- They remain on record as the most
consistently successful British film company
in history.
From offices in Wardour street in the heart
of London's film business district,
and from the small Thames side studio
near Windsor Castle, they made films that played
in every country in the world in every
category of entertainment.
Grand period adventures.
Grim military stories.
- What is it?
- Whiskey.
Officers are Russians.
- Police dramas,
suspense thrillers,
comedies, travel logs, dramas.
- But for mot of the world, the named Hammer
conjures images of fantasy and terror.
Like comedies from Britain's Ealing Studio,
cartoons from Disney, or westerns from Republic,
the Hammer style was unique and distinctive.
By subtle implication,
and by graphic depiction, the company made its
international reputation with the primal elements
of exploitation films.
Sexuality and violence,
flesh and blood.
- The ties of flesh and blood
were also quite literal.
A business enterprise with a family atmosphere
extending from the front office,
to the cast and crew.
To the clapper boy, and the cooks in the canteen.
Home video has given renewed life to these now
classic tales.
Original soundtracks and paper back tie ins
have become valued collector's items.
Posters given away free to theaters,
now sell for hundreds, sometimes thousands,
of pounds.
An album of film scores from Silver Screen Records
sold out immediately in the UK,
the US, and Europe.
- Why then, do these films inspire such
nostalgic devotion?
And why did the company's world influence seem to fade
after 20 years?
Like a vampire in the rays of the morning sun?
Hammer's gothic revival was both revolutionary,
and extremely traditional.
The blend of eroticism and the supernatural
have imparted English literature since the 18th century.
Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein,
and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula,
are a part of this tradition,
as for Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle,
and Robert Louis Stevenson.
With stage adaptations of works like
Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
filled audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
On a more lurid level,
the Penny Dreadfuls often used supernatural themes.
Varney the Vampire printed in 1847.
Early movies offered similar thrills.
Nosferatu, the first version of Dracula.
Without dialogue to give it away,
even has leashed the minds of audiences of the world.
- With the coming of talking pictures,
the international market changed.
Like the Tower of Babel, movies now spoke
in a thousand discordant voices.
- Furthermore, in the 1930s and 40s,
graphic violence was taboo.
Movie cowboys might get shot,
but you would never see them bleed.
- Major Hollywood studio monopolized
the world film market with name stars.
Over seas audiences preferred these films.
- It's originated as a very small distribution company,
under the title Exclusive Films.
The people concerned then were my grandfather,
Enrique Carreras, from Spain, a Spanish man,
and a man called Will Hammer, or Hinds,
depending on how you knew him,
as to whether it was in his private life,
or he had a sort of theatrical life.
- Hammer was my father, surprising enough.
He was a successful business man,
and a failed comedian.
He failed because he wasn't really very funny.
- Adopting a company name from Hinds'
stage name, Will Hammer, they made a handful of films
such as this musical with American singer,
Paul Robeson.
Prophetically, one of these early films featured
Bela Lugosi, star of Hollywood's Dracula.
- I killed a man.
- You killed a rat.
- I joined, where, very close as we sit here today,
to being 50 years when I first reported for work
as an office boy in Wardour Street.
During the period, may I tell you,
when doodlebugs were dropping on London at that time.
So it was an exciting start.
Well then I had to go off and do national service.
By the time I came back, my father had joined the company.
- Jimmy Carreras was the most wonderful salesman
I had ever met.
Full of charm.
Knew exactly what he wanted but charmed you out of it
if it was not what you wanted.
- And he took this small company
and increased it in its size and put on a sales force.
And Exclusive did actually become quite a small entity
within the British film industry at the time
of the quota quickies.
- To protect domestic film production,
Parliament enacted a quota system.
Colonel James Carreras helped fill that quota.
- But you see, Jimmy Carreras, and Mike Carreras,
never got on.
There was a great schism between them.
- My father was a businessman, a salesman.
He wasn't a film maker.
I mean, there was no collision, but there was no meeting
of the minds either.
- I wasn't around when Jimmy Carreras was running
the company.
There's no doubt that that was the hey day of the company,
that he created it.
He was the entrepreneurial driving force.
He let the directors direct the way they wanted.
He let the writers do what they wanted,
let the actors do what they wanted
within a budget, creating an osprey decor,
a sense of, um, of well being and common purpose over
a tremendously long period of time
and an awful lot of movies.
- Will Hinds' son, Tony,
alternated production duties with Michael Carreras.
Although, his secret wish was simply to write.
- Now after the war, I went to see him.
We seemed to get on right,
and he said why don't I join.
And I'd just come out of the airforce
and I really hadn't anything to do.
So we got together and uh, I joined the firm.
And it was then just a distribution company.
It was handling other peoples' films.
But, uh, you have to realize that after the war,
there's a tremendous audience for
a cinema going audience in England.
People didn't even bother to find out what was on,
they just went.
If it was terrible, they came out to support.
If it was good, they came out,
but they still went.
So anything went.
And there was a tremendous boom in film distribution.
The trouble was to try and get the films.
- Tony Hinds was a better filmmaker than I was.
He was, you know, a definitive filmmaker.
Tony only lived to make films.
- We became quite friendly, which is most unusual
as Tony never became friendly with anybody
involved in movies.
We became quite friendly.
- We very luckily got a hold of the rights and
were encouraged to make a film by the booking manager
for the ABC Cinemas, which turned out to be Dick Barton,
which was a tremendous, successful radio series.
And from that, we actually discovered that people
were going to the cinema to see this very small
second feature, rather than to see the feature
because Dick Barton really was a national institution.
And from there it developed into
another Dick Barton, which was made in Blackpool,
with great locations, we actually went outdoors
to shoot a shot at the top of
the tower at Blackpool.
And from there in a very small way,
we started to make a series of radio orientated
characters and bringing them to life in the cinemas.
I think it's 1948
we actually had a production program of
six pictures a year.
All based on the radio series.
And from that, slowly,
whatever the company policies were in changing names,
but Exclusive segued into Hammer Films.
- Bray Studios began as a Thames side
manor house.
- And a lot of it was kind of falling apart
and you know, needed repair.
And I remember once it was a terrible thunderstorm.
Oh, god, the rain came down in sheets.
As it can, as you know that.
And uh, the roof's leaking,
everything's leaking.
And Terry Fisher says, "Carry on.
"Carry on."
