Hammer Films Retrospective (part I) Gothic Beginnings
I’m honestly not the biggest horror movie guy out there. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate them.
Exactly.
I just hate what they have turned into. There is so little artistry to it these days. So little concern with trying to provoke the “delightful shiver.” These days it’s all built around scenes that spend as little time as possible building tension and then clobbering the audience with a jump scare, followed by gory body horror. Modern body horror only works if you don’t actually look at it. The adroit carefully layered craftsmanship of the buildup is gone. It just doesn’t satisfy a taste for gothic horror that was developed in early childhood.
When I was six, my parents made the profoundly stupid decision of letting my older brother babysit me. The sadistic moron spent the evening selling me on the idea that The Horror of Dracula, which would be on Creature Features that night, was the scariest movie in all existence. But since he was a responsible babysitter he would not permit me to stay up past my bedtime to watch it. In fact, we would both be going to bed early that night, so he would not have to worry about me getting up at 10 o’clock and sneaking downstairs to watch it. Which of course is what I did.
I tapped out and ran for my bed in terror when Lucy got staked by Peter Cushing, my vicious little shit of an older brother’s peels of laughter following me as I dove under the bed. When my folks got home, Dad didn’t buy my brother’s story and went down to his room bellowing out a long list of chores that he had just earned for himself.
I finally got around to thanking my brother for doing that to me this year because he was the one that introduced me to Hammer Films.
Horror and the promise of the delightful shiver it will bring have been the building blocks of a film genre that has been around since the days of Thomas Edison’s movies. Each decade seems to find a country that understands the necessary zeitgeist that must be tapped into better than anyone else. In the 1920’s post post-World War I Germany had the most innovative horror movies in the world.
Universal Studios took the lead in the 1930s, creating the movie monsters that would set the baseline standard for pop culture that is still in force today. The mental image your mind automatically summons when you mention Frankenstein or Dracula came from Universal Studios.
But in post-war WWII Britain, a small studio would take Universal’s mantle and run rings around it.
In November of 1934, a stage Magician who worked under the name William Hammer (real name William Hinds) decided to go into the production end of the movie business and founded the most successful independent British film company in history.
Hammer Films followed the established traditions of the great British Film companies in the 1930s and went broke almost immediately. While Hammer Films was liquidated, its distribution arm, Exclusive Films continued to do great.
After the war, William’s son Tony resurrected the marque to make quota-quickies; cheap films that filled gaps in the release schedule. It was part of an act of Parliament that was designed to prop up the flagging British film industry. The quota quickies were actually a necessity for a distribution company like Exclusive because the government was serious about the quota part.
Hammer Films started off by buying up the film rights to successful radio plays like Death in High Heels and Dick Barton: Special Agent.
The war, societal changes to the servant class (or rather former servant class) as well as a socialist government had made times pretty hard for the gentry class. Consequently, country mansions were easy to come by and cheaper than actual film studios. The Freehold of Down Place was renamed Bray Studios and Hammer Films made a deal with an American producer named Robert Lippert.
Lippert’s partnership explains the otherwise inexplicable choice of American actor Brian Donlevy starring as the British scientist Bernard Quatermass in the Quatermass Xperiment.
Nigel Kneale was the creator of the Quatermass serials. His voice was easily and unquestionably the most influential in shaping the field of British science fiction-horror. His influence was enormous you can see it in everything from Doctor Who to 28 Days Later. You can even feel a shadow of his hand in Sean of the Dead. And yet, he was at best uncomfortable with his manner of fame.
Kneale wanted the trappings of literary fame. Being toasted by student assemblies at Cambridge. Perhaps an honorary degree from Oxford. Fawning reviews by the New York Review of books. He wanted his fans to be part of a world of high-back leather chairs and expansive mahogany desks, Meerschaum pipes, and fine tobacco by the fireplace.
Kneale never quite adjusted to the fact that his most effusive fans usually weighed 300 pounds and were dressed like Klingons.
Kneale was not happy with Hammer’s first attempt at Quatermass. Primarily because of Donlevy. Too loud, too gruff, and too American. He had been a film star at one time but those days were behind him. Now he was having to get by in the world of American television and had started to take a serious interest in his alcoholism. He was at best disinterested in his film and the world it was trying to build. In the words of Nigel Kneale, “he took the money and waddled.”
The Quatermass Xperiment was the story of a space expedition that ended in disaster. The British Experimental Rocket Group (BERG) had launched the expedition with three astronauts aboard and there was only one left when it crash-landed, the other two were missing. The survivor Carroon was barely able to talk. The spacecraft showed signs of forcible entry from the outside. Carron metamorphosized into a creature that was as much plant as it was animal and went on your standard alien killing spree. Quatermass came up with a theory that the creature had absorbed Carroon and the other astronauts and was only disguising itself as Carroon. However, he deduced (somehow) that the now Kaiju-sized creature could only survive on Earth with the connivance of Carroon and the other two men. Quatermass gave an impassioned speech that convinced the humans to give up a nightmarish existence and die to save the human race. Since things weren’t getting any better from here, they agreed. Croaked. And saved the world.
Quatermass was built on the fundamentals of high intelligence and rock-solid, inflexible morality. He was driven more by his sense of prudence, his sense of right more than anything else.
Truth be said, Americans can like Quatermass but we don’t get him on an emotional level like the Brits do. He spoke to his countrymen’s post-Empire insecurities as well as the fear the rest of the world had about the nuclear world.
Quatermass II happened and I don’t care about it. It was an Invasion of the Body Snatchers deal.
Then came the last of Hammer’s Quatermass pictures: Quatermass and the Pit. This film was shot during Hammer’s Golden Age, the company had a firm grip on who it was by then and Nigel Kneale had an even firmer grip on the character.
By the time Quatermass and the Pit came out Hammer had long established its reputation for its mastery of gothic horror.
Its reputation for flesh and blood.
