, especially on newer additions. [Prod. – Producer; Dir. – Director; Scr. – Screenplay; Ph. – Cinematography]

28 Days Later (2002)

Prod. Andrew Macdonald | Dir. Danny Boyle | Scr. Alex Garland | Ph. Anthony Dod Mantle

47 Meters Down (2017)

Dir. Johannes Roberts | Scr. Ernest Riera

Abominable Dr Phibes, The (1971)

Prod. Louis M. Heyward/Ron Ducas | Dir. Robert Fuest | Scr. James Whiton/William Goldstein | Ph. Norman Warwick

Abominable Snowman, The (1957)

Prod. Aubrey Baring | Dir. Val Guest | Scr. Nigel Keale

Afraid of the Dark (2021)

Dir. Jonathon Green Miles Keyland | Scr. Miles Keyland

Alien (1979)

Prod. Gordon Carroll | Dir. Ridley Scott | Scr. Dan O’Bannon

Amazing Mr Blunden, The (1972)

Prod. Barry Levinson | Dir. Lionel Jeffries | Scr. Lionel Jeffries | Ph. Gerry Fisher

Amityville Scarecrow (2021)

Dir. Jack Mundy | Scr. Shannon Holiday

Amulet (2021)

Dir. Romola Garai | Scr. Romola Garai

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Prod. George Folsey Jr | Dir. John Landis | Scr. John Landis

And Now the Screaming Starts! (aka Bride of Fengriffen) (1972)

Prod. Milton Subotsky/Max J. Rosenberg | Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr.

Roger Marshall | Ph. Denys Coop

Annihilation (2018)

Dir. Alex Garland | Scr. Alex Garland

Anniversary, The (1967)

Prod. Jimmy Sangster | Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr. Jimmy Sangster

Asphyx, The (1972)

Prod. John Brittany | Dir. Peter Newbrook | Scr. Brian Comport

Astonished Heart, The (1949)

Dir. Terence Fisher/Antony Darnborough | Scr. Noel Coward

Asylum (1972)

Prod. Max J. Rosenberg/Milton Subotsky | Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr. Robert Bloch | Ph. Denys Coop

At the Mountains of Madness (2021)

Dir. Matthew Cooper | Scr. Matthew Cooper

Awakening, The (1980)

Prod. Robert H. Solo | Dir. Mike Newell | Scr. Chris Bryant

Bad Nun, The (2018)

Dir. Scott Chambers | Scr. Scott Chambers

Banishing, The (2020)

Dir. Christopher Smith | Scr. David Beton/Ray Bogdanovich/Dean Lines

Battle Beneath the Earth (1967)

Dir. Montgomery Tully | Scr. L. Z. Hargreaves

Beast in the Cellar, The (1970)

Prod. Graham Harris | Dir. James Kelly | Scr. James Kelly | Ph. Harry Waxman/Desmond Dickinson

Beast Must Die, The (1974)

Prod. Milton Subotsky/Max J. Rosenberg | Dir. Paul Annett | Scr. Michael Winder

Behemoth the Sea Monster (aka The Great Behemoth) (1958)

Prod. Ted Lloyd | Dir. Eugene Lourie/Douglas Hickox | Scr. Eugene Lourie/Robert Abel/Daniel James/ Allen Adler | Ph. Ken Hodges

Beneath the Surface (2022)

Dir. Scott Chambers/Becca Hirani | Scr. Paul W. Franklin

Beserk (1967)

Prod. Herman Cohen | Dir. Jim O’Connolly | Scr. Aben Kandel/Herman Cohen | Ph. Desmond Dickenson

Black Death (2010)

Dir. Christopher Smith | Scr. Dario Poloni/Christopher Smith

Black Rider, The (1954)

Prod. A. R. Rawlinson | Dir. Wolf Rilla | Scr. A. R. Rawlinson | Ph. Geoffery Faithfull

Black Torment, The (1964)

Prod./Dir. Robert Hartford-Davis | Scr. Donald and Derek Ford | Ph. Peter Newbrook

Blackout (aka Murder by Proxy) (1954)

Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Richard Landau

Blood Beast Terror, The (1967)

Prod. Arnold Louis Miller | Dir. Vernon Sewell | Scr. Peter Bryan | Ph. Stanley A. Long

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971)

Prod. Howard Brandy | Dir. Seth Holt/Michael Carreras | Scr. Christopher Wicking | Ph. Arthur Grant

Blood of the Vampire (1957)

Prod. Robert S. Baker/Monty Berman | Dir. Henry Cass | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. Monty Berman

Blood Tide (1980)

Prod. Donald Langdon/Nico Mastorakis/Luigi Cingolani/Brian Trenchard-Smith | Dir. Richard Jeffries | Scr. Richard Jeffries/Nico Mastorakis

Bordello Death Tales (2009)

Dir./Scr. James Eaves/Pat Higgins/ Alan Ronald

Boy Meets Girl (1994)

Prod./Dir./Scr. Ray Brady | Scr. Jim Crosbie

Break in the Circle (1954)

Dir./Scr. Val Guest

Bride of Scarecrow (2018)

Dir. Louisa Warren | Scr. Shannon Holiday

Brides of Dracula, The (1960)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Jimmy Sangster/Peter Bryan/Edward Percy/ Anthony Hinds | Ph. Jack Asher

Brides of Fu Manchu, The (1966)

Prod. Harry Alan Towers | Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Harry Alan Towers (‘Peter Welbeck’) | Ph. Ernest Steward

Brothers Grimm, The (2005)

Prod. Daniel Bobker | Dir. Terry Gilliam | Scr. Ehren Kruger

Burke and Hare (1971)

Prod. Guido Coen | Dir. Vernon Sewell | Scr. Ernle Bradford | Ph. Desmond Dickinson

Byzantium (2012)

Prod. Elizabeth Karlsen/Stephen Woolley | Dir. Neil Jordan | Scr. Moira Buffini | Ph. Sean Bobbitt

Candy Witch, The (2020)

Dir. Becca Hirani | Scr. Scott Chambers

Cannibal Troll (2021)

Dir. Scott Chambers/Becca Hirani | Scr. Scott Chambers

Captain Clegg (aka Night Creatures) (1961)

Prod. John Temple Smith | Dir. Peter Graham-Scott | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. Arthur Grant

Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)

Prod./Dir./Scr. Brian Clemens

Castle of the Living Dead (1964)

Dir. Warren Kiefer (credited to Herbert Wise (Luciano Ricci)) | Scr. Warren Kiefer/Michael Reeves

Cat and the Canary, The (1977)

Prod. Richard Gorden | Dir./ Scr. Radley Metzger

Cat Girl (1957)

Prod. Herbert Smith | Dir. Alfred Shaughnessy | Scr. Lou Rusoff | Ph. Peter Hennessy

Censor (2021)

Dir. Prano Bailey-Bond | Scr. Prano Bailey-Bond/Anthony Fletcher

Cherry Tree (2015)

Dir. David Keating | Scr. Brendan McCarthy

Cherry Tree Lane (2010)

Dir./Scr. Paul Andrew Williams

Chicken (2015)

Dir. Joe Stephenson | Scr. Freddie Machin/Chris New

Children of the Damned (1963)

Prod. Ben Arbeid | Dir. Anton M. Leader | Scr. John Briley | Ph. Davis Boulton

Circus of Horrors (1959)

Prod. Julian Wyntle/Leslie Parkyn | Dir. Sidney Hayers | Scr. George Baxt | Ph. Douglas Slocombe

Citadel (2012)

Dir./Scr. Ciaran Foy

City of The Dead (aka Horror Hotel) (1959)

Prod. Donald Taylor | Dir. John Moxey | Scr. George Baxt | Ph. Desmond Dickinson

City Under the Sea (aka War Gods of the Deep) (1965)

Prod. George Willoughby | Dir. Jacques Tourneur | Scr. Charles Bennett/Louis M. Heyward

Cloudburst (1951)

Dir. Francis Searle | Scr. Francis Searle/Leo Marks

Colonel Bogey (1947)

Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. John Baines/W. E. C. Fairchild

Company of Wolves, The (1984)

Prod. Stephen Woolley | Dir./ Scr. Neil Jordan

Conjuring the Genie (2021)

Dir./Scr. Scott Chambers

Conjuring the Genie 2 (2022)

Dir. Ian David Diaz | Scr. Craig McClearie

Corpse, The (aka Crucible of Horror) (1969)

Prod. Gabrielle Beaumont | Dir. Viktors Ritelis | Scr. Olaf Pooley | Ph. John Mackey

Corridor of Mirrors (1945)

Prod. Rudolph Cartier | Dir. Terence Young | Scr. Rudolph Cartier/Edana Romney

Corridors of Blood (1957)

Prod. Richard Gordon/John Croydon | Dir. Robert Day | Scr. Jean Scott Rogers | Ph. Geoffrey Faithfull

Corruption (1967)

Prod./Ph. Peter Newbrook | Dir. Robert Hartford-Davis | Scr. Donald Ford/ Derek Ford

Count Dracula (1970)

Dir. Jesús Franco | Scr. Jesús Franco/ Harry Alan Towers (‘Peter Welbeck’)/ Eric Krohenke/Augusto Finocchi

Countess Dracula (1970)

Prod. Alexander Paal | Dir. Peter Sasdy | Scr. Jeremy Paul/Alexander Paal/ Peter Sasdy/Gabriel Ronay | Ph. Ken Talbot

Craze (1974)

Prod./Scr. Herman Cohen | Dir. Freddie Francis

Creatures the World Forgot (1970)

Dir. Don Chaffey | Scr. Michael Carraras

Creep (2004)

Prod. Julie Baines | Dir./ Scr. Christopher Smith

Creeping Flesh, The (1972)

Prod. Michael Redbourn | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Peter Spenceley/Jonathan Rumbold | Ph. Norman Warwick

Crescendo (1969)

Prod. Michael Carreras | Dir. Alan Gibson | Scr. Jimmy Sangster/Alfred Shaughnessy | Ph. Paul Beeson

Crimes at the Dark House (1940)

Prod. Odette King | Dir. George King | Scr. Edward Dryhurst/ Fredrick Hayward/H. F. Maltby

Crow Hollow (1952)

Dir. Michael McCarthy | Scr. Dorothy Eden

Crucible of Terror (1971)

Prod. Tom Parkinson | Dir. Ted Hooker | Scr. Ted Hooker/Tom Parkinson | Ph. Peter Newbrook

Cry of the Banshee (1970)

Prod./Dir. Gordon Hessler | Scr. Tim Kelly/Christopher Wicking | Ph. John Coquillon

Cupid (2020)

Dir./Scr. Scott Chambers

Curse of Frankenstein , The (1956)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. Jack Asher

Curse of Humpty Dumpty, The (2021)

Dir./Scr. Scott Chambers

Curse of Simba (aka Curse of the Voodoo) (1964)

Prod. Richard Gordon | Dir. Lindsay Shonteff | Scr. Brian Clemens (‘Tony O’Grady’)/Leigh Vance

Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka

Crimson Cult) (1968) Prod. Louis M. Heyward | Dir. Vernon Sewell | Scr. Mervyn Haisman/Henry Lincoln | Ph. John Coquillon

Curse of the Fly, The (1965)

Prod. Robert L. Lippert/Jack Parsons | Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Harry Spalding | Ph. Basil Emmott

Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, The (1964)

Prod./Dir. Michael Carreras | Scr. Michael Carreras (‘Henry Younger’) | Ph. Otto Heller

Curse of the Scarecrow (2018)

Dir. Louisa Warren | Scr. Shannon Holiday

Curse of the Werewolf, The (1960)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. Arthur Grant

Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966)

Dir. Gordon Fleming | Scr. Milton Subotsky/Terry Nation

Damned , The (aka These are the Damned) (1961)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Joseph Losey | Scr. Evan Jones | Ph. Arthur Grant

Dance of the Vampires (The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth are in My Neck) (1967)

