Hammer Horror

What are your favourite Hammer horror movies?

Mine are The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Devil Rides Out, Captain Kronos-Vampire Hunter and the Dracula series.

The Cushing Frankensteins for me. All of those are great, the only possible exceptions being parts of Monster From Hell and The Evil Of. I loved Peter Cushing, such a consummate actor and apparently one of the most decent, kind and sincere people you could ever hope to meet. He's easily one of my favourite actors of all-time (quite possibly my outright favourite), and deserves far more recognition than he gets as a brilliant actor and IMO one of our true all-time greats. His devotion and commitment to his Hammer (and Amicus) roles, regardless of how lurid or hokey some of those films may have otherwise been, made those films an absolute joy to watch.

I love THE DEVIL RIDES OUT. QUATERMASS AND THE PIT is pretty neat, too.

The Jimmy Sangster Hammers (including his psychological thrillers) are all good. Cloudburst is interesting, Hands of the Ripper is worth seeing, also the Brian Clemens scripts are very funny... lots of more obvious stuff such as Frankenstein Created Woman and Vampire Circus.

Just added all the Dracula flicks starring Christopher Lee in my Netflix queue. Should be fun.

The teaser trailer for the new Hammer flick, THE WOMAN IN BLACK, which attempts to return to the "classic" period piece vibe, starring Daniel Radcliffe:

The generic sample library-stock music (i.e. bowed cymbal as stinger at 0:230) didn't help convince me. I hope for the best, but I'm sure that the final score won't in any way resemble James Bernard, Tristram Cary, Benjamin Frankel, Malcolm Williamson, Richard Rodney-Bennett, Edwin Astley, Christopher Gunning etc... More likely that not it will takes it lead from Steve Jablonsky and other MV composers.

I've given up hope for film scores in general, Sharky. I tune 'em out unless something special (or particularly egregious) catches my attention. They are, more or less, a lost art.

Unfortunately it's hard for me to tune them out, since I pay so much attention to music, good or bad. It's rendered a great deal of films from the last decade or so near unwatchable for me.

Future DVDs/Blu-rays should have a score-on/score-off capability.

Dracula AD 1972 and The Vampire Lovers

I really get a kick out of THE LOST CONTINENT (1968): In its first 45 mins an excellent adventure flick with Eric Porter in Bogart mode and lots of weird characters. And lots of shlock monster action in the film's second half. Great stuff.

Very Freudian.

ambler wrote:

Very Freudian.

Freud is dead.

God, I miss Hammer.

ambler wrote:

God, I miss Hammer.

A fun movie as well.

There needs to be a serious campaign to get Hammer films back on TV more regularly. Seriously, the only Hammer films which ever turn up on the box nowadays are always the same ones: Dracula Prince Of Darkness, Twins Of Evil, Countess Dracula and The Devil Rides Out have been screened a few times in recent years, but there's so many Hammer (and Amicus) films which haven't seen the light of day on UK TV for probably over a decade now, if not longer. Amicus' The Skull hasn't been screened in the UK in over 20 years, for instance, with films such as Nothing But The Night suffering near-similar fates. With so many TV channels available to us nowadays, not to mention the popularity of horror and the popularity of actors such as Christopher Lee, I can't fathom for the life of me why a film series with a decent-sized cult following (not to mention potential new audiences) can't find a regular place on late night television. Really puzzles me and p*sses me off.

Yeah, quite perplexing. They used to be staples of late night terrestrial TV in the UK. I suspect they're now seen as terminally old fashioned by the 'powers that be'. As James Delingpole might say, 'they’re just not relevant or in any way meaningful to a war-damaged eight-year-old Somali kid on a south London crack estate.'

Noticed this today, I know we have a few Hammer horror fans here.

Quote :

Jimmy Sangster, Writer for British Horror Films, Dies at 83

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS, New York Times
Published: August 21, 2011

Jimmy Sangster, a prolific screenwriter best known for his classic 1950s horror movies that dipped into the cinematic delights of gore and sex and helped define the British company Hammer Films, died on Friday. He was 83.

