British Horror

The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer

When speaking of Britsih horror most of us would picture the classic Hammer Horror movies, with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing staring. But before the starting of the Hammer film production, it was Tod Slaughter who pioneered and dominated the horror genre. Tod Slaughter started as theatre actor before he stared in some of the most violent horror films in the 1930s when he was in his 50s including The Face At The Window(1939), The Crimes Of Steven Hawke and Murder In The Red Barn which both released in 1936.

IN 1933, the British Board of Film Sensors added the first 'H'( for "horror") certificate to cover the American horror films that started to flush in in the 1930s. One of the most famous American horror films "Frankenstein", contains a scene which implied the death of a little girl at the hands of Frankenstein's monster.  And because of this, in 1951, the government introduced the "X" certificate to replace the "H" certificate in order to cover any films that contain "adult" subject matter. 

Between 1958-1970, Hammer Film Productions is probably one of the most successful movie studios in the world working mainly with the Gothic horror genre. Hammer is a family business founded by Enrique Carreras and William Hinds in 1932. The first film they produced that started gaining interest was The Mystery of the Mary Celeste (1936), starring Bela Lugosi. However, in this early state of Hammer, they mainly focused on “Quota Quickies" films which lie on The Cinematograph Act that said 25% of films screened must be British made. 

In 1951, Hammer purchased a small country estate in Windsor called Down Place( later known as Bray Studio). They use this estate as their office/studio as well as their filming location which appears again and again in their films due to its gothic looking architecture and became the key to the "Hammer look" of their films. 

The 1950s also saw a remarkable step forward for Hammer as they released the film The Quatermass Xperiment. This is their first film that has international appeal as Hammer realized they can start exporting film to America. 

The name of the film was changed from the original BBC Television serial The Quatermass Experiment to take advantage of the X-certificate. Follow the success of the film, Hammer Continuously made the two popular sequels Quatermass 2 and X The Unkown.

However, Hammer could not just keep making Quatermass movies forever, they remade the Frankenstein story named The Curse of Frankenstein which went viral in 1957. But unlike the original Frankenstein films, Hammer puts a lot of terrifying, shocking and violent elements as their selling points in the first ever British full-colour horror film. Later on, Hammer produced another Gothics remake, Dracula, which broke box-office record in the UK, US and across the world.

From those successes, Hammer established themselves as a unique brand in the horror film industry. However, from the mid-60s to the 70s, Hammer's films had to compete with the wave of competitions from not only Europe but also from America. For example, in 1973, the film The Wicker Man directed by Robin Hardy is an excellent mixture of thriller and horror genre that brings to the audience a more intelligent and troubling horror.