Review: 'The Hammer Horror Omnibus'

Hammer horror was always more about aesthetics and the enthralling presence of the studio's big stars than story. What is Hammer without all of that crimson house-paint blood, those lush Victorian sets, the decayed Gothic castles and cemeteries, and the enthralling presence of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee? 

Online Petition to Get WB to Release Hammer Horror Blu-rays in the U.S.

In the U.S., the rights to Hammer Horror titles are as all over the place as the pre-op limbs of Frankenstein's Monster. Millennium Entertainment (Dracula: Prince of Darkness; Frankenstein Created Woman), Shout! Factory (The Vampire Lovers), and Synapse Films (Hands of the Ripper; Countess Dracula) have already gotten started on putting out some of these movies on blu-ray stateside. However, the two companies that own the most essential Hammers--Universal (Brides of Dracula; Curse of the Werewolf) and Warner Brothers (Horror of Dracula; The Curse of Frankenstein)-- continue to sit on their catalogs of classics. To call the latter company to task, Diabolique Magazine has started up one of those online petitions asking for the release of the following movies on Blu-ray:

The Curse of Frankenstein
Horror of Dracula
The Mummy
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
Dracula, AD 1972
Taste the Blood of Dracula
Dracula Must Be Destroyed

 I'm not convinced that these kinds of petitions ever actually accomplish anything. I'm pretty sure Warner Brothers will release these films in hi-def when it damn well feels like it (or not). I signed the petition nevertheless. For what it's worth, you can too here.

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Peter Cushing

He was the gracious gentleman who played such vile creations as Dr. Frankenstein and Grand Moff Tarkin. He was the glaring, gaunt-face who embodied such noble fellows as Dr. Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes. Peter Cushing was one of the most versatile, committed, and skilled stars to thrill and charm horror fans. Yeah, you knew that already. So on the 100^th anniversary of his birth, let’s glare at twenty things you may not have known about Peter Cushing.

1. Peter Cushing’s grandfather Henry was an actor who performed with Sir Henry Irving in Faust at London’s Lyceum Theater. Irving’s manager was Bram Stoker, who’d one day write a certain novel that would be the source of one of Peter’s most memorable movies.

2. Collecting toy soldiers was one of Peter Cushing’s great enthusiasms, and he didn’t just keep them locked away in some glass cabinet. Adult Peter liked to get down on the floor with his toys and play with them!

3. Coincidentally, Peter Cushing’s first film role was in 1939’s The Man in the Iron Mask, helmed by James Whale, who directed Universal’s 1931 version of Frankenstein. Cushing was cast as a double for Louis Hayward in his dual role as Louis XIV and the monarch’s twin brother Phillipe. Whale also gave Cushing a small on-screen role as the Second Officer, which required him to learn fencing and nearly resulted in serious injury when he accidentally stabbed his horse with his spurs, sending the beast into a scenery-wrecking frenzy and leaving Cushing dumped on the floor of the set.

4. Early in his career, a future member of one of horror’s greatest teams appeared on screen with one of comedy’s greatest when Peter Cushing goofed around with Laurel and Hardy in 1939’s A Chump at Oxford.

5. Unlike that other creepy duo of Karloff and Lugosi, who never enjoyed a close relationship off screen, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee always remained great friends.

Houses of Frankenstein: Universal and Hammer's Horror Epochs

“We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein... It is one of the strangest tales ever told… I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even — horrify you.”

These words helped usher in Horror’s golden age when Edward Van Sloan spoke them in the prologue of Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein in 1931. For the next ten years, the studio was the first and last word in Horror. All others paled in terms of production values, iconography, and well, interest. Although other major studios produced great horror movies during the decade—Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Island of Lost Souls, MGM’s Freaks and Mad Love, Warner Bros.’ The Mystery of the Wax Museum—only Universal aligned itself with the controversial new genre with utmost fidelity. That’s because studio chief, Carl Laemmle, Jr., wasn’t just a fad-hopping dabbler like the heads of the rival majors. He was a genuine monster fan; cinema’s first horror hound. And under his watch, all of Horror’s essentials were carved in granite: the vampire, the creation monster, the werewolf, the mad doctor, the twisted lab assistant, the mummy, the monstrous bride. The pictures were big money makers, hence the pretenders from outside Universal, but they were dismissed by critics for their lowbrow luridness. Junior’s own father thought his son’s devotion to all things macabre and ghoulish was foolish. So, when he was muscled out of Universal in 1935, the studio’s interest in producing quality Horror gradually faltered. Following its final prestige monster movie, 1941’s The Wolf Man, Universal proceeded to churn out fun but fatuous sequels, some barely distinguishable from the Z-grade flicks rolling off Poverty Row. So went the ‘40s. So went the ‘50s.

