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.

Terence Fisher - vo.rs

Hammer Horror and the Colourising of the Gothic