Prod. Gene Gutowski | Dir. Roman Polanski | Scr. Gerard Brach/Roman Polanksi | Ph. Douglas Slocombe

Dangerous Voyage (1953)

Dir. Vernon Sewell | Scr. Julian Ward

Dark Mile, The (2017)

Dir. Gary Love | Scr. Gaby Hull

Dark Places (1972)

Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Ed Breenan/ Joseph Van Winkle | Ph. Ernest Steward

Dark,The (2005)

Dir. John Fawcett | Scr. Stephen Massicotte/Simon Maginn

Darklands (1996)

Prod. Paul Brooks | Dir. Julian Richards | Scr. Julian Richards/ David Mitchell

Dashcam (2021)

Dir. Rob Savage | Scr. Gemma Hurley/Rob Savage/Jed Shepherd

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

Dir. Harry Kumel | Scr. Pierre Drouot/Jean Ferry/Harry Kümel/ Joseph Amiel

Day of the Triffids, The (1962)

Prod. George Pitcher | Dir. Steve Sekely/Freddie Francis | Scr. Phillip Yordan | Ph. Ted Moore

Day the Earth Caught Fire, The (1961)

Prod./Dir. Val Guest | Scr. Wolf Manckowitz/Val Guest | Ph. Harry Waxman

Dead of Night (1945)

Prod. Michael Balcon | Dir. Alberto Calvacanti/Charles Crichton/Basil Dearden/Robert Hamer | Scr. John V. Baines/Angus MacPhail | Ph. Jack Parker/H. Julius

Deadly Bees, The (1966)

Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Robert Bloch/Anthony Marriott

Deadman Apocalypse (2016)

Dir./Scr. Charlie Steeds

Death Line (1972)

Prod. Paul Maslansky | Dir. Gary Sherman | Scr. Ceri Jones/Gary Sherman | Ph. Alex Thomson

Deathwatch (2002)

Prod. Mike Downey | Dir./Scr. Michael J. Bassett

Demons of the Mind (1971)

Prod. Frank Godwin | Dir. Peter Sykes | Scr. Christopher Wicking | Ph. Arthur Grant

Demonsoul (1994)

Prod./Dir./Scr. Elisar Cabrera

Descent, The (2005)

Prod. Christian Colson | Dir./Scr. Neil Marshall

Descent: Part 2, The (2009)

Dir. Jon Harris | Scr. James McCarthy/J. Blakeson/James Watkins

Detour (2016)

Dir./Scr. Christopher Smith

Devil Doll (1963)

Prod./Dir. Lindsay Shonteff | Scr. Ronald Kinnoch ( ‘George Barclay’)/Lance Z. Hargreaves | Ph. Gerald Gibbs

Devil Girl from Mars (1954)

Prod. Edward J. Danziger/Harry Lee Danziger | Dir. David Macdonald | Scr. John C. Maher/James Eastwood

Devil Rides Out, The (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1967)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Richard Matheson | Ph. Arthur Grant

Devil Ship Pirates, The (1963)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. Michael Reed

Devil’s Man, The (1976)

Prod. Frixos Constantine | Dir. Costas Carayiannis | Scr. Arthur Rowe

Devils of Darkness (1964)

Dir. Lance Comfort | Scr. Lyn Fairhurst

Diaboliques, Les (1955)

Dir./Scr. Henri-Georges Clouzot | Scr. Pierre Boileau/Thomas Narcejak/Jerome Geronimi/Rene Masson/Frederic Grendel

Dinosaur Hotel 2 (2022)

Dir. Jack E. Bell | Scr. Craig McClearie

Disciple of Death (1972)

Prod./Dir. Tom Parkinson | Scr. Churton Fairman/Tom Parkinson

Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1960)

Dir. Sidney J. Furie | Scr. Nathan Juran (‘Jerry Juran’)/James Kelley/ Peter Miller

Doctor Jekyll (2023)

Dir. Joe Stephenson | Scr. Dan Kelly-Mulhern

Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)

Prod. Albert Fennell/Brian Clemens | Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr. Brian Clemens | Ph. Norman Warwick

Dog Soldiers (2002)

Prod. David E. Allen | Dir./Scr. Neil Marshall | Ph. Sam McCurdy

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Prod. Peter Katz | Dir. Nicholas Roeg | Scr. Chris Bryant/Allan Scott

Don’t Speak (2020)

Dir./Scr. Scott Chambers

Doomwatch (1972)

Prod. Tony Tenser | Dir. Peter Sasdy | Scr. Clive Exton | Ph. Kenneth Talbot

Doppelganger (aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) (1969)

Dir. Robert Parrish | Scr. Gerry Anderson/Sylvia Anderson/Donald James

Dorian Gray (1970)

Prod. Harry Alan Towers | Dir./Scr. Massimo Dallamano

Dr Morelle: The Case of the Missing Heiress (1949)

Dir. Godfrey Grayson | Scr. Roy Plomley/Ambrose Grayson

Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972)

Prod. Louis M. Heywood | Dir. Robert Fuest | Scr. Robert Fuest/ Robert Blees | Ph. Alex Thomson

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1964)

Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Milton Subotsky | Ph. Alan Hume

Dr Who and The Daleks (1965)

Dir. Gordon Flemyng | Scr. Milton Subotsky/Terry Nation

Dracula (1979)

Prod. Walter Mirisch | Dir. John Badham | Scr. W. D. Richter

Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula) (1957)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. Jack Asher

Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

Prod. Josephine Douglas | Dir. Alan Gibson | Scr. Don Houghton

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)

Prod. Aida Young | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. Arthur Grant

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1965)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Jimmy Sangster (‘John Sansom’) | Ph. Michael Reed

Dream Demon (1988)

Prod. Paul Webster | Dir. Harley Cokeliss | Scr. Christopher Wicking/ Harley Cokeliss/Catherine de Pury

Dust Devil (1993)

Prod. Jo-Anne Sellar | Dir./ Scr. Richard Stanley

Earth Dies Screaming, The (1964)

Prod. Robert L. Lippert/Jack Parsons | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Henry Cross | Ph. Arthur Lavis

Eden Lake (2008)

Dir./Scr. James Watkins

Endless Night (1974)

Prod. Leslie Gilliat | Dir./Scr. Sidney Gilliat

English Haunting, An (2020)

Dir./Scr. Charlie Steeds

Escape From Cannibal Farm (2017)

Dir./Scr. Charlie Steeds

Evil of Frankenstein, The (1963)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. John Wilcox

Ex Machina (2014)

Prod. Andrew Macdonald/Allon Reich | Dir./Scr. Alex Garland

Exorcism, The (1972)

Dir./Scr. Don Taylor

Exorcist Vengeance (2022)

Dir. Scott Chambers/Becca Hirani | Scr. Matthew B.C./Jeff Miller

Eye of the Devil, The (1966)

Dir. J. Lee Thompson | Scr. Robin Estridge/Dennis Murphy

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Dir. Georges Franju | Scr. Pierre Boileau Thomas Narcejak/Claude Sautet/Pierre Gascar

F (2010)

Dir./Scr. Johannes Roberts

Face at the Window, The (1939)

Prod. Randell Faye | Dir. George King | Scr. A.R. Rawlinson/Ronald Fayre

Face of Fu Manchu, The (1965)

Prod. Harry Alan Towers | Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Harry Alan Towers (‘Peter Welbeck’) | Ph. Ernest Steward

Face the Music (1954)

Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Ernest Borneman

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Prod. Lewis M. Alan | Dir. Francois Truffaut | Scr. Francois Truffaut/ Jean-Louis Richard | Ph. Nicolas Roeg

Fall of the House of Usher, The (1949)

Dir. Ivan Barnett | Scr. Duke Richards

Fanatic (aka Die! Die! My Darling!) (1964)

Prod. Antony Hinds | Dir. Silvo Narizzano | Scr. Richard Matheson | Ph. Arthur Ibbetson

Fear in the Night (1971)

Prod./Dir. Jimmy Sangster | Scr. Jimmy Sangster/Michael Syson | Ph. Arthur Grant

Fiend Without a Face (1957)

Prod. John Croydon | Dir. Arthur Crabtree | Scr. Herbert J. Leder/Amelia Reynolds Long | Ph. Lionel Banes

Fiend, The (1970)

Prod./Dir. Robert Hartford-Davis | Scr. Brian Comport | Ph. Desmond Dickinson

Final Scream, The (2019)

Dir./Scr. Scott Chambers

Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956)

Dir./Scr. Cy Roth

First Man into Space (1958)

Prod. John Cooper/Lance Z. Hargreaves | Dir. Robert Day | Scr. Wyott Ordung

First Men in the Moon (1964)

Prod. Charles H. Schneer | Dir. Nathan Juran | Scr. Nigel Kneale/Jan Read | Ph. Wilkie Cooper

Flaw, The (1955)

Prod. Brandon Fleming/Geoffrey Goodheart | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Brandon Fleming

Flesh and Blood Show, The (1972)

Dir. Pete Walker | Scr. Alfred Shaughnessy

Flesh and the Fiends, The (aka Mania) (1959)

Prod. Robert S. Baker/Monty Berman | Dir. John Gilling | Scr. John Gilling/Leon Griffiths | Ph. Monty Berman

Forest of the Damned (2005)

Prod. Miguel Ruz | Dir. Johannes Roberts | Scr. Johannes Roberts/ Joseph London

Four-Sided Triangle, The (1962)

Prod. Michael Carreras | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Paul Tabori/Terence Fisher

Fox Trap (2019)

Dir. Jamie Weston | Scr. Scott Chambers

Fragment of Fear (1969)

Prod. John R. Sloan | Dir. Richard C. Sarafian | Scr. Paul Dehn | Ph. Oswald Morris

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1972)

Prod. Roy Skeggs | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. Bryan Probyn

Frankenstein Created Woman (1966)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. Arthur Grant

Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Bert Batt/Anthony Nelson-Keys | Ph. Arthur Grant

Freeze (2022)

Dir./Scr. Charlie Steeds

Fright (1970)

Prod. Harry Fine/Michael Style | Dir. Peter Collinson | Scr. Tudor Gates | Ph. Ian Wilson

Frightmare (1974)

Prod./Dir. Pete Walker | Scr. David McGillivray

From Beyond the Grave (1973)

Prod. Milton Subotsky/Max J. Rosenberg | Dir. Kevin Connor | Scr. Robin Clarke/Raymond Christodoulou

Frozen Dead, The (1966)

Prod./Dir./Scr. Herbert J. Leder | Ph. Davis Boulton

Full Circle (aka The Haunting of Julia) (1976)

Prod. Peter Fetterman | Dir. Richard Loncraine | Scr. Dave Humphries

Full Treatment, The (1960)

Prod. Victor Lyndon | Dir. Val Guest | Scr. Val Guest/Ronald Thorn

Gamma People, The (1955)

Prod. John Gossage | Dir. John Gilling | Scr. John Gilling/John Gossage/Louis Pollack | Ph. Ted Moore

Ghost Ship (1952)

| Prod. Nat Cohen | Dir. Vernon Sewell | Scr. Philip Thornton/ Vernon Sewell

Ghost Stories (2017)

Dir./Scr. Jeremy Dyson/Andy Nyman

Ghost Story (1974)

Prod./Dir. Stephen Weeks | Scr. Stephen Weeks/Rosemary Sutcliffe

Ghosts of Berkeley Square, The (1947)

Dir. Vernon Sewell | Scr. James Seymour

Ghoul, The (1933)

Prod. Michael Balcon | Dir. T Hayes Hunter | Scr. Roland Pertwee/John Hastings Turner/ Rupert Downing

Ghoul, The (1975)

Prod. Kevin Francis | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’)

Girl with All the Gifts, The (2016)

Dir. Colm McCarthy | Scr. Mike Carey

Gods of the Deep (2023)

Dir./Scr. Charlie Steeds

Gorgo (1960)

Prod. Wilfrid Eades | Dir. Eugène Lourié | Scr. Robert L. Richards (‘John Loring’)/Daniel James (‘Daniel Hyatt’)/Eugène Lourié | Ph. Freddie Young