And there we are, a splash, donk, going everywhere,
but we carried on.
- I can remember shooting in a big room downstairs.
I can't remember what film it was.
And there wasn't room for the boom operator
and he had to stand outside the window
with a boom through the window,
and if it rained, it was too bad.
He chucked a tarpool over himself.
And um, that's how we filmed.
And at the time, we didn't think
it was extraordinary at all.
- One of my jobs was to go to the airport
and see if anybody got off that I recognized.
And it was never the person I went to meet because
they used to bandy big names about
and I'd wait there and no big names got off the airplane
and then somebody that I might have seen
or somebody was holding a card up,
would be the actor we got for that particular film.
- Don't move.
- Hammer had Anthony Nelson-Keys
to run the Bray facility.
He and a young assistant named Jimmy Sangster
both went on to become producers.
- I worked for Hammer ever since I came out
of the forces, which was when I was about 20.
And I worked with them constantly.
We'd work from 8:30 to 5:30 on Wednesdays and Fridays,
until six o'clock on the other three days.
And they were very strict about breaking up on time.
- You know, as executive producer, you used
to cut the turkey at Christmas.
It was a really small family, permanent unit.
I mean, our crew used to,
I think probably three years was a minimum engagement
when they used to join Hammer in those days.
We had the same directors alternating
and the producers were Tony Hinds and myself.
Certain types of films that he enjoyed making, I didn't,
and certain types of films I liked making, he didn't,
but the studio only made one film at a time,
and that is a tremendous advantage in not only
everybody knowing everybody, but everybody knew
what the hell they were doing.
They were all working on the same film,
and the Americans adored this.
- Out was limited to second features,
the bottom halves of double bills.
- Thank you, sir.
- Partnership with Robert Lippert secured all
important American distribution.
A bit more money and stock shots from other
Lippert pictures.
- It's jammed.
- And that's really how we got into the
American market, through Lippert.
A big influence in our lives.
And that started what I call the second cycle
of the development of Hammer.
Which the first cycle was the quota quickies.
The second cycle was really quota quickies,
slightly bigger, but with an American ingredient in them.
And suddenly, we were a British company that
got known in America.
I mean, unheard of in those days.
- But in the early 50s, there was little
to distinguish the company.
- They were not even on their way to becoming
a cult then.
- Hammer flowed with the incoming tides
of television by adapting a BBC serial that had
Britons glued to the tellie.
The X in Xperiment emphasized that the story
was too horrific for children.
- We were up on our way to Tangier and we were
leaving the airport, and Tony Hinds raced up in a car,
and just before we got on the plane,
he put a whole bundle of television scripts
in my hands and said, "Read these in Tangier.
"We want to make a film of it."
I said to Tony Hinds, "I would like to do this,
"as a documentary, and I'd like to shoot
"it cinema verite, handheld cameras, all that."
And he said, "Okay, do it."
- The Creeping Unknown
became the American title as Quatermass
had no name recognition outside the United Kingdom.
- Three men went into outer space.
Only one of them came back.
Came back a strange, distorted creature.
Haunted and possessed by something beyond
human understanding.
Lippert sent Brian Donlevy over to play
Bernard Quatermass, director of the first
British rocket group.
- Unlock his mind for me, Brisco, and find it.
I know you can do it.
- It isn't jut a--
- I know of the strain and tension you've been under,
but to stop now when we're so close.
- These were stories with a very dynamic hero
who was a no nonsense kind of scientist
who let nothing stand in his way
and was actually kind of ruthless in this way
which was a really interesting protagonist for a picture.
Usually the protagonists in pictures,
these people were the villains in American pictures.
- You've destroyed him like you've destroyed
everything else you've touched.
- There's no room for personal feelings
in science, Judith.
- I want a corder around the entire area.
Evacuate all public.
Get information to check up every movement
that's likely to take place inside this radius tonight.
- Yes, sir.
- With Quatermass Xperiment and the
Terrence Fisher pictures, and the sequel to Quatermass,
which is called Enemy From Space,
which was another mind blower,
I began to notice
a musical score going on.
I mean, the music of these movies was really astonishing.
It turns out it was a composer named James Bernard.
- And it was then that I started to work with
John Hollingsworth who was already the music director
of Hammer.
And he played the tapes to Tony Hinds who said,
"Okay, let's try."
And so there I was suddenly flying into
the Quatermass Xperiment.
Very alarming it was, too, the first time around.
Quatermass was called I think entirely for strings
and percussion.
It seemed to suit the subject very well.
- The special effects fella that we had,
Les Bowie, did miracles for nothing.
Always complaining, always saying, "How can I do this?
"It's impossible."
Always came up with it.
And that monster was, in fact, a piece of tripe.
- Again, emphasizing the X certificate,
Hammer followed with X The Unknown,
a thriller about black radioactive ooze from
beneath the Earth.
- It was Tony Hinds' and my careers, and we were batting
around ideas and it seemed at the end of a session,
I'd come up with the most idea,
so Tony Hinds said "Go away and write it."
I said, "I'm not a writer.
"I'm a production manager."
And he said, "Well write it.
"If we like it, we'll buy it."
So I wrote it, and he liked it, and he bought it.
- It's on its way.
The man at the main gate had it just like the others.
It's coming in on the west side.
Look!
There is it! On the roof!
- Peter!
Peter!
Get out of the Jeep, get out of it!
- And posters were the great sell that used to go over
were most elaborate in artwork, posters.
But I remember him once telling an executive
that we wanted to do a picture about the yeti,
and the man became most interested in what the yeti
would look like and Jimmy said to him,
"We don't know, we haven't caught one yet."
- Bernard Robinson's art department
transformed the Bray Manor House into a Tibetan temple
while the camera crew shot action scenes
on location in the French Pyrenees.
- And we had what was lovingly called a crash course
in skiing.
We had two days of it, that's all,
before we all went up and hung on by a teeth.
- Forest Tucker starred with the fellow
who became rather linked with Hammer over the years.
- They know it was me.
Stay here.
Wait!
Ed, I can hear ya, I'm comin'!
- You've got to understand that isn't Shelley,
that isn't anybody.
- I can hear his voice.
- It's in your own mind.
It's just happened to me too.
- A great guy.
A great guy with props.
He works out over night
every single prop and thing that he can use,
and never tells anybody,
and he comes out during the scenes.
He became known as Props Peter.
