I am making my second horror book now that I am about half way through with my history Jack Hill’s exploitation style cinema. The Jack Hill book was very informative and gave he in an insight that I did not have before into the world of low budget film making and in particular with working with Roger Corman. I would definitely like to find the Roger Corman auto-biography How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime in PDF format. Well my next hmemade book project is a hefty one at 313 pages and yet worth it. It is A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer. I can’t wait to get it bound up and sit back and read through it and then provide some articles on what I learn. I may have to do some posts that add some new information to some of the many Hammer posts I have already done here. I also have collected almost every Hammer film ever made here and have them scattered about on several DVD discs. I just enjoy those films so much and have seen many of them several times. Some I have yet to actually see – such as The Stranglers of Bombay and Maniac – and look forward to some viewing as soon as I get through the movies I am watching now. I should say while I am the topic of movies I am watching that I have watched quite a few Vincent Price films in the last few months and have yet to write one blasted post on the man or his films. I will have to correct that situation soon. So in the mean time I lifted some images from the PDF of A History of Horrors and will share those with you. I left the text to the images so the context can be explained. I am sure most of these have never been seen online before. Most show behind the scenes activities or dinner parties for the Hammer bigwigs.

UPDATE: Got the book made today and thought I would post the cover to it. Again, like the Jack Hill book, it cost me about .50 to print as we used our own paper and printer to print it out. This is a great book and of course it would nice to own the real thing, but that is not going to happen here in China. Here are some scans of the covers. I had to make a cover in Word Doc for the fibery cover the printing places use and then put a color cover on the inside. The quality is pretty good.

IMAGES FROM A HISTORY OF HORRORS

MORE RARE PICTURES FROM THE HISTORY OF HAMMER FILMS >>

SCARS OF DRACULA

1970/Director: Roy Ward Baker/Writers: Anthony Hinds as John Elder

Cast: Christopher Lee, Dennis Waterman, Jenny Hanley, Christopher Matthews, Patrick Troughton, Michael Gwynn, Michael Ripper, Wendy Hamilton, Anouska Hempel

For people who say that this is the worst Hammer Dracula film ever made they must have stopped at this 1970 feature and never checked out Dracula A.D. 1972 and then The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the last of the Hammer Dracula features. This is the last of the Hammer series to feature the Count in a Gothic setting however. In this one the Count is back in Transylvania and the continuity the series had followed fairly well over the last three films (Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and Taste the Blood of Dracula) is jarred by the fact that at the end of Taste the Count is left a pile of powdery, desiccated blood in London. Scars does have the Count start off as powdery blood but there are some  gaps here that leave the last story dangling. How did the powdered blood get to Translyvania and into Dracual’s secure chamber, accessable only from the castle wall overlooking a steep cliff? Earlier features spent a good portion of the early story explaing how Dracula returns from the dead but this one sort of bypasses all that and simply has a bat vomit blood on the red powder. Why? Where did the blood gorged bat come from and how did Dracula control it? We will never know.  The film was shot on a skimpy budget and shot quickly. It was released, sometimes on a double bill with Horror of Frankenstein, only a few months after Taste the Blood of Dracula. It was director Roy Ward Baker’s first stab at a Gothic film and the absence of such maestros of the style like Terence Fisher or Freddie Francis is sorely felt. But to be honest Ward does the best he can with a script that offers very little in the way of something new to add to the series and a small budget and tight schedule. He just does not have the flair that Terence Fisher had but those are pretty big shoes to try and fill in the first place.

MORE OF SCARS OF DRACULA HERE >>

FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN

1967/Director: Terence Fisher/Writer: Anthony Hinds

Cast: Peter Cushing, Susan Denberg, Thorley Walters, Robert Morris, Duncan Lamont

Frankenstein Created Woman is the fourth of the Hammer Frankenstein films and sees the return of Terence fisher as director after a brief absence from the helm while Freddie Francis directed The Evil of Frankenstein. Anthony Hinds is back as script writer under the familiar pseudonym John Elder. We will get to The Evil of Frankenstein another day as I will eventually get all the Hammer Frankenstein efforts reviewed then move on to the Dracula films. But I did want to clear something up that puzzled me for a while regarding the film Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. In that film I made the error of stating in my review of that film that Baron Frankenstein shows the damage he received at the end of Frankenstein Must Be destroyed. I was recalling that from memory and I am far from an expert on the films but it would seem that in Frankenstein Created Woman Frankenstein already shows some damage to his hands. We may infer from this that the injuries were received at the end of 1964’s The Evil of Frankenstein when the castle burns down and then explodes (like in the James Whale version) though it not shown or explained. Anyway, I always wondered about his hands in that film and need to go back and rewatch Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, a fine Terence fisher film as well, and see if his hands are gloved in that one.