Gorgon, The (1963)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. John Gilling | Ph. Michael Reed

Gothic (1986)

Prod. Penny Corke | Dir. Ken Russell | Scr. Stephen Volk

Grip of the Stranger (aka The Haunted Stranger) (1957)

Prod. John Croydon | Dir. Robert Day | Scr. Jan Read/John C. Cooper | Ph. Lionel Banes

Hallow, The (2015)

Dir. Corin Hardy | Scr. Corin Hardy/Felipe Marino/Tom DeVille

Hand of Night, The (1966)

Dir. Frederic Goode | Scr. Bruce Stewart

Hands of the Ripper (1971)

Prod. Aida Young | Dir. Peter Sasdy | Scr. L.W. Davidson | Ph. Kenneth Talbot

Hardware (1990)

Prod. Joanne Sellar | Dir. Richard Stanley | Scr. Richard Stanley/Mike Fallon

Haunted (1995)

Prod./Dir. Lewis Gilbert | Scr. Lewis Gilbert/Bob Kellett/Tony Prager

Haunted House of Horror (originally: The Dark; aka Horror House) (1968)

Dir./Scr. Michael Armstrong

Haunting of the Tower of London (2022)

Dir./Scr. Charlie Steeds

Haunting, The (1963)

Prod./Dir. Robert Wise | Scr. Nelson Gidding | Ph. Davis Boulton

Hellfire Club, The (1959)

Prod./Dir./Ph. Robert S. Baker/ Monty Berman | Scr. Leon Griffiths/ Jimmy Sangster

Hellraiser (1987)

Prod. Christopher Figg | Dir./ Scr. Clive Barker

Hidden/Caché (2005)

Dir./Scr. Michael Haneke

His House (2020)

Dir. Remi Weekes | Scr. Remi Weekes/Felicity Evans/Toby Venables

Hole, The (2001)

Prod. Jeremy Bolt | Dir. Nick Hamm | Scr. Ben Cort/Caroline Ip

Horror Express (1972)

Prod. Bernard Gordon | Dir. Eugenio Martin | Scr. Arnaud d’Usseau/Julian Zimet

Horror Hospital (1973)

Prod. Richard Gordon | Dir. Anthony Balch | Scr. Anthony Balch/Alan Watson

Horror of Frankenstein, The (1970)

Prod./Dir. Jimmy Sangster | Scr. Jimmy Sangster/Jeremy Burnham | Ph. Moray Grant

Horror of it All, The (1963)

Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Ray Russell

Horrors of the Black Museum (1958)

Prod. Herman Cohen/Jack Greenwood | Dir. Arthur Crabtree | Scr. Aben Kandel/Herman Cohen | Ph. Desmond Dickinson

Host (2020)

Dir. Rob Savage | Scr. Gemma Hurley/Rob Savage/Jed Shepherd

Hound of the Baskervilles, The (1958)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Peter Bryan | Ph. Jack Asher

House in Sherwood, The (2020)

Dir./Scr. Richard Mansfield

House of Darkness (1947)

Dir. Oswald Mitchell | Scr. John Gilling

House of Mortal Sin (aka The Confessional) (1975)

Prod./Dir. Pete Walker | Scr. David McGillivray

House of Mystery (1961)

Prod. Julian Wyntle/Leslie Parkyn | Dir./Scr. Vernon Sewell | Ph. Ernest Steward

House of the Long Shadows (1983)

Prod. Menahem Golan | Dir. Pete Walker | Scr. Michael Armstrong

House of Whipcord, The (1974)

Prod./Dir. Pete Walker | Scr. David McGillivray

House That Dripped Blood, The (1970)

Prod. Max J. Rosenberg/Milton Subotsky | Dir. Peter Duffell | Scr. Robert Bloch | Ph. Ray Parslow

Hysteria (1964)

Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Jimmy Sangster

I Met a Murderer (1939)

Dir. Roy Kellino | Scr. Pamela Kellino/James Mason/Roy Kellino

I Monster (1970)

Dir. Stephen Weeks | Scr. Milton Subosky

Incense for the Damned (1969)

Prod. Peter Newbrook | Dir. Robert Hartford-Davis | Scr. Julian More | Ph. Desmond Dickinson

Innocents, The (1961)

Prod./Dir. Jack Clayton | Scr. William Archibald/Truman Capote/John Mortimer | Ph. Freddie Francis

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Prod. Stephen Woolley | Dir. Neil Jordan | Scr. Anne Rice | Ph. Philippe Rousselot

Invasion (1966)

Prod. Jack Greenwood | Dir. Alan Bridges | Scr. Roger Marshall/Robert Holmes | Ph. James Wilson

Island of Terror (1965)

Prod. Tom Blakeley | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Edward Andrew Mann/ Alan Ramsen | Ph. Reg Wyer

It (1966)

Prod./Dir./Scr. Herbert J. Leader | Ph. Davis Boulton

Jack the Ripper (1958)

Prod./Dir./Ph. Robert S. Baker/ Monty Berman | Scr. Jimmy Sangster/Peter Hammond/Colin Craig

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Prod. Charles H. Scheer | Dir. Don Cheadle | Scr. Jan Read/Beverly Cross | Ph. Wilkie Cooper | SFX Ray Harryhausen

Jekyll and Hyde (2021)

Dir./Scr. Steve Lawson

Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (aka Those Fantastic Flying Fools) (1967)

Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Dave Freeman/ Harry Alan Towers (‘Peter Welbeck’)

Jurassic Island (2022)

Dir. Dominic Nutter | Scr. Tom Jolliffe/Scott Chambers/Dom Ellis

Kill List (2011)

Dir. Ben Wheatley | Scr. Ben Wheatley/Amy Jump

Killing Tree, The (2022)

Dir. Rhys Frake-Waterfield | Scr. Craig McLearie/Rhys Frake-Waterfield

Kiss of the Vampire (1962)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. Alan Hume

Konga (1960)

Prod. Herman Cohen | Dir. John Lemont | Scr. Aben Kandel/Herman Cohen

Lair of the White Worm, The (1988)

Prod./Dir./Scr. Ken Russell

Last Horror Movie, The (2003)

Prod. Zorana Piggott | Dir. Julian Richards | Scr. Julian Richards/ James Handel

Last Night in Soho (2021)

Dir. Edgar Wright | Scr. Edgar Wright/Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Latin Quarter (aka Frenzy) (1945)

Prod. Louis H. Jackson | Dir./ Scr. Vernon Sewell | Ph. Gunther Kramph

Lawnmower Man, The (1992)

Prod. Gimel Everett | Dir. Brett Leonard | Scr. Gimel Everett/ Brett Leonard

Legacy, The (1978)

Prod. David Foster | Dir. Richard Marquand | Scr. Jimmy Sangster/ Patrick Tilley/Paul Wheeler

Legend of Hell House, The (1972)

Prod. Albert Fennell | Dir. John Hough | Scr. Richard Matheson | Ph. Alan Hume

Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, The (1973)

Prod./Scr. Don Houghton | Dir. Roy Ward Baker

Legend of the Werewolf, The (1974)

Prod. Don Houghton | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’)

Lemming (2005)

Dir. Dominic Moll | Scr. Gilles Marchand/Dominic Moll

Let Me In (2010)

Dir. Matt Reeves | Scr. Matt Reeves/John Ajvide Lindqvist

Lighthouse (2000)

Prod. Tim Dennison/Mark Leake | Dir./Scr. Simon Hunter

Limehouse Golem, The (2016)

Prod. Stephen Woolley/Elizabeth Karlsen/Joanna Laurie | Dir. Juan Carlos Medina | Scr. Jane Goldman

Living Dead, The (1933)

Dir. Thomas Bentley | Scr. Frank Miller

Lodge, The (2019)

Dir. Severin Fiala/Veronika Franz | Scr. Sergio Casci Veronika Franz/ Severin Fiala

Lost Continent, The (1968)

Dir. Michael Carreras | Scr. Michael Carreras (‘Michael Nash’)

Lost Hearts (1973)

Dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark | Scr. Robin Chapman

Lust for the Vampire (1970)

Dir. Jimmy Sangster | Scr. Tudor Gates

Madhouse (1974)

Prod. Max J. Rosenberg | Dir. Jim Clark | Scr. Greg Morrison/Ken Levison

Man in Black, The (1949)

Dir. Francis Searle | Scr. John Gilling

Man in the Back Seat, The (1961)

Prod. Julian Wyntle/Leslie Parkyn | Dir. Vernon Sewell | Scr. Malcolm Hulke/Eric Paice | Ph. Reginald Wyer

Man Who Could Cheat Death, The (1958)

Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Jimmy Sangster

Man Without a Body (1957)

Dir. W. Lee Wilder/Charles Saunders | Scr. William Grote

Maniac (1962)

Prod. Jimmy Sangster | Dir. Michael Carreras | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. Wilkie Cooper

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)

Prod. Francis Ford Coppola | Dir. Kenneth Branagh | Scr. Frank Darabont/Steph Lady

Masque of the Red Death, The (1964)

Prod. George Willoughby | Dir. Roger Corman | Scr. Charles Beaumont/R. Wright Campbell | Ph. Nicolas Roeg

Men (2022)

Prod. Andrew Macdonald/Allon Reich | Dir./Scr. Alex Garland

Mine Own Executioner (1947)

Dir. Anthony Kimmins | Scr. Nigel Balchin

Monk, The (1973)

Dir. Ado Kyrou | Scr. Luis Bunuel/Jean-Claude Carriere/Antonio Troisio

Monk, The (1990)

Dir./Scr. Francisco Lara Polop

Monk, The (2011)

Dir. Dominik Moll | Scr. Dominic Moll/Anne-Louise Trividic

Monsters (2010)

Dir./Scr. Gareth Edwards

Monster Club, The (1980)

Prod. Milton Subotsky | Dir. Roy Ward Barker | Scr. Edward Abraham/Valerie Abraham

Monster of Terror (aka Die, Monster, Die) (1965)

Dir. Daniel Haller | Scr. Jerry Sohl

Moon (2008)

Dir. Duncan Jones | Scr. Duncan Jones/Nathan Parker

Moon Zero Two (1969)

Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr. Michael Carreras

Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (aka My Son, the Vampire) (1952)

Dir. John Gilling | Scr. Val Valentine

Mr In-Between (2001)

Prod. Andreas Bajohra | Dir. Paul Sarossy | Scr. Peter Waddington

Mummy, The (1959)

Prod. Michael Carreras | Dir. Terrence Fisher | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. Jack Asher

Mummy: Resurrection, The (2022)

Dir./Scr. Steve Lawson

Mummy’s Shroud, The (1966)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. John Gilling | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) /John Gilling | Ph. Arthur Grant

Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girlie (1969)

Prod. Ronald J. Kahn | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Brian Comport | Ph. David Muir

Murder by Decree (1979)

Prod./Dir. Bob Clark | Scr. John Hopkins

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971)

Prod. Louis M. Heyward | Dir. Gordon Hessler | Scr. Christopher Wicking/Henry Slesar | Ph. Manuel Berenguer

Mute Witness (1996)

Prod./Dir./Scr. Anthony Waller | Ph. Egon Werdin

My Little Eye (2002)

Prod. David Hilton | Dir. Marc Evans | Scr. James Watkins/David Hilton

Myrte and the Demons (1949) (UK/ Netherlands)

Dir. Paul Schreiber | Scr. Gyles Adams

Mysterious Island (1961)

Dir. Cy Enfield | Scr. John Prebble/Daniel Ullman/Crane Wilbur

Mystery of the Marie Celeste, The (aka The Phantom Ship) (1935)

Prod./Dir. Denison Clift | Scr. Denison Clift/Charles Larkworthy

Naked Edge, The (1961)

Prod. Walter Seltzer | Dir. Michael Anderson | Scr. Michael Ehrlich/ Joseph Stefano

Naked Evil (1966)

Dir./Scr. Stanley Goulder

Nanny, The (1965)

