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Thhe now legendary film company Hammer made such classics as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), plus their numerous sequels and subsequent remakes of old Universal Gothic chillers (The Curse of the Werewolf, The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera), as well as making international stars out of Peter Gushing and Christopher Lee. 'Forty years on from The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer films are still being shown in cinemas, on television and on video all over the world', according to Lee writing in 1997. 'People of all generations are familiar with the name. What other film company has had a comparable impact?' Over the period from the mid-1950s to the late- 1970s, when Hammer's production finally ground to a halt, this British endeavour changed the face of horror/fantasy cinema and also inspired a generation of prominent Hollywood film makers, such as Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton and John Landis.1
The present author's own avid teenage cinema-going years were certainly made more unforgettable by the vivid impact of Hammer films such as The Abominable Snowman (1957), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1958), The Mummy (1959), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960), and psycho-thriller Taste of Fear (1961). Running concurrently were American International's rival Edgar Allan Poe adaptations featuring Vincent Price (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tomb of Ligeia), directed by low-budget maestro Roger Gorman. The Rank circuit refused to book Hammer's 1X' certificate films, with their age 16 and above restriction, because of their 'family audience' policy but the Associated British Gnemas (ABC) circuit ran them repeatedly. ABC's double-bill Hammer programmes with matching sensational posters remain a fond memory.
Much of Hammers output, unlike that of another lucrative British screen franchise starting in 1958, the Carry On films - both of which exemplify that there was once a domestic market for truly British films - has been deservedly celebrated by present-day cinéastes as of real artistic substance. Largely because Hammer drew upon a deep native tradition of Gothic literature, according to David Pirie, making horror 'the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim [as] its own, and which relates to it in the same way as the...