Hammer Horror - vo.rs

Twins of Evil: Hammer's Puritans-vs-Vampires Morality Play

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Most Hammer vampire films know exactly who the villain is: the aristocrat in the castle with the appetite and the cape. Twins of Evil (1971) is the one that hedges the question, and it is the better for it. The film hands you a monster in the castle, all right — a decadent count dabbling in Satanism — and then plants directly opposite him a second, human monster: a fanatical witch-hunter burning innocent girls in the name of God. For most of its length Twins of Evil is a study of two fanaticisms, the supernatural and the puritanical, circling a pair of young women caught between them. That it comes packaged as a piece of early-1970s exploitation, with all the sensationalism the era demanded, only makes the moral seriousness underneath more surprising.

Countess Dracula: Hammer's Blood-Bathing Aristocrat

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Countess Dracula (1971) is the great mis-sold film in the Hammer catalogue. The title promises fangs, capes and a female cousin to Christopher Lee’s Count. What it delivers is a gothic tragedy about vanity and ageing in which no one is bitten, no one turns to mist, and the only blood being drunk is bathed in rather than swallowed. Hammer’s marketing department borrowed the most bankable name in horror and stuck it on a film that has nothing to do with vampirism at all — and the odd thing is that the mislabelling has protected it. Approach Countess Dracula expecting another vampire picture and it disappoints; approach it as what it actually is, and it turns out to be one of the studio’s more interesting curiosities of the early 1970s.

Hammer Horror and the Colourising of the Gothic

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 13:00:00 +0000

When Universal made its monsters in the 1930s, it made them in black and white, and the monochrome did a great deal of moral work the studio never had to acknowledge. Shadow hides. It abstracts blood into a dark smear, turns a wound into a shape, keeps the body decorous even in death. Twenty years later a small British studio called Hammer took exactly those characters — Frankenstein’s creature, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man — and ran them through Eastmancolor, and the moment the blood turned red the whole gothic changed character. Hammer’s real innovation was chromatic. The studio worked out what colour does to horror, and the answer was: it makes everything explicit that monochrome had let you deny.

The Hammer Horror Essential Ten

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 14:00:00 +0000

When Universal’s monsters ran out of fur and fangs, a small British studio in a country house at Bray took the same characters, added Eastmancolor, blood the shade of Dulux gloss, and a frankness about sex and violence the Americans had never dared, and sold them back to the world. Hammer Film Productions dominated horror from 1957 into the mid-1970s on budgets that would embarrass a modern advert, and it did so with a repertory company as recognisable as any studio’s: Peter Cushing’s fine-boned intelligence, Christopher Lee’s towering menace, Terence Fisher’s unfussy classical framing, James Bernard’s brass-heavy scores blaring the very word “Dra-cu-la” in three notes.