Dir. Seth Holt | Scr. Jimmy Sangster

Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1972)

Prod. Jack Smith | Dir. Fred Burnley | Scr. Gordon Honeycombe

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Dir. Mark Romanek | Scr. Alex Garland

Night Caller, The (aka Blood Beast from Outer Space) (1965)

Prod. Ronald Liles | Dir. John Gilling | Scr. Jim O’Connolly | Ph. Stephen Dade

Night Has Eyes, The (aka Terror House) (1942)

Dir. Leslie Arliss | Scr. Alan Kennington/Leslie Arliss

Night My Number Came Up, The (1954)

Prod. Michael Balcon | Dir. Leslie Norman | Scr. R. C. Sheriff | Ph. Lionel Banes

Night of the Big Heat, The (aka Island of the Burning Damned) (1967)

Prod. Tom Blakeley | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Ronald Liles/Pip Baker/ Jane Baker/John Lymington

Night of the Demon, The (aka Curse of the Demon) (1957)

Prod. Hal E. Chester | Dir. Jacques Tourneur | Scr. Charles Bennett/Hal E. Chester | Ph. Ted Scaife

Night of the Eagle (Burn Witch Burn) (1961)

Prod. Albert Fennell | Dir. Sidney Hayers | Scr. Charles Beaumont/ Richard Matheson/George Baxt | Ph. Reg Wyer

Nightcomers, The (1971)

Prod./Dir. Michael Winner | Scr. Michael Hastings | Ph. Robert Paynter

Nightmare (1962)

Prod. Jimmy Sangster | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. John Wilcox

Nightmare Park (1972)

Dir. Peter Sykes | Scr. Clive Exton/ Terry Nation

Nine Miles Under (aka Nine Miles Down) (2009)

Dir. Anthony Waller | Scr. Anthony Waller/Everett De Roche

No Blade of Grass (1970)

Dir. Cornel Wilde | Scr. Sean Forestal/Cornel Wilde (‘Jefferson Pascal’)/ John Christopher

Nothing But the Night (1972)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. Peter Sasdy | Scr. Brian Hayles

Nutcracker Massacre (2022)

Dir. Becca Harani | Scr. Joe Knetter/Jeff Miller

Oblong Box, The (1968)

Prod./Dir. Gordon Hessler | Scr. Lawrence Huntingdon | Ph. John Coquillon

Octane (2003)

Prod. Alistair MacLean-Clark | Dir. Marcus Adams | Scr. Stephen Volk | Ph. Robin Vidgeon

October Man, The (1947)

Prod. Eric Ambler | Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr. Eric Ambler

Old Dark House, The (1962)

Prod. William Castle/Anthony Hinds | Dir. William Castle | Scr. Robert Dillon | Ph. Arthur Grant

One Million Years B.C. (1965)

Dir. Don Chaffey | Scr. Michael Carreras/Mickell Novak/George Baker/Joseph Frickert

Out of Darkness (2023)

Dir. Andrew Cumming | Scr. Ruth Greenberg/Andrew Cumming/ Oliver Cassman/

Panic (1963)

Prod. Guido Coen | Dir./Scr. John Gilling/Guido Coen

Paranoiac (1962)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Jimmy Sangster

Parasite (2004)

Prod./Dir. Andrew Prendergast | Scr. Andrew Prendergast/Alan Coulson/Paul Mackman/Jason Kingsley/ Richard Stacey

Peeping Tom (1959)

Prod./Dir. Michael Powell | Scr. Leo Marks | Ph. Otto Heller

Persecution (aka The Terror of Sheba) (1974)

Prod. Kevin Francis | Dir. Don Chaffey | Scr. Robert B. Hutton/ Frederick Warner/Rosemary Wooten

Phantom of the Opera, The (1961)

Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’)

Piper, The (2023)

Dir. Anthony Waller | Scr. Anthony Waller/Duncan Kennedy

Plague of the Zombies (1965)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. John Gilling | Scr. Peter Bryan | Ph. Arthur Grant

Poor Things (2023)

Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos | Scr. Tony McNamara

Possum (2018)

Dir./Scr. Matthew Holness

Power, The (2021)

Prod. Rob Watson/ Matthew James Wilkinson | Dir./ Scr. Corinna Faith

Prey (1977)

Prod. Terence Marcel | Dir. Norman J. Warren | Scr. Max Cuff

Projected Man, The (1966)

Prod. John Croydon/Maurice Foster | Dir. Ian Curteis | Scr. John C. Cooper/ Peter Bryan/Frank Quattrocchi | Ph. Stan Pavey

Psychomania (1971)

Prod. Andrew Donally | Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Julian Harvey | Ph. Ted Moore

Psychopath, The (1966)

Prod. Max J. Rosenberg/Milton Subotsky | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Robert Bloch | Ph. John Wilcox

Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth) (1967)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr. Nigel Kneale | Ph. Arthur Grant

Quatermass II (aka Enemy From Space) (1956)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Val Guest | Scr. Nigel Kneale/Val Guest | Ph. Gerald Gibbs

Quatermass Xperiment, The (aka The Creeping Unknown) (1954)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Val Guest | Scr. Richard Landau/Val Guest | Ph. Jimmy Harvey

Quest For Love (1971)

Dir. Ralph Thomas | Scr. Terence Feely

Quiet Ones, The (2014)

Dir. John Pogue | Scr. Craig Rosenberg/Oren Moverman/John Pogue/Tom de Ville

Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1965)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. Michael Reed

Ravenous (1999)

Prod. Adam Fields | Dir. Antonia Bird | Scr. Ted Griffin

Rawhead Rex (1986)

Prod. Kevin Attew | Dir. George Pavlou | Scr. Clive Barker

Razor Blade Smile (1998)

Prod./Dir./Scr. Jake West

Reptile, The (1965)

Prod. Anthony Nelson-Keys | Dir. John Gilling | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. Arthur Grant

Repulsion (1965)

Prod. Gene Gutowski | Dir. Roman Polanski | Scr. Roman Polanski/ Gerard Brach | Ph. Gilbert Taylor

Resident, The (2011)

Dir. Antti J. Jokinen | Scr. Antti J. Jokinen/Robert Orr

Revelation (2001)

Prod./Dir. Stuarst Urban | Scr. Stuart Urban/Frank Falco

Revenge of Frankenstein, The (1957)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. Jack Asher

Revenge of the Blood Beast, The (aka The She Beast) (1965)

Prod. Paul M. Maslansky | Dir. Michael Reeves | Scr. Michael Reeves (‘Michael Byron’) | Ph. G. Gengarelli

Ripper Untold (2021)

Dir./Scr. Steve Lawson

Ripper’s Revenge (2023)

Prod. May Monteiro/Hannah O’Donoghue/Jeremy Rothwell | Dir./Scr. Steve Lawson

Ritual, The (2017)

Dir. David Bruckner | Scr. Joe Barton

Robin Redbreast (1970)

Prod. Graeme MacDonald | Dir. James McTaggart | Scr. John Bowen

Room to Let (1950)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Godfrey Grayson | Scr. John Gilling/Godfrey Grayson

Rose écorchée, La/Blood Rose, The (1970)

Dir. Claude Mulot | Scr. Claude Mulot/Jean Larriaga/Edgar Oppenheimer

Sacrifice (2020)

Dir./Scr. Andy Collier/Tor Mian

Saint Maud (2019)

Prod. Andrea Cornwell/Oliver Kassman | Dir./Scr. Rose Glass

Satan’s Skin (aka Blood on Satan’s Claw) (1970)

Prod. Peter L. Andrews/Malcolm B. Heyworth | Dir. Piers Haggard | Scr. Robert Wynne-Simmons | Ph. Dick Bush

Satanic Rites of Dracula, The (aka Count Dracula and His Satanic Bride) (1974)

Prod. Roy Skeggs | Dir. Alan Gibson | Scr. Don Houghton

Satellite in the Sky (1956)

Dir. Paul Dickson | Scr. John Mather/J. T. McIntosh/Edith Dell

Scars of Dracula, The (1970)

Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’)

Scotland Yard Mystery, The (aka Living Dead) (1934)

Prod. Walter C. Mycroft | Dir. Thomas Bentley | Scr. Frank Miller

Scream and Scream Again (1969)

Prod. Max J. Rosenburg/Milton Subotsky | Dir. Gordon Hessler | Scr. Christopher Wicking | Ph. John Coquillon

Severance (2006)

Prod. Jason Newmark/Finola Dwyer | Dir. Christopher Smith | Scr. James Moran/Christopher Smith

Shadow of the Cat (1960)

Prod. Jon Penington | Dir. John Gilling | Scr. George Baxt | Ph. Arthur Grant

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Prod. Nira Park | Dir. Edgar Wright | Scr. Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright

She (1964)

Prod. Michael Carreras | Dir. Robert Day | Scr. David T. Chantler | Ph. Harry Waxman

She Will (2021)

Dir. Charlotte Colbert | Scr. Kitty Percy/Charlotte Colbert

Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962)

Prod. Arthur Brauner | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Curt Siodmak | Ph. Richard Angst

Shining, The (1980)

Prod. Robert Fryer/Stanley Kubrick | Dir. Stanley Kubrick | Scr. Stanley Kubrick/Diane Johnson

Shuttered Room, The (1966)

Dir. David Greene | Scr. D. B. Ledrov/Nathaniel Tanchuck

Signalman, The (1976)

Dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark | Scr. Andrew Davies

Silent Cry (2002)

Dir. Julian Richards | Scr. Simon Lubert

Skeleton Key, The (2005)

Prod./Dir. Iain Softley | Scr. Ehren Kruger | Ph. Daniel Mindel

Skull, The (1965)

Prod. Max J. Rosenberg/Milton Subotsky | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Milton Subotsky/Robert Bloch | Ph. John Wilcox

Slave Girls (aka Prehistoric Women) (1966)

Dir. Michael Carreras | Scr. Michael Carreras (‘Henry Younger’)

Sleeping Room, The (2014)

Dir. John Shackleton | Scr. Ross Jameson/ John Shackleton/Alex Chandon

Snake Woman, The (1960)

Dir. Sidney J. Furie | Scr. Orville Hampton

Snorkel, The (1957)

Prod. Michael Carreras | Dir. Guy Green | Scr. Peter Myers/Jimmy Sangster

So Long at the Fair (1949)

Prod. Betty E. Box | Dir. Terence Fisher/Anthony Darnborough | Scr. Hugh Mills/Anthony Thorne | Ph. Reginald Wyer

Someone at the Door (1950)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Francis Searle | Scr. A. R. Rawlinson

Someone in the Lift (1967)

Dir. Ian Keill | Scr. David Campton

Sorcerers, The (1966)

Prod. Patrick Curtis/Tony Tenser | Dir. Michael Reeves | Scr. Michael Reeves/Tom Baker | Ph. Stanley Long

Spaceflight IC-1 (1965)

Dir. Bernard Knowles | Scr. Harry Spaulding

Spaceways (1952)

Prod. Michael Carreras | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Paul Tabori/Richard Landau | Ph. Reg Wyer

Speak No Evil (2022)

Dir. Christian Tafdrup | Scr. Christian Tafdrup/Mads Tafdrup

Spider (2002)

Prod./Dir. David Cronenberg | Scr. Patrick McGrath | Ph. Peter Suschitzky

Spirit Trap (2005)

Prod. Susie Brooks-Smith | Dir. David Smith | Scr. Rohan Candappa/Paul Finch/Phil O’Shea

Stalls of Barchester, The (1971)

Dir./Scr. Lawrence Gordon Clark

Stolen Face (1951)

Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Martin Berkley/Richard H. Landau

Straight On Till Morning (1971)

Dir. Peter Collinson | Scr. Michael Peacock

Strange World of Planet X, The (1957)

Dir. Gilbert Gunn | Scr. Paul Ryder/Joe Ambor

Stranger from Venus (1954)

Dir. Burt Balaban | Scr. Hans Jacoby

Stranglers of Bombay, The (1959)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. David Z. Goodman | Ph. Arthur Grant

