Peter Cushing - 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.

The Amicus Portmanteau Canon

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 14:00:00 +0000

For a decade Hammer owned the British horror map, and everyone assumes the rival studio down the road was chasing it. Amicus Productions was doing something stranger. Founded by two Americans in London, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, Amicus shot on the same Shepperton stages, hired the same faces — Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Freddie Francis behind the camera — and then pointed them at a completely different shape of film. Hammer built lush single-narrative Gothics in corseted period dress; Amicus specialised in the portmanteau: three, four, five short shockers threaded together by a framing device, set squarely in the present day. It is the omnibus form perfected, and for a run of films between 1965 and 1974 nobody did it better.

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.