- We dare you,
dare you to see the Abominable Snowman
of the Himalayas.
- So what we tried desperately to do is we all said
we must never, ever see that yeti.
You can see pieces of him, bits, an arm,
or an eye or a thing, and let people build their own
vision of him.
- Nigel Kneale adapted his BBC sequel,
Quatermass II.
Future director Brian Forbes was one of the victims
of a mass alien invasion.
Only Quatermass suspects the truth:
that the synthetic food in a top secret facility
is not for human consumption.
But Nigel Kneale still felt Donlevy was too harsh,
too bullying,
too American.
- Benson Broadhead is dead.
- Dead?
- I watched him die a few hours ago in that plant.
His whole body covered with some kind of corrosive poison,
and eaten away.
- Naturally, the director defended his star.
- Now, would that sort of a thing,
a down to Earth, prosaic, honest to God man like
Brian Donlevy was an enormous help.
- I know that Nigel Kneale, who wrote the teleplays,
was not happy with the condescension that went on.
But having seen the teleplays, you know,
they're now available here, and the six hour Quatermass
in the pit, for instance, of three hours,
however long it is,
that the film adaptions were really remarkably good.
The high points and all the ideas were all retained
in these things.
- That pipe has been blocked with human pulp.
- Yes, what is it, tell us.
Inside those domes are creatures from outside this Earth.
- Oh, you're mad.
- I've seen them.
Thousands of tiny creatures that have conjoined together
and expanded to things 100 feet high.
- Quatermass and The Pit televised in 1958
was planned by Hammer for more than a decade.
Ultimately, Andrew Keir took the Quatermass role
under the direction of Roy Ward Baker.
- Well I read it and I thought
"That's absolutely marvelous."
It was a really foul proof script.
It was excellent.
The film was meant to be made at Elstree Studios,
and they suddenly said, "Sorry, we have no space."
But just up the road was the old Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studio
and they were only too delighted because their studio
was empty so we had the whole place to ourselves.
So it was very lucky in an enormous back lot,
which we built the exterior of the underground station.
- An excavation uncovers a rocket ship
of unknown origin and the rotting remains of giant insects.
Quatermass deduces that alien technology endowed
the human race with intelligence,
and the will to purge society of anyone who does not
follow the will of the hive.
- Roy Ward Baker didn't want me for Quatermass.
He wanted, uh, what was his name?
Kenneth Moore.
And, for,
seven and a half weeks, it was utter hell.
- Those sort of choices were made in a small committee,
really, of Tony Hinds, who was really the head
of production at any rate, at Hammer,
and was also one of the partners in Hammer.
And, Sir James Carreras,
and Tony Nelson-Keys, and me,
who put his name for this, I couldn't really remember,
because he was excellent.
- They were coming.
- Who? What were?
- Them.
Them.
- He saw the creatures.
- They were alive.
- Alive?
- Despite the fact that I didn't get on with Roy
and it was a bit tricky with other people,
but um, we gelled as a unit, as a group of actors.
I wanted to kill you.
- Why?
- Because you are
different.
- I caught that some of the scenes were uneven.
Ronan, it's Barbara.
She's the one, get down here quick.
- My duty now is to quiet public alarm.
And you, you'll keep your damn paws out of things.
- Listen, I am advising you all to leave.
There may be grave danger.
I tell you, this could be dangerous.
So get back!
It was what I was afraid of.
The thing got a huge intake of energy,
the very substance of it seemed to be coming alive.
And the,
and you can't see this world any longer.
- It's just brilliant.
It's just fantastic what a great,
what a great idea, you know.
What a great way of finishing it off.
- It's still a remarkable picture.
There was an idea movie, and that was really unusual.
- The film came out the same year as 2001.
By then, the name Hammer signified gothic fantasy.
- By 1950, the classic themes
had been used a buffoons and comic foils.
- In the 50s, when the genre was basically in decline,
- Wow!
- The horror movies had sunk pretty low.
And when the Hammer pictures came along,
they were obviously classier.
- American Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotosky
approached Hammer's silent partner
with a Frankenstein script.
- It didn't bear much relationship to the film
that we finally made.
They had the ear of Eliot Hyman, I think I'm correct
in saying, and Eliot, by this time we were
now associated with Eliot, but he, because
he didn't know much about it either,
thought it was a good idea in making,
because there hadn't been a gothic horror maiden
since the universal cycle,
and certainly to in color.
And so he really sent the script over.
Tony looked at it and said, "No we can't do this."
It just wasn't good enough.
- And I'm given a script, which I didn't really like.
It was boring, and a sort of a rehash of the old,
but anyway, we were gonna do it.
- A cheap black and white production was
planned with Boris Karloff considered for the role
of the old baron when Hammer learned that they
would be sued if they copied any elements from
the older films.
- So we had to make a film that was entirely
different from the first one.
Well then it became fun.
- Instead, the planned an all new version
with Jack Asher shooting in Eastman color
and Jimmy Sangster completely rewriting the script.
- I'm not sure.
I don't think so, I don't think I read it.
I'd just seen all the old Frankenstein movies.
The only problem with Universal was they had
a copyright on the monster.
We couldn't use an idea of the Boris Karloff
type monster with the bolts through his neck.
See, that was the only problem.
I mean, Frankenstein was public domain.
That's why we came up with a different one,
a different design.
- Terrance Fisher had directed moody
TV episodes of Robin Hood, and a thriller admired
by Hitchcock himself, so Long At the Fair.
- Oh, it was lovely.
He was such fun.
He always knew exactly what he wanted,
and that's why the films were made fast,
in the way they were.
- Quiet, didn't have a lot to say.
Knew what he was doing.
He was an old time pro.
- Luckily, I had a break in my BBC work,
and was able to take the role I'd seen
Colin Clive play in the original 1931 film.
We've discovered the source of life itself.
And we've used it to restore a creature that was dead.
- We never make our films with tongue in cheek.
Having played so many of the period doctors,
I always go to my doctor,
and ask, you know, "How do you take a brain out
"and do anything?"
But something, you must do it all correctly.
- I can't prove your word.
But I can stop you using his brain.
- Why?
He has no further use for it.
Don't be a fool.
Be careful!
You'll damage it!
- The sale to Warner Brothers brought barely
enough to finish the film.
40,000 pounds, about $112,000.
Christopher Lee brought a new interpretation
to the role of the man made man.