Strings (2012)

Dir./Scr. Rob Savage

Strongroom (1962)

Dir. Vernon Sewell | Scr. Max Marquis/Richard Harris

Study in Terror, A (1965)

Dir. James Hill | Scr. Donald and Derek Ford

Summer Scars (2002)

Dir. Julian Richards | Scr. Al Wilson/Julian Richards

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)

Prod./Dir. George King | Scr. Frederick Hayword/H. F. Maltby

Symptoms (1974)

Prod. Jean Dupuis | Dir. Joseph Larraz | Scr. Joseph Larraz/Stanley Miller

Tale of a Vampire (1992)

Prod. Simon Johnson | Dir. Shimako Sato | Scr. Jane Corbett/Shimako Sato

Tales from the Crypt (1971)

Prod. Max J. Rosenberg/Milton Subotsky | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Milton Subotsky | Ph. Norman Warwick

Tales That Witness Madness (1972)

Prod. Norman Priggen | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Jennifer Jayne (‘Jay Fairbank’) | Ph. Norman Warwick

Taste of Fear (aka Scream of Fear) (1960)

Prod./Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Dir. Seth Holt | Ph. Douglas Slocombe

Taste of the Blood of Dracula (1969)

Prod. Aida Young | Dir. Peter Sasdy | Scr. Anthony Hinds (‘John Elder’) | Ph. Arthur Grant

Tell-Tale Heart, The (1960)

Dir. Ernest Morris | Scr. Brian Clemens/Eldon Howard

Terror (1978)

Prod. Richard Crafter | Dir. Norman J. Warren | Scr. David McGillivray

Terror of the Tongs (1960)

Dir. Anthony Bushell | Scr. Jimmy Sangster

Terror, The (1938)

Dir. Richard Bird | Scr. William Freshman/Edgar Wallace

Terrornauts, The (1967)

Dir. Montgomery Tully | Scr. John Brunner

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Prod. John Kohn | Dir. Douglas Hickox | Scr. Anthony Greville-Bell

Theatre of Death (1966)

Prod. Michael Smedley-Aston | Dir. Samuel Gallu | Scr. Ellis Kadison/Roger Marshall | Ph. Gilbert Taylor

Them (2006)

Dir./Scr. David Moreau/Xavier Pallud

They Came from Beyond Space (1967)

Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Milton Subotsky

Three Cases of Murder (1954)

Dir. David Eady/George More O’Ferrall/Orson Welles/Wendy Toye | Scr. Ian Dalrymple/Donald Wilson/ Sidney Carroll

To the Devil a Daughter (1975)

Prod. Roy Skeggs | Dir. Peter Sykes | Scr. Christopher Wicking/ John Peacock

To the Public Danger (1947)

Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. T. J. Morrison/ Arthur Reid/Patrick Hamilton

Tomb of Ligeia, The (1964)

Prod. Pat Green | Dir. Roger Corman | Scr. Robert Towne | Ph. Arthur Grant

Tooth Fairy (2019)

Dir. Louisa Warren | Scr. Tom Critch/Shannon Holiday

Tooth Fairy 2: Return of the Tooth Fairy (2020)

Dir. Louisa Warren | Scr. Tom Jolliffe

Tooth Fairy3: The Last Extraction (2021)

Dir. Louisa Warren | Scr. Tom Jolliffe

Torture Garden (1967)

Prod. Max J. Rosenberg/Milton Subotsky | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Robert Bloch | Ph. Norman Warwick

Tower of Evil (aka Horror of Snape Island) (1971)

Prod. Richard Gordon | Dir. Jim O’Connolly | Scr. Jim O’Connolly/ George Baxt

Trauma (2004)

Dir. Marc Evans | Scr. Richard Smith

Triangle (2009) Dir./Scr. Christopher Smith

Trog (1970)

Prod. Herman Cohen | Dir. Freddie Francis | Scr. Aben Kandel/Peter Bryan/John Gilling | Ph. Desmond Dickinson

Trollenberg Terror, The (aka The Crawling Eye) (1958)

Prod. Robert S. Baker/Monty Berman | Dir. Quentin Lawrence | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. Monty Berman

Turn of the Screw (1992)

Prod. Steffan Ahrenberg | Dir./Scr. Rusty Lemorande

Turning, The (2020)

Dir. Floria Sigismondi | Scr. Chad Hayes/Carey W. Hayes

Twins of Evil (1971)

Dir. John Hough | Scr. Tudor Gates

Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, The (aka House of Fright) (1959)

Prod. Michael Carreras | Dir. Terence Fisher | Scr. Wolf Mankowitz | Ph. Jack Asher

Uncanny, The (1977)

Prod. Claude Heroux | Dir. Denis Heroux | Scr. Michel Parry

Uncle Silas (aka The Inheritance) (1947)

Prod. Laurence Irving | Dir. Charles Frank | Scr. Ben Travers

Under the Skin (2011)

Dir. Jonathan Glazer | Scr. Walter Campbell/Jonathan Glazer

Unearthly Stranger (1963)

Dir. John Krish | Scr. Rex Carlton

Upturned Glass, The (1947)

Dir. Laurence Huntingdon | Scr. John Monaghan/Pamela Kellino

Urban Ghost Story (1998)

Prod. Chris Jones | Dir. Genevieve Jolliffe | Scr. Genevieve Jolliffe/ Chris Jones

Vampire Circus (1971)

Prod. Wilbur Stark | Dir. Robert Young | Scr. Judson Kinberg | Ph. Moray Grant

Vampire Lovers, The (1970)

Prod. Harry Fine/Michael Style | Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr. Tudor Gates | Ph. Moray Grant

Vampire nue, La (1970)

Dir. Jean Rollin | Scr. Jean Rollin/ Serge Moati

Vampire Virus (2020)

Dir. Charlie Steeds | Scr. Sam Ashurst/Jerome Reygner-Kalfon/ Sebastien Semon/Charlie Steeds

Vampyres (1974)

Prod. Brian Smedley-Aston | Dir. Joseph Larraz | Scr. Diana Daubeney

Vault of Horror (1973)

Prod. Max J. Rosenberg/Milton Subotsky | Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Scr. Milton Subotsky

Vengeance of Fu Manchu, The (1967)

Dir. Jeremy Summers | Scr. Harry Alan Towers (‘Peter Welbeck’)

Vengeance of She, The (1967)

Dir. Cliff Owen | Scr. Peter O’Donnell

Venom (1970)

Prod. Kenneth Rowles | Dir. Peter Sykes | Scr. Donald Ford/Derek Ford | Ph. Peter Jessop

Very Edge, The (1963)

Prod. Raymond Stross | Dir. Cyril Frankel | Scr. Leslie Bricusse/Vivian Cox/E. J. Howard

View from a Hill, A (2005)

Dir. Luke Watson | Scr. Peter Harness

Viking Queen, The (1966)

Prod. John Temple-Smith | Dir. Don Chaffey | Scr. Clarke Reynolds/John Temple-Smith

Village of the Damned (1960)

Prod. Ronald Kinnoch | Dir. Wolf Rilla | Scr. Stirling Silliphant/Wolf Rilla/Ronald Kinnoch (‘George Barclay’)

Virgin Witch (1970)

Dir. Ray Austin | Scr. Hazel Adair (as Klaus Vogel)

Virtual Death Match (2020)

Dir. Louisa Warren | Scr. Scott Chambers/Suzy Spade

Vulture, The (1966, unreleased)

Dir./Scr. Laurence Huntingdon

Wake Wood (2009)

Dir. David Keating | Scr. Brendan McCarthy/David Keating

Warning to the Curious (1972)

Dir./Scr. Lawrence Gordon Clark

Werewolf Castle (2021)

Dir./Scr. Charlie Steeds

Werewolf in England, A (2020)

Dir./Scr. Charlie Steeds

What a Carve Up (aka No Place Like Homicide) (1962)

Dir. Pat Jackson | Scr. Ray Cooney/Tony Hilton

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969)

Prod. Aida Young | Dir. Val Guest | Scr. Val Guest/J. G. Ballard

Where Has Poor Mickey Gone? (1964)

Prod. Gerry Levy | Dir. Gerry Levy | Scr. Gerry Levy (as Peter Marcus)

Where the Bullets Fly (1966)

Prod. James Ward | Dir. John Gilling | Scr. Michael Pittock

While I Live (1947)

Dir. John Harlow | Scr. John Harlow/Doreen Montgomery

Whispers of Fear (1974)

Prod. Ian Merrick | Dir./Scr. Harry Bromley Davenport

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968)

Dir./Scr. Jonathan Miller

White Noise (2005)

Prod. Paul Brooks | Dir. Geoffrey Sax | Scr. Niall Johnson

White Settlers (aka The Blood Lands) (2014)

Dir. Simeon Halligan | Scr. Ian Fenton

Wicker Man, The (1973)

Prod. Peter Snell | Dir. Robin Hardy | Scr. Anthony Shaffer

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)

Dir./Scr. Rhys Frake-Waterfield

Wisdom of Crocodiles (1998)

Prod. Carolyn Choa/David Lascelles | Dir. Po-Chih Leong | Scr. Paul Hoffman | Ph. Oliver Curtis

Witchcraft (1964)

Prod. Robert Lippert/Jack Parsons | Dir. Don Sharp | Scr. Harry Spaulding | Ph. Arthur Lavis

Witches, The (aka The Devil’s Own) (1966)

Prod. Anthony Nelson Keys | Dir. Cyril Frankel | Scr. Nigel Kneale

Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) (1967)

Dir. Michael Reeves | Scr. Tom Baker/Michael Reeves | Ph. John Coquillon

Woman In Black, The (2012)

Dir. James Watkins | Scr. Jane Goldman

Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014)

Dir. Tom Harper | Scr. Jon Croker/Susan Hill

Womaneater (1957)

Prod. Guido Coen | Dir. Charles Saunders | Scr. Brandon Fleming

Women Without Men (1955)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Elmo Williams | Scr. Val Guest/Richard Landau

Wrath of Dracula (2023)

Dir./Scr. Steve Lawson

Wrong Number (1959)

Dir. Vernon Sewell | Scr. James Eastwood

X the Unknown (1956)

Prod. Anthony Hinds | Dir. Leslie Norman | Scr. Jimmy Sangster | Ph. Gerald Gibbs

Zeta One (1969)

Prod. George Maynard/Tony Tenser | Dir. Michael Cort | Scr. Michael Cort/Alastair Mackenzie

Select Bibliography

For a long time after A Heritage of Horror was published there were no books about Hammer, or UK horror. Now there are probably around 30 titles or more, many of them valuable and acknowledged in the text. In this abundance, quite a divergence has developed, with very serious academic texts sitting alongside glossy books for fans, with several in both categories asking extraordinarily high prices – some well over £100

Below is a highly selective bibliography of the books I have found most useful with regard to UK horror – a list only covering books about British cinema, Hammer and UK horror in general, published up to the autumn of 2023.

It does not, with one exception, Benjamin Halligan’s Michael Reeves, include studies of particular directors, individual films or other companies, though many of these are mentioned in the text.

All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, Charles Barr (ed.) (BFI, 1986)

Highly illuminating book of essays with some extraordinary research on the development of realism and the whole British documentary tradition, plus much material on horror.

British Horror Cinema, Steve Chibnall & Julian Petley (eds) (Routledge, 2002)

An excellent book with essays on subjects like female madness, the old dark house and the critical response, plus studies of lesser covered directors like Peter Walker and Clive Barker.

British Horror Film Locations, Derek Pryett (McFarland, 2008)

Landscape being a major feature of British horror, this is very useful with background and photos. True, IMDB Pro now gives bare locations for many films, but this has much more detail on those locations, making it a great handbook.

