Return of the heyday of horror - Hammer film company rises again

[Blackleaf]

The great British horror movie company - Hammer - is being revived.


The film company has been renowned for making horror movies written by classic British horror writers, such as "Dracula" (Bram Stoker), "The Curse of Frankenstein" (Mary Shelley) and mystery movies such as "Sherlock Holmes" (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle).


Hammer is Britain's oldest movie studio, and may once again produce two or three British movies a year, as well as a prime-time television series.
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Return of the heyday of horror - as Hammer films rises again

by BAZ BAMIGBOYE 11th May 2007
Daily Mail


Fresh blood was coursing through the Hammer film company yesterday, when the studio behind countless Dracula and Frankenstein pictures changed hands.

It means that new movies - and a prime-time television series - will be shot based on the Hammer Film Productions back catalogue. Hammer, Britain's oldest movie studio, has films going back to the Thirties.

Simon Oakes, one of the executives behind the takeover, told me how, when he was researching Hammer, he found hand-written documents from Arthur Conan Doyle in 1930 giving the company the right, at that time, to make the "moving motion picture of The Hound Of The Baskervilles".

Fangs for the memories: Christopher Lee as Dracula (1966)



In its heyday between the mid-Thirties and early Eighties, Hammer made The Curse Of Frankenstein, Dracula, Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb and The Devil Rides Out, helping to turn Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee into stars.

Hammer also produced Quatermass And The Pit - and let's not forget One Million Years BC, with Raquel Welch.

There's gold in red blood.

"There's a tremendous opportunity to re-imagine the classic films with new productions," Oakes told me.

Good enough to eat: Christopher Lee stars in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968 )



Oakes and partner Marc Schipper will pump $50 million into Hammer productions thanks to a mammoth injection of capital from John de Mol, the savvy billionaire who developed Big Brother.
And many of the films and TV shows Oakes wants to make won't just be blood fests.

"The Hammer DNA is very broad - it's not just gorenography," he insisted. "Horror was also about fear and psychologiocal drama."

He and his associates, top movie producers Guy East and Nigel Sinclair, want to build up a list of star names to become synonymous with the reborn Hammer brand.

dailymail.co.uk

 

[Josephine]

That's too cool! I love horror movies...will be interesting to see what they produce now!

 

[gopher]

I just watched:

Darn good movie - one of the best Hammer produced.

Speaking of which, I thought we had another thread on Hammer but couldn't find it. They sure made great spook flicks which are especially entertaining around Halloween.

 

[Blackleaf]

Let Me In (2010), The Resident (2011) and The Woman In Black (2012) are amongst the most recent Hammer horrors since the famous old film production company was revived in 2007.

Let Me In and The Resident may have been set in America and had mainly American actors (although Kodi Smith-McPhee is Australian) but all three are British films.

 

[Twila]

Loved Let Me in. Kind of romantic and sweet. I tried to get the original, Let the Right One In, but couldn't find it available for download with english subs.

 

[coldstream]

I thought Hammer films had a great product concept. They put together very good actors bred on the British stage, with copywrited characters made famous in Hollywood's golden age of horror in the 1930s, in simplified but well produced formats. They were aimed at a somewhat low brow audience and drive-ins. But, what they came up with was totally entertaining and accessible, it not exactly high art.

 

[Blackleaf]

Of course, it was British writers who gave the world both Dracula and Frankenstein's monster.

In his three-part 2010 documentary A History of Horror, Mark Gatiss, one of the four members of horror-comedy quartet The League of Gentlemen, looks at the history of horror.

In episode two, he focuses on the British Hammer Films of the 1950s and 1960s, which inspired Gatiss' childhood passion for horror. He meets key figures from Hammer to discuss the series of Frankenstein and Dracula films which made stars of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, both of whom Gatiss argues are underrated talents. He also identifies a short-lived sub-genre of British "folk horror", drawing on paganism and folklore, including Witchfinder General (1968 ), his personal favourite Blood on Satan's Claw (1970), and The Wicker Man (1973).

Episode 2 - Home Counties Horror

A History of Horror: Hammer Films and the British Horror (legendado PT-BR) - YouTube

 

[coldstream]

Hammer monsters had a decidedly more American complexion in characters like Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy than their literary inspiration by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker (who was Irish) or Jane Loudon respectively.

In fact Hammer had entered into distribution agreeements with the original American film producers to reproduce the film personnas of those films to avoid copyright infringement.

 

[Blackleaf]

Hammer monsters had a decidedly more American complexion in characters like Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy than their literary inspiration by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker (who was Irish) or Jane Loudon respectively.

Bram Stoker was British. At the time that Bram Stoker lived (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) the whole of Ireland was part of the UK. He was a British citizen.

Also, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula and the Mummy weren't inspired by Shelley, Stoker and Loudon. Those writers created those characters.

In fact Hammer had entered into distribution agreeements with the original American film producers to reproduce the film personnas of those films to avoid copyright infringement.

No, it didn't. Hammer only had to do that when it was making Frankenstein's monster films, as Universal had RE-copyrighted Mary Shelley's creation.

Mary Shelley first penned Frankenstein in the summer of 1816 during her famous summer with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. The first edition was published in 1818 though it was published anonymously. It was only on the second printing, in 1823, that she would be credited as the author.

By 1931, over a century later, Frankenstein had long lapsed into the public domain and became ripe pickings for Universal Studios.

However, in adapting Mary Shelley’s classic tale to the silver screen, Universal had a problem: The original book was largely devoid of of any real description of the monster, leaving most of the details to the reader’s imagination. In fact, only a few lines were spent on the moment the monster came to life, meaning the iconic scene with lightening, maniacal laughter and scifi-looking equipment didn’t exist in the book.

As such, Universal had to craft an image of what it thought the monster should look like and, through the magic of make up and 1930s special effects, turned actor Boris Karloff into a flat topped, lumbering giant with two bolts and a prominent scar.

However, since that look wasn’t in the original story, Universal could control its particular vision of the monster and enforce copyright in it.

However, by the time Hammer made The Evil of Frankenstein in 1964, a new film distribution deal had been made between Hammer and Universal. As a result, Hammer had free rein to duplicate make-up and set elements.

This copyright infringement only applied to Frankenstein's monster.

I also think Hammer are far better at making horror films than Universal are. BBC Four showed Hammer's classic 1958 film Dracula, starring Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, last night. Not only is it the first Dracula film in colour, it's also far better than any Hollywood Dracula film, and is considered to be the best Dracula film ever made.

In fact, in the same year, the Americans released the black and white The Return of Dracula. It is set in a small town in California in the 1950s, where Count Dracula arrives in the form of an artist named Belak Gordal (Lederer) who has travelled from Europe to visit his cousin, Cora Mayberry (played by Greta Granstedt). The story revolves around his interaction with Cora's daughter, Rachel (Norma Eberhardt).

However, later in the same year, Hammer released Dracula. Starring Christopher Lee as the eponymous vampire, this film was very much inspired by Bram Stoker's novel, in which Jonathan Harker arrives at the castle of Count Dracula in Klausenberg (the German name for Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania, Romania) on a dark and stormy night, and The Return of Dracula - with its Americanised, saccharine plot set in California - would have a lack of attention due to Christopher Lee's new stardom as the Count.