MORE FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN HERE >>

Until only recently I had never seen a episode of the British television production, by Granada Television, of the 1984 to 1994 Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett as Conan Doyle’s master sleuth and David Burke and Edward Hardwicke taking turns at Dr. Watson. There were a few reasons for this that I will go into but in the end I think I may have been simply hard headed and biased towards anyone playing the role other than Basil Rathbone. But that is not the only reason and as time has gone on I can see some flaws in the Rathbone films, though not in his particularly perfect portrayal of Holmes. I picked up the boxed set with Brett a month or so ago and at the same time begin re-reading some of the stories in my two volume collection of the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes that I keep on my bedside table, usually along side a couple books by Louis Lamour and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (my moods fluctuate obviously). I went into the series with some skepticism but not to the degree I will approach the new Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr. interpretation.

My main concern was not with Jeremy Brett, who I knew nothing of but had read for some time that his performance is highly praised, but with the fact it was a British TV production. I typically do not like British TV shows, with exceptions of course, simply because of the way they look. The sets usually look like stage sets (even when they’re not) and the camera work looks jumpy and washed out, as if it were all shot on video rather than film. For all I know it may be. Sometimes the camera work is in and out of focus and the sound quality is flat at best. More like some drama you would see on PBS than on American prime time or cable. Which is not to say that what shows up on US TV is really better in substance but is usually better in form than most British TV which is in strange contrast to the usually above average look and feel of British cinema.

MORE OF JEREMY BRETT AS SHERLOCK HOLMES HERE >>

Tom Chantrell is one of those people in the film industry whose influence is far reaching and you are familiar with his work even if you are not familiar with the man’s name. A prolific and hard working illustrator Chantrell’s career spanned a half century and literally thousands of posters, the bulk being British Horror films (most notably his work for Hammer studios) and American horror and exploitations films. His career all but came to a halt in the 1980’s and then ever more so in the 90’s when digital designs became the preferred method of “creation” for movie posters, CD covers and paperback book jackets. He would begin to gain some degree of well deserved cult status before his death in 2001. The man could produce three or four posters a week and  had a keen commercial instinct. His posters were often used to sell a movie before the film had even been completed. He was a British gentleman with a wry wit and sense of humor who never took himself or his work too seriously. As well the man served his country heroically in WWII disarming landmines, a duty that typically had a fairly short life expectancy. Luckily he survived the war and went on to a long and happy life as a great illustrator and family man.

I look at his stuff then look at the posters and paperback covers of today and my heart simply aches for a time when an artist could be an artist and produce actual artwork. I am not saying I hate all the poster artwork of today or that I detest good Photoshop works. But it seems that is all there is anymore and it all lacks grand designs and vibrant colors. His posters (as can be said of many great horror and exploitation posters) were often more thrilling than the movies they tried to sell. I included what might be his most well known image, one of his Star Wars poster designs (Hong Kong version) and it is a much imitated layout and design, as well it should be. The bottom line is they don’t do posters and artwork like this any more and those days are not coming back. That is a sad thing in my little book.  Here is a link to a page on his career with Hammer with some photos and a short interview.

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THE HOUSE OF HAMMER

The House of Hammer was a British movie magazine put out in the mid 70′s when Hammer as a film company was grinding down to a near stand still. But at the time the magazine was the best selling movie magazine in Britain. The publication tried to combine what Warren magazines was doing with Famous Monsters of Film Land and its black and white comic magazines. The artists that contributed to the magazine were also frequent Warren contributors and they may have jumped at the chance to illustrate some of the classic Hammer films in narrative form. The magazine however did not only focus on Hammer films or exclusively on British cinema but contained articles on classic American horror as well.  I included an illustrated version of one of the better latter day Hammer films Vampire Circus drawn by the fantastic Brian Bolland. I have all the issues on my hard drive and look forward to posting some more samples from this curious magazine including some comic strip hosted by an illustrated Peter Cushing as Abraham Van Helsing. For now enjoy Vampire Circus and a couple page samples.

MORE HOUSE OF HAMMER #17 HERE >>

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN

1957/Director: Val Guest/Writer: Nigel Kneale

Cast: Forrest Tucker, Peter Cushing, Maureen Connell, Richard Wattis, Robert Brown, Michael Brill, Wolfe Morris, Arnold Marlé

The Abominable Snowman was one of Hammer’s ealry films that came out right before Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula. It was written by Nigel Kneale and directed by Val Guest, the pair who earlier had created the two Quartermass films. It stars a young and intense Peter Cushing before he became legendary as the morally ambivalent Victor Frankenstein and the morally unshakable Abraham Van Helsing. I had earlier reviewed X-The Unknown and like that film I will say the same thing about The Abominable Snowman and that is that it is too bad Hammer did not do more films like this after they took off in the early sixties. This is a fine film, well written, directed and acted and I wonder what else this great studio could have produced along these lines had they set their minds to it. Of course Hammer did do other films during the sixties than just their classic retakes of old Universal horror films like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman and The Mummy. Other than The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Cushing playing Sherlock Holmes, I have not had a chance to get too many of those suspense and crime style films from Hammer but hopefully I will be shortly. But this film, released the same year as but prior to Curse of Frankenstein, was from their very early days when they were just beginning to emerge as a so to be major horror studio and there is a certain quality the film has that their later non-Universal style films, the few I have seen, did not usually have though The Hound of the Baskervilles is a very good film.

MORE ABOMINABLE SHOWMAN HERE >>