Hammer Horror - A Brief Moment in British Cinematic Creativity
Hammer Films may have been founded in 1935 but
it only produced anything of consequence, other than the first of its
Quatermass series in 1955, when Peter Cushing emerged as Baron
Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). Until its demise (in its original incarnation) as film maker in 1979 (although its story really ends in
1974 to all intents and purposes), it became known for a peculiarly
English Gothic take on themes originally developed by Universal Studios
in the 1930s but derived from English literary models. There was
Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy as well as a homegrown Quatermass
series and Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and Dennis Wheatley adaptations
(Hound of the Baskervilles, She and The Devil Rides Out respectively). Highly variable in quality, its keynote stars were Peter
Cushing and Christopher Lee with Ingrid Pitt as perhaps the best known
female star in the vampire series.
Sinclair McKay's book is
readable, as it should be from someone who was Deputy Features Editor of
a major newspaper, but only in a workmanlike way. There are few
complaints to be had about his general judgements, his occasional gossip
is amusing and the brief accounts of key films and the useful context
in the cinema of the period or (with perhaps less usefulness) the wider
culture and politics of the period are well judged. The photographs are
also largely new and capture the day-to-day work of the studio well. His
weaknesses are an excess of repetition - 'embonpoint' appears to be a
favourite word and he might have done with a thesaurus to hand on a few
occasions. He has a somewhat jumpy attitude to chronology. As with
all jobbing journalists, deep analysis is not his strong point. His
matey jokiness can also pall on occasions. His attempt to defend the
studio's films against the charge of sexism is noble but it is a bit
forced - although it is true that strong women characters did start to
appear in the mid-period.
But why quibble? - it is an enjoyable
and nostalgic read. It allows one to place the key films where
they should be in the story. The picture he paints is an affectionate
and practical one - of a business first and foremost based on trying to
give the public what they wanted at the lowest possible cost. They
lucked out on a talented team of actors, designers, composers, directors
and writers who could churn out some low cost art from little more than
the producers' tried and tested method of producing the poster first
and worrying about the production afterwards - and using the same sets over
and over again as if they were a touring repertory company.
Hidden
within the text is a much bigger story of national economic decline that
McKay constantly alludes to but never quite develops as an analysis.
This studio was artistically British in every respect but it had a
colonial relationship to its backers. The financing was largely American
and its product was dictated to a considerable degree by the
expectations and requirements of the bigger American market, that is,
when it was not being forced into the straitjacket of producing
homegrown rubbish like On the Buses (1971-1973) to grab that brief
moment between there being a television in every home and the arrival of
colour. The American public wanted Christopher Lee so this very
fine actor was stuck into a role, the near-monosyllabic red-eyed
Dracula, that was way below his level of talent. Fortunately, for his
long term career, the non-Hammer roles of Scaramanga in a Bond movie
and, for his long run reputation, in The Wicker Man (as well as a few
more interesting roles at Hammer such as the Duc de Richelieu in The
Devil Rides Out) made sure that he did not suffer the fates of Bela
Lugosi and of Boris Karloff as the eternally typecast B-movie horror
actor. Alongside the American Vincent Price, Cushing and Lee are
respected as actors and as persons in a way that had unfairly eluded the Universal
generation.
The book is thus servicable but is not great - a
reasonably sound and entertaining guide to a cultural phenomenon. In
1957, the humourless left-wing Tribune complained that Curse of Frankenstein was
'depressing and degrading for anyone who loves the cinema'. By 1973, it
was being outgrossed (in horror as well as cash) by The Exorcist.
Cinematic horror moved inexorably back to Hollywood where, with
occasional brilliant outings from the UK such as the recent 28 Days series, it broadly stayed, if with periodic challenges from East
Asia. As so often, the United Kingdom was a research laboratory for Anglo-Saxon
cultural experimentation, usually on a shoestring budget, until big
American money felt confident enough to throw significant dollops of its
capital at better produced and resourced productions of its own back
home. The renaissance of American horror starts in the early 1970s and
parallels the collapse of independent British horror which, in turn, had
arisen as the run of Universal and later science fiction films (the infamous and thoroughly enjoyable 'creature features') from the
1930s to the 1950s had tailed off.
Once a product had been tried
and tested in its smaller English-speaking market, the original smaller scale creative sources could be happily abandoned, the best talent attracted
to America and the British left to pick up the pieces. Even today, UK
Government policy towards the creative industries appears to pander to
this Atlantic model, throwing educational resources into creativity in a
race against time to see how much global capital can be attracted to
London (in particular) before the talent gets pulled overseas again.
Never was the 'creative destruction' of capitalism more clearly
represented than in British film-making of the 1970s. The story
of Hammer is thus a minor tragedy of national decline and not one
restricted to the 1970s. McKay documents how freebooting US studios
became much more strictly capitalist enterprises and how creative decisions
worked through uncomprehending committees.
This ironic because it was just at the this time that the New Hollywood was liberating directors and actors from those same committees and Polanski had already been drawn ever westwards from his British master work (not Hammer) Repulsion (1965) towards the US and Rosemary's Baby (1968), the precursor to the market-critical The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). British Horror was also outclassed by the violence emerging in the New Hollywood which hit the old country like a hammer and not a Hammer with Peckinpah's The Straw Dogs (1971) set in Cornwall, a territory previously owned by the British Gothic. Meanwhile, the American executives financing British horror had lost their interest in devil worship at just the wrong time and had no
context for Quatermass. We were lucky that The Devil Rides Out (1968) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967), two of the finest horror films of the period,
slipped through the net.
In the end, the studio lost its way -
neither able to push the boundaries as did the smaller end of the native
market (in films such as the brilliantly dark and sadistic Witchfinder
General (1968) or the perversely misunderstood The Wicker Man (1973)) nor invest
in the production values and new thinking that might have created a new
range of horror or adventure products (or take the studio into new
creative territory altogether). It was the American funders who kept
pushing the studio back into churning out variable versions of the old
Gothic classics. A sign of decline was the decision to create a
Kung Fu Dracula movie (The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974))
in a vain and perverse attempt build up an East Asian funding base out of Hong Kong.
The film is not that bad but it is not that good either. After a tired
Dennis Wheatley retread and a tolerable attempt to re-make a Hitchcock
with American stars, the studio was dead five years later (although there has been a more recent and broadly successful attempt at revival with the notable Wake Wood in 2009 and at least nine films at the time of writing since 2008 and more on the way). The original
films (or rather a few of them) remain classics that stand with the
Universal horrors as icons of popular culture, watchable over and over
again as comfort food and, for the British, alongside the 'Carry On'
series, as proof that, indeed, the past is another country.