- The legs are independent of the arms.
The hands sort of don't coordinate with the feet
or the rest of the body.
So I tried to play the character like an ill coordinated,
childish creature.
- The first day I met Christopher,
he was disappointed that he hadn't any dialogue.
I told him, "Well consider yourself lucky.
"I've read the script."
- Well we were shooting in the dark.
We rarely were.
I did about three tests if I remember right,
remember rightly,
for the character.
They were quite dreadful, I mean,
one of them made me look like a combination
between a wolf and a pig.
And the other
was actually, it was actually surprisingly
quite close to the Elephant Man.
And then, I think it was I,
or perhaps it was Phil Leakey, the makeup man,
or Roy Ashton, the other makeup man,
we put out heads together and I think I said,
"Look, it's bits and pieces of other people so,
"it should be patched together."
So there were these lumps and these scars
and the one dead eye and the stitch marks
and everything.
Which was pretty unpleasant.
Makeup man Phil Leakey created a face
that's been rightly described as looking
like a road accident, a patchwork creature
of shards and stitches.
It was almost impossible for me to eat or drink
and naturally, there weren't many people
prepared to sit down and eat and drink with me.
- It's never horrific to you.
In fact, we might have laughed.
Probably did.
- I guess I was 10 or 11.
Oh it was terrifying.
I mean, I was scared to death.
I've always heard the makeup criticized in later years
as not being very good makeup,
but I thought it was pretty creepy.
- When we saw Curse of Frankenstein,
there was a graphic quality to it that was totally shocking.
Which made it extremely endearing to us.
We enjoyed it a great deal, and I'll never forget
the audience's reaction at that midnight snowing
at the New York Paramount, they loved it.
We were about 15 years old, I think,
my friends and myself.
- Wouldn't you understand, you're in real danger?
What Victor is doing is dangerous to
everyone in the house.
No, you cannot possibly conceive what dreadful thing
he's planning to do.
- What are you trying to tell me, Paul?
That Victor's wicked, insane?
What is amazing today to me is the production value
with the beauty of the sets, the costumes.
They were all real.
They were all Victorian costumes.
- Elizabeth, come back!
- The disembodied hands, eyes, and organs
were liberally garnished with bright red blood,
much to Christopher's dismay when he was shot in the face.
- When this happened, I gave in to the most ear splitting
shriek which literally paralyzed everybody on the set,
that I don't think they'd ever heard anything like it.
And it was genuine because there was some agent
in this blood, glycerin, whatever,
I felt somebody had put a red hot poker into my eye.
The film grossed 70 times its production cost.
Seven million dollars.
The company had, in fact, created a being with a life
of its own.
- Hammer made their first remake
after the 29 pictures in 1956 or 58, I think it was.
And it was the Frankenstein picture
and it was the only one amongst five.
It was up the junction, and it was Peter Sellers
and the Frankenstein picture and,
two or three others.
It was quite a nice picture,
no idea they were starting this incredible snowball.
- I remember everyone being astounded
at the success at that movie though.
I mean, it took off.
And I don't think we got very good reviews, did we?
- The critics hated us.
I mean, really, loathed the film and loathed us,
but it started the cycle and it started Hammer
as it really became know, Hammer horror.
The critical reaction came at the same moment as the queues.
I mean, you haven't got a choice.
What are you gonna do?
Are you gonna read the newspaper or look at the queues?
- The success of The Curse of Frankenstein
was way out of proportion to what was expected.
I think if that picture hadn't been as successful as it was
in America, there might not have been any other
big Hammer films.
- Through his friend, Mike Frankovich,
James Carreras struck a three film pact with
Columbia Pictures, to include a sequel,
originally called Blood of Frankenstein.
The script focused on the continuing attempts
of Baron Frankenstein to perfect his grizzly work.
- In the year 1860, I, Baron Frankenstein,
was sentenced to death on the guillotine.
But I have escaped the guillotine,
and I shall avenge the death of my creation.
- I wanted to scare people and make them sort of shudder,
and I think what is the most shudder making thing
from my point of view was cannibalism, so I put cannibalism
into the picture.
- 'Cause Peter and I used to play games on the set
all the time.
- Who is he?
- Nobody.
He isn't born yet.
We had a sheep's brain.
And so we shot the scene and we didn't
finish the scene on the day we were using
the brain, and we had to pick it up next morning.
And the, when I opened it, it was actually alive.
I mean, the smell was appalling.
All the technicians were fainting.
So we had to um, I said, "I can't work with this thing."
I said, "He's going to upstage me."
Anesthetic!
- I think what he's doing is a ruthless thing,
and it might be different from Mary Shelley, but
it wasn't much different from the other
movie Frankensteins.
- There was also an abortive TV pilot film
but it was shot in Hollywood, not by the
Hammer production team.
- It was just a disaster.
I mean, the people how were involved with the Screen
Gems had no idea what they were trying to make.
I mean, I don't know why the ever came to us
in the first place because, you know, we had made
some fairly good gothic stories.
When I got there, I took with me six scripts.
All written by Jimmy Sangster,
and all ready to shoot.
I mean, you know, in good professional niche.
And the first thing they made me do
was to sit down and listen to the title music.
They had some jingle.
I mean, that confused me slightly that we were
listening to jingle music before we even
made anything, but they were very proud of that.
And then they started to trot out some directors
who I think they kept in cupboards on the lower floor,
ready to work.
You know, have megaphone, will travel sort of directors.
And I just couldn't believe the whole scene so I
kicked up a bit of a stink and we started again
by them getting out a list of writers.
- Your name
is Herbert.
If you remember, and understand,
lift your hands.
- And finally, having gone through with their
head writing honcho,
he said to me, "There's a guy here who I think
"lives in England called Jimmy Sangster.
"Why don't we try him?"
So we did full circle.
I had the six scripts under my arm,
which they hadn't read.
Probably Jimmy had put another name over them,
I don't know, so I said to them,
"Well I actually know this man, I have some influence,
"I can probably get him to do a script."
And then of course when I told them that
all these were his, I mean the whole thing
just fell apart.
I went home.
It was Christmas time, I couldn't bear it anymore,
and Tony Hinds went over to finish the project,
and even he couldn't get them to make a good film.
- If nothing else, it pointed out how
uninspired the first film might have been.
Hammer and the Baron went back to work in 1963.
- You are interrupting my work.
