Hammer Film Productions made more than 160 movies, about a
third of which were the horror flicks that earned the company its looming
reputation. With so many films and so many producers, directors, and writers
who helped Frankenstein them to life, Hammer is well deserving of a monstrous
encyclopedia like the one Chris Fellner is about to publish.
The Encyclopedia of
Hammer Films is exactly what the title describes. Fellner’s tome supplies
more than 525 pages of entries on the expected movies and crew members, as well
as entries on Hammer’s forays into television, such as The Hammer House of Horror, and even some items with a somewhat
tangential relationship to the production company, such as Blood of the Vampire (a non-Hammer production made by a crew with deep
ties to Hammer) and Ida Lupino, whose husbands and father worked for Hammer and
who played house-host to Hammer’s number-one star, Peter Cushing.
Entries on films each follow a similar format with
subheadings listing cast and crew and UK and U.S. release dates, summarizing
plots in great detail, offering quotes from critics and cast/crew members (Christopher Lee’s quotes are almost invariably about how he wasn’t being paid enough), and
tersely running down production notes and trivia, some of which are quite
interesting (I had no idea that Cary Grant was a major Hammer-head who almost
starred in Phantom of the Opera in
1962). That terseness prevents this book about fun films from being truly fun.
It would have been nice if Fellner took a more playful and less drily
encyclopediac approach to composing his encyclopedia. He only drops his dry
professionalism when discussing the so-called “Hammer Glamour” actresses for
which the studio is famous. While the way Fellner leers over these actresses is
technically appropriate in a book about a studio infamous for the way it
exploited its female stars, it can make for uncomfortable reading in 2019,
especially when the author does such unnecessary things as relaying certain actresses’ measurements. A book about
the sixties does not have to read like a book written in the sixties.