Well, at least in the States.

In England, Enrique Carreras’s Hammer Productions was a small studio that slipped out a few movies in 1936 and ’37 (including The Mystery of the Marie Celeste starring Bela Lugosi) before declaring bankruptcy amidst an economy more concerned with looming war than producing B-pictures. Like The Mummy, Hammer was in mere hibernation.

With the War two years past, Enrique’s son James helped utter the incantation that revived Hammer in 1947. The studio birthed cheap sci-fi and mystery pictures, “quota quickies” designed to slip in and out of cinemas and turn a fast pound. One such film was 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment, Val Guest’s sci-fi potboiler about a rocket that returns to Earth with an infectious monster in tow. Another quota quickie for sure, but The Quatermass Xperiment did not behave itself as other pictures of its ilk had. This was a different kind of sci-fi movie than anything that preceded it, more concerned with horrifying than stirring the imagination—and on a more revolutionary level, the first film bent on grossing out its viewers. The violence was more graphic, the mutations goopier. There was no way this movie was going to make it to theaters with anything less than an X-certificate. In a brilliant, and rather cheeky, stroke, James Carreras and producer Anthony Hinds seized on the undesired rating, stamping a big, blazing “X” in the film title. Audiences rushed to see this nasty piece of work. Carreras and Hinds plotted their next move.

And this is where Hammer Horror is truly born—and the monsters of the Universal age are reborn. There had been Frankenstein films before James Whale’s, but it was his that solidified the Monster in the collective consciousness. No longer was he the articulate, jaundiced creature Mary Shelley described in her novel. He was now a mute blockhead with electrodes jutting from his neck, droop eyed and decked in hobnail boots and a sport coat. Whether the face belonged to Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., or Glenn Strange, the basic design was always the same. For any studio beside Universal to present the Frankenstein Monster in any other way would be downright iconoclastic.

Hammer, of course, was now in the business of iconoclasm. The filmmakers tossed out the make-up devised by Universal’s Jack Pierce. This new monster would be lean rather than bulky, more like a horribly scarred man than a misshapen, otherworldly creature. Karloff was chosen for his grim countenance. This new Monster was matinee-idol handsome when not scabbed, stitched, and clouded. And most shocking of all, his gory scars and wounds would be presented in vivid Technicolor. The Universal Horrors that were so questionable during their day would be rendered quaint by Hammer’s new approach. Karloff’s extreme pathos is barely detectable in Christopher Lee’s almost mechanical killing machine. Colin Clive’s moral turmoil has been dissolved in favor of Peter Cushing’s unrepentant evil, and from here through subsequent sequels, Dr. Frankenstein would always be Hammer’s wickedest villain. His tawdry affair with his maid introduced another integral element to the Hammer stew: sex (though the studio’s fixation on heaving cleavage was still several years away). The Curse of Frankenstein was released on May 2, 1957, and with it, the Hammer Horror era had begun.

No shocker that critics were outraged, and none that audiences turned The Curse of Frankenstein into a box office phenomenon. The formula was now set. Naturally, Dracula would swoop in after Frankenstein, the Mummy would stalk out next, and then the werewolf, almost in the very same order they paraded across the Universal back lot. And like that studio, there would be a stock company of monsters and mad scientists. Universal had the Laemmles, James Whale, and Karl Freund behind the camera and Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr., in front of it. Hammer had the Carrerases, director Terence Fisher, who rendered his images with a painter’s eye, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, Cushing and Lee. Uncannily, Hammer also followed Universal’s creative trajectory. Its stealthily artistic early films eventually gave way to tossed-off moneymakers, endlessly trotting out the same monsters: fun but fatuous sequels. Serious Horror gave way to camp. And reflecting the times as much as steering them, the films became lazily edgy: bigger buckets of blood, bigger boobs.