Contemporary British Horror Cinema. Industry, Genre and Society, Johnny Walker (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)

A landmark book, the first I can find, to devote itself to the massive British horror boom of the new century and, though fairly academic in approach, it is careful to appraise the industry side and analyse brands, also stressing the sheer breadth of the new horror. Where I don’t agree, Eden Lake, for example, I still recognize his argument as forceful (and back him in utterly rejecting the Daily Mail’s absurdly literal reading of the film). It’s only unfortunate that the major explosion of micro-budget horror happened just after the book came out.

Do You Want It Good or Tuesday?, Jimmy Sangster (Midnight Marquee, 1997)

Jimmy Sangster’s entertaining memoirs. He has also written the informative, purely Hammer, book Inside Hammer (Reynolds & Hearn, 2001).

English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema, Jonathan Rigby (Reynolds & Hearn, 2015)

Exhaustive, highly inclusive and extremely well-researched book, with innumerable nuggets of information and revelation. Rigby has dug very deep, in some places deeper than anyone, and many of his comments are highly astute, so much so, you notice when you disagree. (Did he really find Britannia Hospital funny? Well, it’s not a horror film anyway, but it shows how inclusive the book is.) The latest edition now has an exhaustive section on TV.

The Hammer Story, Marcus Hearn & Alan Barnes (Titan, 1997)

Semi-official book on Hammer: outstanding factual and visual material from the films, balanced if condensed overview, though contains no criticism and little controversy.

Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years, Wayne Kinsey (Reynolds & Hearn, 2000)

Superb labour of love containing masses of material on every aspect of the Bray years and much more besides, including the first real assessment of Hammer and the censor, with astonishing extracts from the BBFC files, which are something of a revelation and spurred me to go back and dig there on non-Hammer films. Sound judgements too.

Hammer Films:An Exhaustive Filmography, Tom Johnson & Deborah Del Vecchio (McFarland and Co., 1995)

Trial-blazing, very comprehensive study with masses of detail and dogged research. Quite rightly became a handbook.

A History of Horrors, Denis Meikle (Scarecrow, 1996)

Excellent study of Hammer’s history, very much ‘the gospel according to Michael’, who offered all assistance. This, and the fact its author is no Hammer horror fan, gives the book a new, helpful slant, adding a whole additional perspective and also revealing much that had been hidden (even if for enthusiasts it renders a few of its judgements moot). In 2023, this appeared in a new edition, Hammer The Whole Story (Hemlock), with much new material.

Michael Reeves, Benjamin Halligan (Manchester University Press, 2003)

Painstaking, very revealing study of Reeves. For the first time I felt I understood him and his life. The life may have been short, but the book is substantial and Halligan does not lack for material. He seems to have got everything, there is, especially unique details of Reeves’ unseen private films.

Index

28 Days Later (2002) here–here, here, here

28 Years Later (in production) here

47 Meters Down (2017) here

A

A History of Horrors (Denis Meikle) here, here

ABC here, here, here

Abominable Dr Phibes, The (1971) here

Abominable Snowman, The (1957) here, here

Adams, Marcus D. here

Adams, Richard here

Afraid of the Dark (2021) here, here

Afterlife (2009) here

Alien (1979) here

Alien Versus Predator (2004) here

All Our Yesterdays: here Years of British Cinema (Charles Barr, ed.) here–here, here

Ambler, Eric here

Amenábar, Alejandro here, here

American Werewolf in London (1981) here

American Werewolf in Paris (1997) here

Amicus Productions here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here

Amityville Scarecrow (2021) here, here, here, here

Amulet (2020) here, here

Anderson, Paul W. S. here, here

Andrews, Anthony here

Andrews, Eamonn here

Anglo-Amalgamated Productions here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here

Annihilation (2018) here, here

Argento, Dario here

Arrighi, Nike here

Asher, Jack here–here

Asphyx, The (1972) here

Astonished Heart, The (1949) here, here

At the Mountains of Madness (2021) here

Awakening, The (1980) here, here

Aylmer, Felix here

B

Bad Nun, The (2018) here

Badham, John here

BAFTA Awards here, here

Bailey-Bond, Prano here, here

Baker, Robert S. here

Baker, Roy Ward here, here, here, here, here, here

Baker, Tom here, here

Balchin, Nigel here

Balcon, Michael here, here, here

Ballard, J. G. here, here–here

Banishing, The (2020) here, here

Bardot, Brigitte here

Barker, Clive here–here

Barr, Charles here–here, here

Bassett, Ronald here

Bates, Ralph here, here, here

Batt, Bert here, here

Baudelaire, Charles here, here, here, here

Baxt, George here, here, here

BBC here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here

BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here

Beach, The (1996, novel) here, here

Beacham, Stephanie here–here

Beaumont, Charles here

Beckinsale, Kate here–here

Beneath the Surface (2022) here

Berman, Monty here–here, here

Beswick, Martine here

BFI (British Film Institute) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Bird, Laurie here

Black Death (2010) here, here

Black Torment, The (1964) here

Blackout (aka Murder by Proxy) (1954) here

Blade Runner (1982) here, here

Blair Witch Project, The (1999) here, here, here

Blaisdell, Anne here

Bloch, Robert here–here

Blood Beast Terror, The (1967) here

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) here, here, here

Blood of the Vampire (1957) here, here

Boehm, Carl here–here

Bogarde, Dirk here

Bones and All (2022) here

Bordello Death Tales (2009) here, here

Boulting, Roy here, here

box office takings here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Boy Meets Girl (1994) here–here

Boyle, Danny here, here, here

Bray Studios (formerly Down Place) here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Break in the Circle (1954) here

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) here, here, here

Bride of Scarecrow (2018) here, here

Brides of Dracula, The (1960) here, here, here, here, here

Brides of Fu Manchu, The (1966) here

Brigand of Kandahar, The (1965) here

Bryan, Peter here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Briant, Shane here, here

Burke and Hare (1971) here

Bushell, Anthony here

Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here

Byzantium (2012) here

C

Calling, The (2000) here–here, here

Camp on Blood Island, The (1958) here

Candy Witch, The (2020) here

Cannes Film Festival here, here, here, here

Cannibal Troll (2021) here, here, here

Captain Clegg (aka Night Creatures) (1961) here

Carey, Mike here, here

Carlson, Veronica here, here, here, here, here

Carpenter, John here, here, here, here, here

Carreras, Enrique here, here, here

Carreras, James here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here; and censorship here; Children of Light here; Curse of Frankenstein here, here; Dracula here–here; early influence here–here; and end of Hammer here, here–here

Carreras, Michael here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here; and Dead of the Night remake here; as managing director here–here; as producer here, here–here; pseudonym here

Cartier, Rudolph here, here, here, here

Cass, Henry here, here, here

Castle of the Living Dead (1964) here, here

Cat Girl (1957) here–here, here

Cat People (Val Lewton, 1942) here, here–here

Cavalcanti, Alberto here, here, here

Censor (2021) here, here

censorship here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here; Beyond Bedlam here; Curse of Frankenstein here–here; Curse of the Werewolf here, here–here; The Damned here; The Devil Rides Again here–here; Dracula here–here; Hammer deals with here–here; Island of Lost Souls here; Jack the Ripper here; James Carreras agrees with here; Night Creatures here; Quatermass II here; Revenge of Frankenstein here; and sex scenes here–here, here, here; Time Without Pity here; Two Faces of Dr Jekyll here; X the Unknown here–here; see also British Board of Film Censors (BBFC)

certification here; 12 rating here; here rating here, here, here; here rating here; PG rating here; R rating here, here, here; X rating here, here, here, here

Chaffey, Don here–here, here

Chambers, Scott here–here, here–here, here, here, here

Chaney, Lon Jr. here

Cherry Tree (2015) here

Cherry Tree Lane (2010) here

Chibnall, Steve here, here

Chicken (2015) here, here

Children of the Damned (1963) here, here

Christie, Julie here, here

Circus of Horrors (1959) here, here–here, here–here, here

Citadel (2012) here

City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel) (1959) here–here

City under the Sea (1965) here

Clairmont, Jane here, here

Clarens, Carlos here, here

Clark, Lawrence Gordon here

Clark, Morfydd here

Clark, Robert here

Clarke, Arthur C. here

Clayton, Jack here

Cloudburst (1951) here–here

co-productions here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Cohen, Herman here, here, here, here–here, here

Cohen, Nat here, here, here

Cokliss, Harley here

Colbert, Charlotte here, here

Cold War, influence on screenwriting here, here, here

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor here–here, here

Collins, Joan here

Collins, Wilkie here, here, here, here, here

Collinson, Peter here

Colonel Bogey (1947) here

Columbia here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here

comedy here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Company of Wolves, The (1984) here

Conan Doyle, Adrian here

Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Conjuring the Genie (2021) here, here, here, here

Conjuring the Genie here (2022) here

Coppola, Francis Ford here, here, here

Coquillon, Johnny here, here

Corman, Roger here, here, here, here, here–here, here

Corridor of Mirrors (1948) here

Corridors of Blood (1957) here

Corruption (1967) here

Count Dracula (1970) here

Countess Dracula (1970) here, here–here

Court, Ben here

Coward, Noël here

Crabtree, Arthur here, here–here, here–here, here

Creative England here–here

Creatures the World Forgot (1970) here, here, here

Creep (2004) here

Creeping Flesh, The (1973) here

Crescendo (1969) here, here

Crimes at the Dark House (1940) here

Crofts, Frank here, here

Cronenberg, David here

Crow Hollow (1952) here

Croydon, John here

Cruise, Tom here, here

Cry of the Banshee (1970) here

Cumming, Andrew here

Cupid (2020) here, here–here, here

Curse of Frankenstein, The (1956) here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Curse of Humpty Dumpty, The (2021) here, here, here

Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka Crimson Cult) (1968) here, here

Curse of the Fly, The (1965) here

Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, The (1964) here

Curse of the Scarecrow (2018) here, here

Curse of the Werewolf, The (1960) here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Cushing, Peter here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here; acting praised here, here, here–here; and censorship here; and Christopher Lee here, here, here–here, here–here, here as Frankenstein here, here, here–here, here, here–here; and The Mummy here; as Van Helsing here, here, here, here, here, here

D

Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966) here

Damned, The (1969) here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here

Dance of the Vampires (aka The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth are in My Neck) (1967) here

Dangerous Voyage (1953) here

Dark Mile, The (2017) here

Dark, The (2005) here, here

Darkhunters (2004) here

Darklands (1997) here–here, here

Dashcam (2021) here

Daughters of Darkness (1971) here–here

Daughters of Dracula see Vampyres

Davis, Bette here

Day of the Triffids, The (1962) here

Day the Earth Caught Fire, The (1961) here

Day the World Ended, The (1955) here

Day, Robert here–here, here

De Niro, Robert here

De Sade, Donatien Alphonse-François, Marquis here, here, here, here, here

Dead of Night (1945) here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here

Deadly Bees, The (1966) here

Deadman Apocalypse (2016) here

Death Line (1972) here, here

Death of Grass (aka No Blade of Grass) (1970) here

Dehn, Paul here, here

Del Toro, Guillermo here

Demon Barber of Fleet Street see Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Demons of the Mind (1971) here

Denberg, Susan here

Deneuve, Catherine here

Descent, The (2005) here–here

Descent: Part here, The (2009) here

Detour (1945) here, here

Detour (2016) here

Devil Doll (1963) here, here, here

Devil Rides Out, The (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1967) here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Devil Ship Pirates (1964) here

Diaboliques, Les (1955) here, here–here, here

Dick, Philip K. here, here

Dickens, Charles here, here, here, here

Die Die My Darling see Fanatic

Diffring, Anton here, here, here

Dinosaur Hotel here (2022) here

Disciple of Dracula see Brides of Dracula, The

Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1960) here

Doctor Jekyll (2023) here, here

Don’t Look Now (1973) here, here–here, here

Donlevy, Brian here–here, 169,185

Donner, Richard here, here–here

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1964) here–here

Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897) here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Dracula (1931) here, here, here, here, here

Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula) (1957) here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Dracula (1979) here