- Your work?
The work of the Devil?
- Hans.
- Please, Father, would you--
- No.
- A wrestler named Kiwi Kingston
played this new monster under the direction
of Freddie Francis.
- Terry was unwell at that time,
and then terribly became unwell and then got
progressively worse.
By this time, Hammer had cleared with Universal
they could use the original makeup.
And I thought it needed something much more physical
than dear old Chris.
And our man was physical, but,
you know, if we did it again, I would have somebody who
could act a little better.
And obviously I used to think of the most effective
way visually, you know, having been a DP and still am,
I always think visually first.
- The Baron was a bit ahead of his time.
I mean, I was unstunting human organs
before that clever doctor, Christiaan Barnard
in South Africa in 1968.
Get out of his way, you fools.
- Go back
and kill him.
- He lives.
See Hans, he's alive.
- Terry Fischer returned in 1967.
- The Terrence Fisher pictures tend to be shot
on long masters, I noticed.
And one of the fascinations in those pitures
is just to sort of watch and try to do something
with essentially an empty frame.
- You see?
A shield of indestructible matter.
- What it it for?
- What is it for?
To give life after death, my friend.
That's what it's for.
Life after death.
- Hans!
- My dear, that man possesses such power.
Such knowledge that,
well sometimes I don't even understand him myself.
- Papa!
- With novice performers like
Playboy model Susan Denberg, Terry patiently blocked out
the action bit by bit.
- Who am I?
Who am I?
- Frankenstein Created Woman was a very interesting
picture, it's got a lot of interesting thematic stuff
that you really wouldn't expect, that they didn't
have to deal with.
In Frankenstein Created Woman in particular,
I remember great stills of Peter Cushing and Susan Denberg
that weren't in the movie, you know,
and I could never figure out whether they
were never shot or whether they were cut out
or what the story was.
- The stills had nothing to do with
the story.
Hammer just wanted to sell theater tickets.
In 1967, Frankenstein moved to the larger Elstree Studios
with Terry Fischer again as director.
- Terry would pretty much let you go
through the scene.
He trusted your own instincts.
He was very easy to work for.
- You haven't finished.
- He would just tell you what you'd already,
what you'd be doing previous to this,
what your emotions would be likely to be like.
And, then ask you to run it through.
- Right, action.
- I can transplant his brain.
If I don't, it'll die through lack of oxygen.
- But that would mean you'd have to remove someone
else's brain to do it.
- Of course, Carl.
How else?
- The police.
They're searching all the houses.
- You must choose between the flames, and the police.
- Once more into the bleach,
with blackmail, murder, and skull duggery.
- Of course he's only doing it for
a frighteningly good call.
- I loved Peter.
Everybody loved Peter.
He was very gentle, he adored his wife.
He was kind.
- What a lovely piece of export, hm?
- I can't speak too highly of him.
- What have you done to him?
- For God sake's go away!
Leave us alone!
- How many heart transplants today?
- Hearts?
I'm ashamed they're old fashioned, we're on brains now.
- Are you? - Yes.
- Jimmy Carreras rarely visited our sets.
He wasn't too keen on horror pictures,
and seeing a crew of 50, at least 40 of whom
appeared to be doing absolutely nothing,
well he became a bit testy.
He preferred to stay on Wardour Street.
- That was their business, it wasn't his business.
I don't think he particularly cared about
the films themselves.
Now, as a film person, I would say that's exactly the
kind of person you want running a film company.
Someone who lets the creative people get on with it,
and if the price for that is a degree of cynicism
on his part, fine, it worked extremely well for Hammer.
- Hammer opted for a younger Baron,
the late Ralph Bates.
Veronica Carlson played the Hazel Court role
while Jimmy Sangster directed, wrote, and produced.
- Jimmy was irreplaceable.
He had a great sense of humor.
At lunch time, we went into the restaurant,
laughed ourselves silly about everything,
calmed down, and then Jimmy said, "Now be serious."
- I had the most fun ever directing that movie.
It's not a good position to be in,
writer, producer, and the director,
because there's nobody to tell you
you're making a mistake.
- But fresh, mind you.
Nothing more than three days old.
- Anything I bring you will be so fresh,
it'd get past the cattleman meat inspector.
- It's almost like the same saga that
the Universal pictures had where they kept adding
more monsters and tried to make the pictures
seem more exciting than they had been previously.
And then by the time they'd done the parodies,
it was over.
It's the same thing that's happened to the westerns.
- 6'7" David Prowse wore a diaper and a bald
cap as this monster.
- I said, "Have you got any ideas as to how
"you're going to play this monster?"
He said, "I've got three children."
And I said, "I just play about with them and frighten them,
"I'd stand up as far big as I can,
"and I sort of walk towards them and say,
"'I am the monster.'"
And the kids'll run away from me and Terry, he said,
"That's fine, perfect, that's just what we want."
And so that was how we finished up, you know,
playing this monster.
- David looked far more imposing in black leather
years later in Star Wars.
As usual, the next film began with a poster,
eventually modified.
With burned hands useless for surgery,
the Baron enlists a young surgeon to
help fashion one last abomination.
It was the Baron's last hurrah so far.
Because of the period, I was given a wig
covered in Marcel waves.
I thought it made me look rather like Helen Hayes.
- I knew you couldn't give up your work completely.
And you haven't.
- David Prowse also played this monster
in a stiff mask and hairy rubber suit.
- It was a sweat suit and a mask.
I could get in the complete outfit within, like,
20 minutes, it was so simple.
I think in my acting as the monster
in Monster From Hell was probably the high point.
And that includes Darth Vader and everything
else that I've done.
I still think the Monster From Hell was probably one of the
best acting jobs that I've ever done.
- I've succeeded this time.
And every sacrifice will have been worth while.
- We had one stunt where he had to,
I was on the rampage in the laboratory.
- Professor!
- And Peter had to come and calm me down.
He smashed the chloroform bottle in his coat,
sort of jumped up onto to the table,
made a dive across, a dive from off.
I mean, the guy was in his like 60s at the time,
and I'm swinging him around, trying to get him off
and doing like an airplane spin, like a wrestler does,
and eventually I have to collapse in a heap,
I'm being suffocated by the chloroform.
We eventually collapse, with him still hanging on
like grim death, you know, on the back.
And when we finished, the whole studio got up
and applauded.
It was wonderful.