But before the decline, Hammer resembled Universal in another crucial way: it pulled Horror into vogue. The 1960s was the most vital time for the genre since the ‘30s, and Hammer’s stylistic paw prints were as evident on Eyes without a Face, Psycho, The City of the Dead (starring Christopher Lee), Night of the Eagle, Viy and the films of Roger Corman and Roman Polanski as Universal’s stamp was on the Horror pictures of its era. But once Hammer faded in the late ‘70s, the genre did not crumble around it like some desiccated old dark house, as it did when Universal’s epoch wound down. By helping to embolden the genre in a time that produced much similar (and, to be honest, often superior) work, Hammer helped Horror get its foothold in cinema once and for all. Some of its spawn—Psycho, The Haunting, Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man, The Exorcist—also gave it a scaly leg up in terms of artistic and critical credibility.

Hammer too has enjoyed its own critical reevaluation in more recent years. Once synonymous with the basest drives behind movie making, Dracula, Curse of the Werewolf, The Mummy, and the one that started it all, The Curse of Frankenstein, are now regarded as cinema classics. Lee and Cushing remain the most beloved team of miscreants since Karloff and Lugosi, and Terence Fisher’s kaleidoscopic imagery has been copied endlessly by filmmakers from Mario Bava to Dario Argento to Tim Burton, but rarely bettered. Karloff’s face may forever be the first that lumbers to mind when one hears the word “Frankenstein”, but Universal may not necessarily be the first studio that leaps forth when pondering Horror’s definitive laboratory.

The Curse of Frankenstein was released 55 years ago today.

A Belated Farewell to Jimmy Sangster

If director Terence Fisher was the eye of Hammer, and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were the horror studio's faces, then Jimmy Sangster was its voice. The Welsh screenwriter composed the mass of Hammer's greatest films, taking fresh liberties with war horses such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy, and conjuring first-rate original material such as Brides of Dracula, Scream of Fear, and The Nanny. His directorial efforts (The Horror of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire, Fear in the Night) were fewer and less successful, arriving after Hammer had passed from its golden age to a new era of sensationalistic sex and gore. Sangster remained active in film until 2000 when he co-wrote the German thriller Mörderische Ferien. At the same time, he was turning his writing to more personal matters, publishing his autobiography Do You Want It Good or Tuesday? in 1997 and Screenwriting Techniques for Success in 2003. Sangster died on August 19 at the age of 83.

Jimmy Sangster is also of the most well-represented writers in this site's on-going series "Psychobabble's 120 Essential Horror Movies." Here's what I had to say about some of his finest work:

36. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957- dir. Terence Fisher)

The Quatermass Xperiment was successful, but it wasn’t the film that made Hammer synonymous with horror. Almost two years of non-horror fare passed before that landmark film arrived. Like Quatermass, Hammer’s reimagining of Frankenstein put more bloody flesh on the screen than audiences were used to at the time, but it did so without masquerading as science fiction and in shocking full color. The Curse of Frankenstein is capital-H Horror. It also fully established the conventions fans would soon associate with Hammer: excessive blood, sleazy sex, and source material with roots in Universal horror. Terence Fisher’s remake arrived just a few months shy of the 25th anniversary of Whale’s original, but the new film could hardly be called a respectful homage. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster makes his film great by jettisoning much of what made Whale’s great. Frankenstein was a poetic, deeply humane portrait of a monstrous innocent driven to horrendous acts after being abandoned by his equally sympathetic creator. The Curse of Frankenstein is a portrait of cruelty. Focus shifts away from the Monster and onto the doctor, who is more villainous than any horror character since Mamoulian’s Hyde, and like Hyde, he is not without his charms because he is played with electrifying gusto. Peter Cushing is great in the title role, magnetic even as he murders a kindly house guest, launches into megalomaniacal rants, or torments the maid with whom he’s having an affair. Christopher Lee makes a lesser impact as the Monster because Fisher gives him a minimum of screen time and doesn’t bother imbuing him with any of the complexities Whale and Karloff gave theirs. Humanity and complexity are not on the agenda here. Its utter cynicism, undiluted by an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style disclaimer, can be felt in many horror films to follow. Typical of a Hammer Horror, critics loathed The Curse of Frankenstein but audiences loved it, and its international success confirmed the studio as the new generation’s Universal and Cushing and Lee as its Karloff and Lugosi.