Dracula, Bram Stoker’s (1992) here

Dracula here–here, here; archetypal villain here–here, here; castle here, here, here, here, here–here, here; coffin here, here; death here–here; popularity in horror here, here, here, here; rebirth here; and sex here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here

Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) here–here

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) here, here–here

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Dream Demon (1988) here, here

Du Maurier, Daphne here, here, here

Duffell, Peter here

Dust Devil (1993) here

DVDs here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here

Dwyer, Hilary here, here

Dyall, Valentine here, here

Dyson, Jeremy here, here, here

E

Ealing Studios here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Earth Dies Screaming, The (1964) here

Eden Lake (2008) here, here, here, here–here

Elder, John here

Elstree Studios here, here, here, here, here

English Gothic literature here, here–here, here, here, here

English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema (Jonathan Rigby) here, here, here, here

English Haunting, An (2020) here

Escape From Cannibal Farm (2017) here

Essiedu, Paapa here, here

Evans, Marc here, here

Evil Dead, The (1981) here, here

Evil of Frankenstein, The (1963) here, here

Ex Machina (2014) here–here, here

Exclusive Film Distribution here, here–here, here, here, here

Exorcism, The (1972) here

Exorcist Vengeance (2022) here, here

Exorcist, The (1973) here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Eye of the Devil, The (1966) here

Eyes Without a Face (1960) here

F

F (2010) here

Fabian, Robert here

Face at the Window, The (1939) here

Face of Fu Manchu, The (1965) here–here

Face the Music (aka The Black Glove) (1954) here

Faculty, The (1998) here

Faith, Corinna here

Fall of the House of Usher, The (1949) here

Fanatic (aka Die! Die! My Darling!) (1964) here–here

Farrow, Mia here

‘Fatal Woman’/femme fatale here, here, here

Fawcett, John here

Fear in the Night (1971) here

Field in England, A (2013) here

Field, Audrey here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here

Field, Shirley Ann here, here, here

Fiend Without a Face (1957) here

Fiends, The see Diaboliques, Les

Film Council here, here, here

Final Scream, The (2019) here, here, here–here, here

Fine, Harry here, here

Finney, Jack here

First Man into Space (1958) here, here

First Men in the Moon (1964) here

Fisher, Terence here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here; criticised here, here; as director here, here, here, here, here–here; importance of here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here; personality here, here; pre-Hammer films here; reminisces here; themes here–here, here, here–here

Flaw, The (1955) here

Flesh and the Fiends, The (aka Mania) (1959) here, here, here

Florey, Robert here

Fly, The (1958) here, here

Fontaine, Joan here, here

Forbes, Bryan here, here, here, here

Forest of the Damned (2005) here–here

Forgotten, The (2004) here

Four-Sided Triangle, The (1962) here, here, here–here, here

Fox (20th Century) here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here

Fox Trap (2019) here

Fragment of Fear (1969) here

Frake-Waterfield, Rhys here, here, here

Francis, Freddie here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here

Franco, Jess here

Frankenstein (Hammer TV Series) here–here

Frankenstein (1931) here, here, here

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1972) here

Frankenstein Created Woman (1966) here, here, here–here

Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969) here–here

Freeze (2022) here

Freud, Sigmund here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here

Friedkin, William here

Frightmare (1974) here

Fu Manchu here–here

Fuest, Robert here

Fulci, Lucio here, here

Full Circle (aka The Haunting of Julia) (1976) here

Furneaux, Yvonne here

G

Gainsborough Studios here–here, here

Gamma People, The (1955) here

Garai, Romola here, here

Garland, Alex here, here, here, here–here

Gates, Tudor here, here

Gatiss, Mark here–here

Geeson, Judy here

George, Susan here–here

German Expressionism here, here

Ghost Ship (1952) here, here

Ghost Stories (2017) here, here

ghost stories here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Ghosts of Berkeley Square, The (1947) here

Ghoul, The (1933) here, here

Ghoul, The (1975) here

giallo here

Gibbs, Gerald here, here–here, here, here

Gibson, Alan here

Gielgud, John here, here

Gilling, John here, here, here, here, here–here, here

Ginger Snaps (2000) here

Girl with All the Gifts, The (2016) here, here

Glass Cage, The (1955) here

Glass, Rose here–here, here

Gods of the Deep (2023) here

Goldoni, Lelia here–here

Gordon, Hessler here, here

Gordon, Richard here

Gordon, Ruth here

Gorgon, The (1963) here, here–here, here, here

Gothard, Michael here

Gothic (1986) here

Gothic movement here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here

Gough, Michael here, here, here

Grant, Arthur here, here–here, here

Gray, Charles here

Grayson, Godfrey here

Greene, Graham here, here–here

Greene, Leon here

Grierson, John here–here

Grimmfest, Manchester here

Grip of the Stranger (aka The Haunted Stranger) (1957) here–here

Guest, Val here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Gunn, Gilbert here

H

Habit (2017) here

Haggard, H. Rider here, here

Half Light (2006) here

Haliday, Bryant here

Halligan, Benjamin here–here, here–here, here

Halligan, Simeon here, here–here

Hallow, The (2015) here

Halloween (1978) here, here

Halloween H20:20 Years Later (1998) here

Hamer, Robert here–here

Hamilton, Patrick here, here, here

Hamm, Nick here

Hammer Film Productions abandons films for move to horror here; and artistic systems here; beginnings here–here, here–here; and British society here–here; and conflicting personalities here; decline here, here, here–here, here–here; early success here–here; foresight here; hard to copy here

Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years (Wayne Kinsey) here, here, here

Hammer Story, The (Marcus Hearn & Alan Barnes) here, here

Hands of the Ripper (1971) here

Haneke, Peter here

Hardware (1990) here

Hardy, Corin here, here–here, here, here, here

Hardy, Robert here

Harris, Laura here

Harryhausen, Ray here, here

Hartford-Davis, Robert here, here

Harvey, Laurence here, here

Haunted (1995) here–here

Haunted Mirror, The (1945) here–here

Haunting of Julia, The see Full Circle

Haunting of the Tower of London (2022) here

Hayers, Sidney here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here

Hayter, James here

Heilbron, Lorna here, here

Hellbreeder (2004) here

Hellfire Club, The (1959) here

Hellman, Monte here

Hellraiser (1987) here, here, here–here

Hemmings, David here, here

Herbert, James here, here

Hessler, Gordon here–here

Heston, Charlton here, here, here

Hibbin, Nina here

Hidden/Caché (2005) here

Highbury Films here–here, here

Higson, Andrew here–here

Hilton, David here

Hilton, James here

Hinds, Anthony here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here

Hinds, Will here, here

His House (2020) here, here, here

Hitchcock, Alfred here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here

Hogfather (2003) here

Hole, The (2001) here

Hollywood here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Holness, Mathew here, here

Holt, Seth here–here, here, here

Horror of Frankenstein, The (1970) here–here, here

Horror of it All, The (1963) here

Horrors of the Black Museum (1958) here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here

Host (2020) here, here, here, here

Hostel (2005) here, here

Houghton, Don here, here

Hound of the Baskervilles, The (1958) here, here–here, here, here

House in Sherwood, The (2020) here

House of Darkness (1947) here, here

House of Mortal Sin (aka The Confessional) (1975) here

House of Mystery (1961) here–here

House of Whipcord, The (1974) here–here

House That Dripped Blood, The (1970) here

Howarth, Kevin here–here

Hull, Gaby here

Hutchings, Peter here

Hyman, Eliot here–here, here, here, here

Hysteria (1964) here, here–here

I

I Met a Murderer (1939) here

I Monster (1971) here

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) here

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) here

Incense for the Damned (1971) here–here

Innocents, The (1961) here, here, here

Insignia Films here

Interview with the Vampire (1994) here, here, here

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) here, here–here, here, here, here, here

Ip, Caroline here

Island of Terror (1965) here

It (1966) here

J

Jack the Ripper (1958) here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here

Jackson, Freda here

Jacob’s Ladder (1990) here, here–here

Jagger, Dean here–here, here

James, M. R. here, here–here, here, here

Jean, Vadim here

Jeffries, Lionel here

Jekyll and Hyde (2021) here

Jenkyn, Mark here

Jennings, Humphrey here, here

Jewel of the Seven Stars (Bram Stoker) here, here

Johnson, Celia here

Jokinen, Antti here

Jolliffe, Genevieve here–here

Jones, Evan here

Jones, Freddie here

Jordan, Neil here

Journey to the Unknown (1968–here) here–here, here

Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (aka Those Fantastic Flying Fools) (1967) here

Jurassic Island (2022) here

K

Karloff, Boris here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Karlsen, Elizabeth here

Katz, Norman here

Keating, David here, here

Keats, John here–here, here

Keir, Andrew here, here, here

Kellett, Bob here

Kiefer, Warren here–here

Kill List (2011) here, here, here

Killing Tree, The (2022) here

Kimmins, Anthony here

King, Stephen here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Kingston, Kiwi here

Kinsey, Wayne here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Kiss of the Vampire (1962) here, here, here, here

Kneale, Nigel here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Kubrick, Stanley here, here, here, here

L

LaBute, Neil here

Laing, R. D. here

Landis, John here

Langella, Frank here

Lansky, Myer here

Lanthimos, Yorgos here–here

Larraz, Joseph here, here–here

Last Horror Movie, The (2003) here

Last Night in Soho (2021) here

Latin Quarter (aka Frenzy) (1945) here, here, here

Lawnmower Man, The (1992) here

Lawrence, Quentin here

Lawson, Steve here, here–here

Le Fanu, Sheridan here, here, here–here, here

Leader, Herbert J. here

Leakey, Phil here, here, here–here

Lee, Christopher here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Legend of Hell House, The (1972) here, here

Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, The (1973) here

Leighton, Margaret here

Lejeune, Caroline A. here–here, here, here

Lemming (2005) here

Let Me In (2010) here

Letchmore Heath here

Levin, Ira here

Lewis, Matthew G. here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Lewton, Val here, here, here

Limehouse Golem, The (2016) here–here

Lippert, Robert here, here, here, here

Little Shoppe of Horrors (Hammer periodical) here, here, here

Living Dead, The (1933) here, here

Lodge, The (2019) here–here

Long Time Dead (2002) here

Losey, Joseph here–here, here, here–here, here, here

Lost Continent, The (1968) here, here–here

Love, Gary here

Lovecraft, H. P. here–here, here, here

Lugosi, Bela here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here

Lust for a Vampire (1971) here, here–here

Lynch, David here, here

M

Maddern, Victor here

Malleson, Miles here, here, here, here, here

Man in the Back Seat, The (1961) here–here

Man on the Beach, A (Short, 1956) here, here

Man Who Could Cheat Death, The (1958) here

Man with the Golden Arm, The (1955) here

Man Without a Body (1957) here, here

Maniac (1962) here

Markham, Barbara here

Marks, Alfred here

Marks, Harrison here

Marks, Leo here

Marshall, Neil here, here

Mask of Dust (1954) here

Maslansky, Paul here–here

Mason, James here, here

Masque of the Red Death, The (1964) here

Massey, Anna here, here

Matheson, Richard here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here

Maturin, Charles Robert here, here, here–here

McCarthy, Brendan here

McCarthy, Colm here, here

McCarthy, Michael here

McGillivray, David here–here, here

Meikle, Denis here, here, here

Melmoth the Wanderer here, here–here

Men (2022) here, here, here, here, here

Merrow, Jane here

micro-budget movies here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here

Midsommar here

Miller, Jonathan here, here, here here, here, here

Mine Own Executioner (1947) here

Minority Report (2002) here

Mitchell, Oswald here, here

Moll, Dominik here

Monk, The (1973) here

Monk, The (1990) here

Monk, The (2011) here

Monster Club, The (1980) here

Monsters (2010) here

Moon (2008) here

Moorcock, Michael here, here

Morell, Andre here

Morley, Evelyn here

Morley, Robert here

Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (aka My Son, the Vampire) (1952) here

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) here, here

Moxey, John here

Mulholland Drive (2001) here

Mummy, The (1959) here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Mummy: Resurrection, The (2022) here, here, here