- Long time employee Roy Skeggs
had risen to producer.
Tony Hinds wrote the script as John Elder.
The composer, Jimmy Bernard, and Terrence Fisher
directing our last film together.
- But even if the monster
was not state of the art,
- Well?
- The Baron was his usual warm and considerate self.
- If everything could be reborn, unblemished,
if a new version of his true self could be created,
in the normal way, by mating.
- But who with?
- Sarah.
- For good or ill,
these films brought technicolor blood to the screen.
Without them, we may have never seen The Wild Bunch
or even the black comedy of the original M-A-S-H.
- To Baron Frankenstein,
the creator of man.
- In any case, Hammer breathes new life
into the Mary Shelley myth.
In return, Frankenstein created Hammer.
They will never be ready for me.
- In 1958, Universal Pictures allowed
Hammer to remake Dracula in exchange for
US distribution rights.
- The Horror of Dracula was a particularly big moment
in my life and the life of a lot of kids my age.
We had watched the Universal pictures, and they were scary,
but they were on television, in your house.
So there something a little safer about watching
those picture, but in a theater, with color,
I remember kid's parents not letting them go see it
because it was supposed to be so scary.
- On one side, the power of good.
- Castle Dracula is somewhere here in Klausenburg.
Will you tell me how I get there?
- On the other?
The seductive allure of evil.
Jimmy Sangster's script eliminated the supernatural
powers suggested by Bram Stoker,
but substituted something even more potent:
sex appeal.
- I thought the more human he became,
the less magic or fantasy figure he became,
the more threatening he was.
- And then, I think the better of the two,
the film that we really felt went further,
was the Horror of Dracula.
You know, there's nothing like
the introduction of Dracula in that picture
where he simply walks down the stairs,
and walks over Jonathan Harker and says,
"Hello, I'm Dracula."
- Mr. Harker.
I'm glad that you've arrived safely.
- Count Dracula.
- I am Dracula, and I welcome you to my house.
- Slip on canine fangs became
de rigueur for all vampires to come in Hollywood,
Italy, Mexico, France, even Japan.
Like Frankenstein, this was a drastic change
from previous versions.
- Oh, you must help me.
You must.
You're my only hope, you must.
- I'll help you.
I promise.
- I decided to play him as a malevolent hero.
I decided to play him as a man of immense dignity,
immense strength, immense power, immense brain,
because it's all there.
He's kind of a super man, actually.
- Dracula was sexy and he was seducing people
and he was basically going to bed with women.
You know, and afterward, they just thought he was great.
- Particularly, as my dear friend Christopher Lee
plays the character of Dracula,
the women are very much attracted to him.
I mean that first picture you had the lady
opening her French windows, lying back
and waiting for her lover to come.
- Well that was definitely in the screenplay,
and I think Terry Fisher, the director,
certainly emphasized that it wasn't a new ingredient.
It's definitely been there.
If you look at Nosferatu, and I mean even in the
strangest forms of these films,
there's a strong, sexual element,
but in the color again, the blood became a little
more gory, the sex became a little more cleavage,
and the whole thing grew up a little.
- So after we'd done the first one,
we'd have a complete reshuffle and I was surprised
when I was told that I had to have the same people.
As a matter of fact, as it were done,
it couldn't have been better.
Cushing had been a star and I was delighted to have him
in Frankenstein.
I thought he was excellent in Dracula,
and really, you couldn't have found a better person
than Chris Lee for Dracula, I don't think.
Anyone.
He was quite original, I think, in making him
a very presentable, quite sexually attractive,
not to me, a quite sexually attractive actor
instead of this rather florid, puffy faced gentleman
that one associated with.
- The one I found just a little more difficult
was Van Helsing, because in the book by
Bram Stoker, he's described a very old, little wizard
man who speaks almost double Dutch.
And that this was going back, what,
nearly 25 years when I was younger and prettier,
if that is possible.
The one thing that Dracula didn't like
was a crucifix.
And there were so many time I had to use one
that in the end, I thought it had become ludicrous.
I was rather like a traveling salesman in crucifixi.
- This three note dropping octave theme
underscored the power of the title character.
- Taking the title of the movie, is that what you mean,
and thinking of a tune, and the obvious one is
♪ Drac-U-La
- I had this date with this guy that I was trying
to impress, and all of 16, and I'm looking and I'm going--
- This is not the Lucy you loved.
It's only a shell, possessed and corrupted
by the evil of Dracula.
- And I'm grabbing him and I'm doing all of this
and all of a sudden, this scene comes in where
they put the stake in.
And I faint.
"Are you alright, are you alright?"
And I'm going, "Oh god, oh god."
- The end of The Horror of Dracula was one of the
few times that I can remember when I was a kid,
people screaming in a theater.
And they screamed just because it was
so horrible and so scary.
- Right at the end of the picture,
Van Helsing forces Dracula into a shaft of sunlight
by rushing along and pulling some curtains down.
Whereupon he withdrew yet another crucifix
out of his pocket and I said,
"Could we not have something different?"
And I suggested that they had the long refectory table,
a candlestick at each end,
and I could rush along like a mad thing,
leap on the table again and grab one table stick
and rush to the other and then wing them together.
And it worked, 'cause it made quite a jolly good climax,
and I believe they used the end of that picture
in the second Dracula, which I wasn't in for some reason.
- Dollar for dollar, the film outperformed
Hitchcock's Vertigo, released the same year.
Critics castigated the film as revoltingly inferior
to the 1931 version.
But Jack Asher was hailed for his camera work,
and Terry Fisher's status as a filmmaker was assured.
In New York for the premiere, we found out just
how valuable a product we had created.
- James Carreras, Tony Hinds,
Peter Cushing and I, the four of us went to the
office of the President of Universal Film,
and his name was Al Deff.
And he then said "Gentlemen, this film of yours,
"will lift Universal out of bankruptcy."
Now I've made a point of asking Peter Cushing
and Tony Hinds and Jimmy Carreras over the years,
"Did he really say that or did I imagine it?"
He said it.
Interesting.
Brides of Dracula in 1960 featured a sexually ambiguous
Baron Meinster,
who drank the blood of men, women,
even his own mother.
- You needn't be afraid, she's dead.
- It offered strong roles to
Martita Hunt and Freda Jackson, again under
Terry Fisher's direction,
as Dr. Van Helsing continued his zealous crusade against
the corrupt cult of vampirism.