Among Mr. Sangster’s biggest hits were the Gothic horror films “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957), “Dracula” (1958), and “The Mummy” (1959).

Mr. Sangster was a production manager at Hammer when he was drafted to write his first feature-length picture. That film, “X The Unknown,” (1956) featured a radioactive blob from the center of the earth, a clever exploitation of contemporary fears of all things nuclear. He recalled in an interview that he was paid 200 pounds for the script.

Those early films, generally shot in rapid succession on tight budgets, were not immediate critical darlings. According to news reports, reviews called several of Sangster’s movies sadistic, nauseating and wholly unimaginative. But they were popular with audiences and are cult classics today.

“They basically reinvented the genre,” said Simon Oakes, the president of Hammer. Those movies, he explained, took horror out of the land of lumpy monsters and brought to it a physicality, sexuality and vivid style. "Dracula,” one of the first British horror films to be shot in color, helped establish the actor Christopher Lee, who played “the terrifying lover who died — yet lived” (in the words of one of its tag lines), as a sex symbol.

In interviews, Mr. Sangster, who had an easy, self-effacing humor, recalled his psychological thrillers, not the Gothics, as his own favorite pictures. Those included “The Scream of Fear,” (1961) which Mr. Oakes said the present-day Hammer Films is in the process of remaking, and “Paranoiac,” a 1963 film The New York Times called an “economical little chiller,” and something “tantalizingly close to a bulls-eye.”

Asked by the website Hammer Graveyard what led him to the horror genre, he replied, “I wrote horror movies because it was my job,” adding, “So, when anyone asks me what were the influences that prompted me to be a ‘horror film’ writer, I tell them it was Wages!”

James Henry Kinmel Sangster was born on Dec. 2, 1927, in North Wales. He starting working in films at 16, made his way up from gopher to screenwriter, and even directed a handful of movies including “The Horror of Frankenstein.”

Mr. Sangster’s survivors include his wife, the actress Mary Peach, and a son, Mark James Sangster.

In the 1970s, when horror movie fans spun toward Hollywood films like “The Exorcist” (1973), Mr. Sangster began writing for American television, both TV movies and series, including “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Ironside” and “Kolchak: The Night Stalker,” which he continued to do for more than two decades.

He also wrote an autobiography called “Do You Want It Good or Tuesday?” (published in the United States in 2009) as well as several novels, mostly mysteries and crime stories, featuring the occasional gun runner, or, in the case of “Touchfeather,” (Norton, 1968), a woman The New York Times described as an “undercover sex-pot.” But it was those early successes with a lusty vampire and Gothic terrors that made his reputation.

“All of a sudden I’m a cult figure,” Mr. Sangster said to The Daily Telegraph in 1996. “But it’s all due to about five movies: a couple of Frankensteins, a couple of Draculas, and a mummy."

RIP.

x

Avarice wrote:

Sangster's 'The Nanny' is one of my favourite films. Fine understated work, superbly directed, and with a great cast.

I saw that film when I was nine years old. Terrified me.

x

God! Hammer horror was practically a third of my childhood. No, more like half of it, given the nightmares they inflicted on me. And not just nightmares either. Some of my puberty dreams revolved around Dracula's brides...

Kennon wrote:

God! Hammer horror was practically a third of my childhood.

Same here. Very sad to hear of the passing of Jimmy Sangster, and I can only thank him for all of the great and enduring memories I have of his work with Hammer.

RIP Jimmy.

Avarice wrote:

Yes, unusually restrained for Hammer and all the more effective for it. I saw it when I was about 11 and had a terrible crush on Pamela Franklin. File under 'Whatever happened to ... ?'

Franklin was also excellent in THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE. I think she's just over 60 now.

RIP Jimmy Sangster.