Mummy’s Shroud, The (1966) here

Munro, Caroline here, here

Munro, Janet here

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971) here

Murphy, Cillian here

Murphy, Nick here

Mute Witness (1996) here

My Little Eye (2002) here, here, here

N

Nanny, The (1965) here, here, here

Narizzano, Silvo here, here

National Film School here, here, here

National Film Theatre here, here, here

Neame, Christopher here, here–here

Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1972) here

Nelson-Keyes, Anthony here

Never Let Me Go (2010) here

Newbrook, Peter here

Newell, Mike here, here

Newman, Kim here, here, here

Night Caller, The (aka Blood Beast from Outer Space) (1965) here

Night Has Eyes, The (aka Terror House) (1942) here

Night My Number Came Up, The (1954) here

Night of the Big Heat (1967) here, here

Night of the Demon, The (aka Curse of the Demon) (1957) here, here, here, here

Night of the Eagle (aka Burn Witch Burn) (1961) here, here–here, here, here

Night of the Following Day (1969) here, here

Night of the Living Dead (1968) here, here, here, here, here, here

Night Stalker, The (1972) here

Nightbreed (1990) here

Nightmare (1962) here, here, here–here

Nine Miles Under (aka Nine Miles Down) (2009) here

Norman, Leslie here, here

Nosferatu (1922) here

Nothing But the Night (1972) here

Nun, The (2018) here

Nutcracker Massacre (2022) here, here

Nyman, Andy here, here

O

Oblong Box, The (1968) here–here, here

Octane (2003) here–here

October Man, The (1947) here

Ogilvy, Ian here–here, here

Omen, The (1976) here, here–here, here, here

One Million Years B.C. (1965) here, here–here

Others, The (2001) here, here–here, here–here, here

Out of Darkness (2023) here

P

Paal, Alexander here

Palace Pictures here, here, here, here, here

Paramount here, here–here, here, here, here, here

Paranoiac (1962) here, here–here, here

Pearce, Jacqueline here

Peck, Gregory here, here, here

Peel, David here

Peeping Tom (1959) here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here

Percy, Edward here

Petley, Julian here, here

Phantom of the Opera, The (1961) here, here, here, here

Piper, The (2023) here

Pirates of Blood River (1962) here, here

Pitt, Ingrid here, here, here

Plague of the Zombies (1966) here, here, here–here, here

Pleasence, Donald here, here

Poe, Edgar Allan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Polanski, Roman here, here, here, here, here, here

Polidori, John here–here, here, here, here

Poloni, Dario here, here

Poor Things (2023) here, here

Possum (2018) here, here

Powell, Michael here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here

Powell, Robert here

Power, The (2021) here, here, here

Powers, Stefanie here

Prager, Tim here

Praz, Mario here, here–here, here, here, here, here

Preminger, Otto here

Price, Vincent here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Psycho (1960) here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here

Psychopath, The (1966) here

Q

Quartermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth) (1967) here, here, here–here

Quartermass II (aka Enemy From Space) (1956) here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here

Quartermass Xperiment, The (aka The Creeping Unknown) (1954) here–here, here, here, here, here

Quest For Love (1971) here

Quiet Ones, The (2014) here–here

R

Radcliffe, Ann (Mrs) here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Radcliffe, Daniel here–here

Raimi, Sam here

Rank Organisation, The here, here, here, here, here–here, here

Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1965) here

Raven, Mike here, here

Rawhead Rex (1986) here

Razor Blade Smile (1996) here

Read, Herbert here, here

Redgrave, Michael here

Reece, Yvette here

Reed, Oliver here, here, here

Rees, Angharad here

Reeves, Michael here, here–here, here, here

Regal International here, here–here

Reptile, The (1965) here, here, here, here, here

Repulsion (1965) here, here, here, here, here

Resident, The (2011) here, here

Revelation (2001) here

Revenge of Frankenstein, The (1957) here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here

Revenge of the Blood Beast, The (aka The She Beast) (1965) here

Ricci, Luciano here

Rice, Anne here

Richards, Julian here–here

Rigby, Jonathan here, here, here, here

Rilla, Wolf here–here

Ring, The , Ringu) (1998) here, here–here

Ripper Untold (2021) here

Ripper, Michael here

Ripper’s Revenge (2023) here

Ritual, The (2017) here

Rixen, Bob here, here

RKO Pictures here–here, here, here

Roberts, Johannes here, here, here

Robertson, Cliff here

Robin Redbreast (1970) here

Robinson, Bernard here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here–here

Rocket to the Moon (1967) here

Rodriguez, Robert here

Roeg, Nicolas here

Rohmer, Sax here, here

Romero, George A. here, here

Room to Let (1950) here

Rose ecorchée, La (The Blood Rose/ Ravaged) (1970) here

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here

Rosenberg, Max here, here–here, here

Roth, Eli here, here

Russell, Ken here

S

Sacrifice (2020) here, here

Saint Maud (2019) here–here

Sangster, Jimmy here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here; and censorship here, here–here; directing here, here; reminiscences here, here, here–here; and Terence Fisher here; writing here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here

Sasdy, Peter here–here

Satanic Rites of Dracula, The (aka Count Dracula and His Satanic Bride) (1974) here

Saw (2004) here, here, here, here, here

Scarlet Blade, The (1963) here

Scars of Dracula, The (1970) here, here, here

Scorsese, Martin here, here, here, here

Scott, Allan here

Scott, Ridley here

Scott, Sir Walter here, here

Scream and Scream Again (1969) here, here, here–here, here, here

Sellars, Elizabeth here

Selltzer, David here

Selwyn, George here

Severance (2006) here, here

Sewell, Vernon here, here–here

sex here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here; and censorship here–here, here, here, here–here; and Dracula here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here; and religion here; exual repression here; in The Vampire Lovers here, here–here

Shackleton, John here, here

Shadow of the Cat (1960) here–here

Shaffer, Anthony here–here

Sharp, Don here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Shatter (1974) here

Shaughnessy, Alfred here–here, here–here

Shaun of the Dead (2004) here–here, here

She (1964) here

She Will (2021) here, here

Shelley, Barbara here, here, here–here, here, here

Shelley, Mary here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Shelley, Percy B. here–here, here, here, here, here

Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) here

Sherman, Garry here

Shining, The (1980) here, here

Shonteff, Lindsay here

Shyamalan, M. Night here, here

Siegel, Don here–here, here, here

Signalman, The (1976) here

Silent Cry (2002) here

Siodmak, Curt here

Sixth Sense, The (1999) here

Skeggs, Roy here

Skeleton Key, The (2005) here, here

Skull, The (1965) here, here, here–here

Sky TV here, here, here, here

Slaughter, Tod here–here

Slave Girls (aka Prehistoric Women) (1966) here–here, here

Sleeping Room, The (2014) here–here

Slocombe, Douglas here

Smith, Christopher here–here

Smith, Madeline here

Snorkel, The (1957) here

So Long at the Fair (1949) here–here, here

Someone in the Lift (1967) here

Sorcerers, The (1966) here–here, here, here

Spalding, Harry here

Speak No Evil (2022) here–here

Stark, Ray here

Steeds, Charlie here, here–here

Steel, Pippa here

Steele, Barbara here, here

Steele, Tommy here, here

Stephens, Robert here

Stevenson, Robert Louis here, here

Stoker, Bram here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Stolen Face (1951) here–here

Straight On Till Morning (1971) here, here

Strange World of Planet X, The (1958) here–here

Stranglers of Bombay, The (1959) here, here, here

Straub, Peter here

Stribling, Melissa here, here

Strickland, Alex here

Strings (2012) here

Strongroom (1962) here

Study in Terror, A (1965) here

Style, Michael here, here

Subotsky, Milton here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Summer Scars (2002) here, here–here

Sunshine (2007) here, here

Surrealism here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here

Sutherland, Donald here, here, here, here, here

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) here

Sykes, Peter here, here, here, here

Symptoms (1974) here, here

T

Tales from the Crypt (1971) here, here

Tales of Frankenstein (1958, unsold TV pilot) here, here

Tales That Witness Madness (1972) here

Taste of Fear (aka Scream of Fear) (1960) here–here, here, here

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) here–here, here

television here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here; explosion here–here; serials here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Tempean Films here–here

Temple, William F. here

Tenser, Tony here, here

Terror of the Tongs (1960) here

Terror, The (1938) here

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) here

Them (2006) here

Three Cases of Murder (1954) here

Tigon British Film Productions here, here, here, here, here

To the Devil a Daughter (1975) here, here–here, here–here

To the Public Danger (1947) here

Tooth Fairy (2019) here

Tooth Fairyhere: The Last Extraction (2021) here

Torture Garden (1967) here–here

Tourneur, Jacques here, here, here

Towers, Harry Alan here, here

Trauma (2004) here

Trevelyan, John here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here

Triangle (2009) here, here

Trog (1970) here

Trollenberg Terror, The (aka The Crawling Eye) (1958) here, here

Tucker, Forrest here

Turning, The (2020) here

Tushingham, Rita here

Twins of Evil (1971) here–here

Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, The (aka House of Fright) (1959) here, here, here

U

Uncanny, The (1977) here, here

Under the Skin (2011) here–here

United Artists here, here, here

Universal here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Upturned Glass, The (1947) here

Urban Ghost Story (1998) here

V

Vampire Circus (1971) here–here

Vampire Lovers, The (1970) here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Vampire Virus (2020) here, here

Vampires (1998) here

Vampyres (aka Daughters of Dracula) (1974) here, here–here, here

Van Helsing here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Varma, D. P. here, here, here

Vengeance of She, The (1968) here

Verne, Jules here

Vertigo (1958) here, here, here

Viaknder, Alicia here

Victor Frankenstein (2015) here, here

Viking Queen, The (1966) here

Village of the Damned (1960) here, here, here–here

Villiers, James here

Virtual Death Match (2020) here

Visa to Canton (1960) here, here

Volk, Stephen here, here, here, here–here

W

Wake Wood (2009) here

Walker, Pete here, here–here

Waller, Anthony here

Walpole, Horace here–here, here, here

Wan, James here, here

Warners Bros. here, here–here, here, here–here, here

Warning to the Curious (1972) here

Warren, Louisa here, here, here

Watkins, James here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Waxman, Harry here

Webber, Robert here–here

Webster, Paul here

Weekes, Remi here, here

Weeks, Stephen here

Welbeck, Peter here

Welch, Raquel here, here

Welles, Orson here, here, here

Wells, H. G. here, here

Werewolf Castle (2021) here

Werewolf in England, A (2020) here

Whale, James here, here, here

Whannell, Leigh here

What a Carve Up (aka No Place Like Homicide) (1962) here

Wheatley, Ben here–here, here, here, here–here

Wheatley, Dennis here, here, here, here, here

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969) here

While I Live (1947) here

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968) here–here, here

White Noise (2005) here–here

White Settlers (aka The Blood Lands) (2014) here, here

Whitman, Stuart here

Wicker, The Man (1973) here–here, here, here, here

Wicking, Christopher here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here

Widmark, Richard here, here

Wilde, Cornel here

Wilde, Oscar here

Wilder, Lee here

Willman, Noel here

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) here–here, here–here

Witchcraft (aka Witches and Warlocks) (1964) here

Witches, The (aka The Devil’s Own) (1966) here, here, here

Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) (1967) here, here–here, here, here, here

Witness for the Prosecution (1957) here

Wolfit, Donald here

Woman in Black here: Angel of Death (2014) here

Woman in Black, The (2012) here, here, here–here, here

Women of Twilight (1952) here

Women Without Men (1955) here

Woodbridge, George here, here

Woolley, Stephen here, here–here

Wordsworth, Richard here–here

Wrath of Dracula, The (2023) here, here

Wright, Edgar here–here, here, here–here

Wrong Number (1959) here

Wyndham, John here–here

X

X The Unknown (1956) here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here

Yordan, Philip here

Young, Aida here

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