- David Peel as the baron,
blindingly handsome, beautiful Yvonne Monlaur,
France's latest sex kitten as Marianne,
whose beauty was her passport to the twilight world
of the undead.
- Neither the budget, nor my sense of the character,
allowed the original climax,
Van Helsing conjuring a hoard of bats
to destroy the depraved baron.
But a jolly good fight and a splash of holy water
and a burning windmill provided a fine alternative.
Count Dracula himself returned eight years after
the original 1958 film.
John Travellion of the British Board of Census
objected to a ritual use to revive the Count
from the ashes of the first film,
so Hammer turned it down.
A bit.
Instead of cutting the victim's head off,
Dracula's disciple tastefully just slits his throat.
Charming, so unlike the home life of our dear queen.
- I must kill him.
- He is already dead.
He is undead, Mr. Kent.
He can be destroyed, but not killed.
- Over three warm days in May 1965,
the brother of Francis Matthews shot these
home movies at Bray Studios.
Camera angles will hide the fact that the castle
is really only one story high.
There are a great many scenes to shoot.
Arrivals, and departures.
And the climax.
- Susan Farmer and Barbara Shelley run their lines.
Charles Tingwell snoozes.
Christopher Lee discusses the action,
and Francis Matthews paces out his walk across
the castle draw bridge.
- Well the hero's always boring in those films.
They have to be because the excitement comes from
the character roles, and the villain.
Since you're not gonna do anything,
it's better you don't say anything either.
I wish you could run it again and hear me saying--
I must kill him.
Just after this terrible thing has happened.
It's not only the delivery of the line,
but the fact that I allowed Terry to let me say the line.
My sister-in-law's a vampire, my brother's dead,
my wife's nearly been killed.
I'm exhausted.
There was always a danger with Hammer
that they forget what had happened to you.
- Makeup man Roy Ashton inserts hand
painted contact lenses for that wild, bloodshot look.
Sometimes with these wretched contact lenses in,
I could hardly see at all.
I'd lunge for somebody and miss them all together.
Terry was a great arranger.
- Chris is ready.
- He'd say, "Show me what you're going to do
"and I'll tell you if it's right or wrong."
And he always gave editor James Kneads exactly
what was needed.
- The first assistant that supervises
the frozen moat, actually a plaster surface
covered in a salt solution to simulate ice.
On action, Christopher strides regally
holding his cloak for the proper billowing effect.
Later that day, the climax.
- It's too late Kent!
Get away from there!
It's too late!
- The dialogue in the original script was
just dreadful, so we compromised.
The character remained mute.
- Why don't you shoot him?
- It would do no good my dear.
- Impervious to bullets, perhaps.
- Running water.
- But not the pure elements.
Whatever the merits of the individual films,
the combination of technical expertise,
on screen talent, and showmanship,
proved that British films could succeed
in the world market place.
- Of the 19 films released
by 20th Century Fox in 1966, only six were profitable.
Two of those were Hammer.
This one,
and Rasputin the Mad Monk.
In later films, we could afford stunt men
like Eddie Powell to do the more dangerous scenes.
But that's really me, getting a lung full of cold water,
in the main part.
- It's a good take, but the aftermath
is a bit anticlimactic.
Wardrobe misses, Rosemary Burrows,
cleans off Dracula's shoes and cape
and Christopher Lee slips out of his wet clothes,
presumably into a dry martini.
But the ice thawed less than two years later.
You just can't keep your boy down.
- I know that on that one, Terry was definitely not fit,
so there was never any question than
to ask Terry to do it.
- Director Freddie Francis had been
an Oscar winning director of photography or DP.
- Then later when people like Freddie Francis,
who was the DP, started to direct,
the pictures would go in for a little
bit more gimmicky visuals.
- Arthur Grant, he was a great fan of mine
when I was a camera man.
And, uh, I let him use
my filters from The Innocence for that
with the sort of graduating colors coming
in from the side.
- These amber filters visually indicated
an aura of evil.
- There is a girl.
- Maria?
- Bring her to me!
Irresistible to women.
Unstoppable by men.
- Christopher Lee.
Veronica Carlson.
Hammer's new star discovery,
Dracula's most beautiful victim.
- Well I used to skip classes at college
if I knew there was a new Dracula film out
or a new Frankenstein film out,
and they were always the Hammer films.
I don't think that I thought that I would ever be
up there with them.
But I yearned to be just that,
and I pretended.
- They lost a lot of what I'd hoped to get in it.
I wanted to accentuate the romantic interest
between the boy and the girl.
And which I did do in the shooting.
But, um, as I say,
once we'd finished shooting, the film is put
in the mincing machine and wound up.
I went away for a week's holiday
and when I came back, they'd finished editing it.
The film was probably due out in about
another two weeks anyway.
- Very tall, very aristocratic.
Beautiful operatic voice.
I think he is the epitome of Dracula.
It was a dream come true.
- The American distributor
came up with a silly, effective ad catch line,
"Boy, does he give a hickie."
- The big difference that those pictures had at the time
from American pictures was they were not just gorier,
because the gore, if you look back at them,
was actually kind of tame.
Although at the time, it was a bit more than people
were used to, but it's mainly the sex.
The parade of buxom, British starlets,
closeups, alleged closeups on medallions that are really,
you know, huge buxom shots.
These myths have a certain built in Freudian fascination
that never really goes away.
- You're talking about the driving of a stake.
I don't,
if you like to look at it that way it is,
but I don't think that's all it meant.
But no, the reason they're staking in Dracula
is to get rid of him.
- And they nearly did.
To save money, accountant Brian Lawrence suggested
that Dracula film in name only,
but the American distributor insisted that the
title character actually appear.
So James Carreras pleaded with me,
saying that I would throw the entire crew out of work
if I didn't appear.
So, of course, I accepted.
Alice.
- Who are you?
How do you know my name?
- But they now had to fit
the character into the script,
so I was only required to pop up from
the occasional dark corner and do very little acting.
Now.
- Secure enough to spoof his image, Christopher Lee
appeared in The Magic Christian,
the first of four films with Raquel Welch.
- And Christopher and I became good friends also
at one point when I was living in London.
He and his wife, Birgit, they were very nice people.
He was quite an elegant and quite a sensual Dracula.
I thought that was just an act and,
he was quite like Dracula actually.