38. Dracula (1958- dir. Terence Fisher)

The suits at Hammer must have taken all of three seconds to decide upon the follow up to 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein. Just as Universal knew Dracula was the natural follow up to their Frankenstein, Hammer recognized the reverse would work equally well. One can recognize Dracula as a Terence Fisher/Hammer production even before the opening credits are complete: we zoom into a crypt and focus on a casket dripped with vivid red-paint blood. As was the case with Curse, subtlety was not much concern in Dracula. Unlike that film, we are presented with a hero of the highest moral character. Deliciously, Van Helsing is played by the actor who brought such immoral menace to the earlier film. Peter Cushing proves he is just as affecting as the good guy as he was as the bad, bringing much zest and charm and heroic confidence to Van Helsing. Once again, Christopher Lee is somewhat underused as the monster, although his commanding presence and rich baritone are put to much better use as Count Dracula then they were as Frankenstein’s wobbly creature. His greatest scenes are reserved for the beginning of the film. About halfway though, he is reduced to the speechless, leering thing he’d reprise in countless Dracula sequels. Fisher’s film also differs from Stoker and Browning by jumbling character relationships, having Jonathan Harker turn into a vampire and get staked early in the picture, and—most egregious of all—losing Renfield. Yet, Dracula (or Horror of Dracula, as it was titled in the U.S. so not to be mistaken for Tod Browning’s film) is the jewel in Hammer’s crown because of the sumptuous visuals Fisher lays out like a decadent, aristocratic banquet: the costumes, the colors, the castles, the wind-blown leaves, the creepy woods— what an invitingly Gothic landscape! Significantly, Hammer’s two big monster movies contributed to a burgeoning monster revival sweeping kid culture in the late ‘50s. The films coincided with the launch of the syndicated “Shock Theater” package that gave a new generation of TV viewers its first taste of Universal’s classic horror. Forrest J. Ackerman capitalized on the craze and fueled it further with his Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Like The Mummy, the iconic monsters had laid dormant for a long spell, but a few conjuring words from Forry, horror hosts such as Zacherley and Vampira, and Hammer’s chief screenwriter Jimmy Sangster were enough to bring them back from the dead. Their young legion of followers, known affectionately as “Monster Kids,” guaranteed these creeps would never be out of the pop cultural floodlights again.

41. The Mummy (1959- dir. Terence Fisher)

Hammer stuck close to formula with its final horror of the ‘50s by remaking Universal’s successor to Dracula and Frankenstein. Cushing, Lee, Sangster, and Fisher all return for The Mummy, which actually has more in common with the mediocre sequel The Mummy’s Tomb than the 1932 Karloff vehicle. This is not one of Sangster’s cleverest scripts, but Lee gets to upstage costar Cushing for the first time. Spending much of the movie wrapped in dirty bandages, his face caked in Egyptian mud, Lee is still more sympathetic as lovelorn Kharis than he was in his earlier monster roles. He also gets some quality face time and dialogue during a lavish, 13-minute sequence reimagining the mummification scene from the original Mummy, though without reaching similar heights of claustrophobia-inducing terror. The greatest triumph of The Mummy is that of Fisher, cinematographer Jack Asher, and their brilliant art department. The team’s use of colored lights, painted backdrops, spectacular costumes and props, and sets cluttered with detail make the whole picture look like a canvass thick with rich oils. The Mummy was Hammer’s first horror film to receive some positive critical notices, but its appeal was certainly most obvious to young monster enthusiasts. The horror genre, however, was about to grow up during a decade of near constant upheaval and violence.

44. The Brides of Dracula (1960- dir. Terence Fisher)

There was no way its sequel would fully recapture the power of Hammer’s Dracula, because Christopher Lee refused to revisit the count for fear of being typecast (his stance would crumble soon enough). Still there’s a lot of what made Dracula great in The Brides of Dracula. Not suffering any of his costar’s reservations, Peter Cushing happily returns as Van Helsing, and he gets more opportunities to display undeath-defying heroism than in the previous film. His showdown with a dashing non-Dracula vampire is likely Terence Fisher’s most thrilling sequence, climaxing with Cushing getting chomped and taking some rather extreme measures to ward off his own vampirism. Marita Hunt is nearly as arresting in the role of the eccentric Baroness Meinster, while Fisher’s trademark mastery of color and artificial environments provides further distraction from Lee’s absence. The screenwriting team, led by Hammer Stalwart Jimmy Sangster, also came up with an intriguing mystery (why is the Baroness Meinster keeping a young man prisoner in her sprawling castle?) that arguably makes the film more engaging than Hammer’s previous horrors to those already well familiar with how Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy pan out. But as is the case with most Hammer pictures, the main allure of The Brides of Dracula is that it provides yet another opportunity to gawk at marvelous sets and costumes rendered in glorious Technicolor and indelible images of vampire brides rising from the grave.