Christopher.
- Within a year, Hammer ground out
another sequel.
- What I was trying to incorporate is the element
of magic, the mystery, the touch of the supernatural.
It was one thing that nobody had ever done,
which was when the hero, Jonathan Harker,
as it is in the book, he looks out of his window
and he sees Dracula climb out of a window of the castle.
It has a certain amount of opposition because it was going
to cost money to build a special set for this.
But at any rate, we did.
When Christopher Lee has to pick up the girl
and carry her from one room to another, whatever,
he said to me, "Well I can carry her, but,
"how am I going to open the door?"
And I said, "Count Dracula doesn't open doors.
"The door opens for him.
"He goes through, and the door closes behind him."
They got them all in supermarkets now,
exactly the same thing.
- But this one barely received
American release.
- The blood line is getting thin so Hammer
tried a transfusion in a new vein.
- I think it came from a distributor.
I think it was partly accepted by us eagerly
as a change of scene.
It didn't work.
It was a mistake.
- The late Canadian director,
Alan Gibson, put us all through our paces.
Vampirism went mod.
- That was the first time I think in my short career
at that time that I realized I actually did
want to act, this was really it,
because I believed in what I was doing.
- Something new, yet as old as time.
- Come on Johnny.
- A date with the Devil.
- I was Dracula's disciple.
I was 22 and I enjoyed it, enormously.
He was absolutely the part, you know,
and you couldn't imagine anyone being
better than him, or being more impressive than him.
I summoned you!
- It was my will.
- Just his presence alone helped you,
you know what I mean?
- One bright spot was the return
of Peter Cushing as the descendant of
Dr. Van Helsing.
- He was delightful.
He was very tough and very, very fit
for a man of his age.
And I would do a lot of the stunts with him.
Grappling and so on and he was in very good shape,
and he did a lot of his own stunts.
I mean, falling off hay wagons and things like that.
An extraordinary man.
- You!
- Could be Dracula's next victim.
- Seriously, I am a fully fledged vampire because
we had this scene where I had to have Christopher Lee
sunk his fangs into me and he actually,
he got a little carried away and drew blood, so,
I am a fully fledge vampire
and that is one of my claims to fame
which I have on my resume.
- You don't have to act much because he is very frightening
when he has all his gear on.
His white face and his contact lenses.
No.
And he's very tall.
I'm not small, and he is very tall.
At that moment, I was being bitten by Dracula.
And I believed it.
- Christopher Lee had major reservations
with the story.
- I stopped making them in 1972
because in my opinion, the presentation of the character
had deteriorated to such an extent,
particularly bringing him into the
contemporary day and age,
that it really no longer had any meaning.
- Nevertheless, when the cameras rolled,
we both gave it everything we had.
Lee's final Dracula was out to destroy mankind
with a deadly virus, and deprive himself
of human victims.
A rather twisted death wish.
- Van Helsing.
I call upon you to witness
my supreme triumph.
You were living, and yet you were dead.
The undead.
You cannot die.
You must want to.
- You will all pray for death.
Release.
- And so you destroy every living soul on this Earth?
And are left with an empty world to command.
Is that what you want,
Count Dracula?
A last blaze of utter horror and violence?
The ghastly annihilation of an entire planet?
Is this your own death wish?
- My revenge went over centuries,
and it's just begun!
That was one of the few Bram Stoker lines that
managed to creep into the scripts.
This film finally wound up in America
years after it was made,
under a rather generic title.
- Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride.
- Other fine actors have since donned the cloak.
Frank Langella, Jack Palance,
Louis Jordan, George Hamilton,
and Gary Oldman.
But Hammer's Dracula seems to live eternally
in the memories of those who experienced him.
- I am Dracula, and I welcome you to my house.
- The growing facility at Bray Studios
reflected the company's expanding horizons.
- And we all lived through the times when the first stage
went up.
There was never a stage when I went there.
And then a second stage went up.
The field where we shot Quatermass
with the rocket coming down and the tree
and all the fire engines,
they finally built a stage on that, too,
and everything, so all our stuff there went.
- This macabre world peaked over
the studio fence.
- In those days the filmmakers still actually
knew how to make films, and not deals.
- We had six weeks to make the movies.
- I think it got to the end of the six weeks,
the movie was really young,
still had about three days work to do on the movie.
And they'd say, "No sorry, cut your film
"to whatever you've got."
And, um, I think it suffered a little bit from the cuts.
- Well we just had to do it in the time
that was allotted.
And it was never enough.
- After we'd been making it for a while,
I was asked if we can cut down,
make it a bit cheaper.
I was always being asked that.
- The ready reckoner.
If you've got a ready reckoner in your mind,
that takes over and you know exactly which line to take.
- Jimmy Carreras somehow or other managed
to create a sense of family in the company
and amongst the company of actors,
technicians, and so on, who all worked over
and over again on Hammer films.
- Constructions.
85%.
Dialogue's not important.
The actors are gonna change,
the actors and the director are gonna change
the dialogue anyway.
- We would bring the films in on budget and on schedule,
and deliver them.
The Americans were really only interested
in delivery dates because once they put it on
a piece of paper, it was gospel.
- If any of us could get any artistic points in,
we could, but the whole overall operation was a
sort of business, financial situation.
- I mean, in '74, Hammer did 10 movies in one year.
And these days, a major studio can't do that.
- Well I have to say that yes, they didn't like
spending too much money.
- I was earning me wages, basically.
- I thought the stars were behind the camera
more than in front of it.
- Tony Hinds who was really the head of production
at any rate at Hammer.
- He was a very shy man that didn't get involved in films
on the floor.
He was a real behind the scenes guy.
- Tony was the master at it.
I mean, he had Terry there.
I mean, why interfere with a winning formula?
- Tony would never complain if one altered
a little bit here or there.
- We did a bit on location,
and a lot in the studio.
- We started with one of the exclusive films,
and they used to send me a script and say,
"Andrew, what can you do with this?"
It was like being in ramp.
- We were all a wonderful team, really.
- I was ready and they buried me up to my neck,
and it was getting on for lunch time,
so they said, "Right.
"We'll come and shoot the scene after lunch."
So there I was left.
- And I enjoyed working at Bray so much,
they asked me to do another film, and another film,
and another film, and the next thing I knew,
I was something I didn't want to be,
I was a horror film director.
- 11 or 12 years old, and into my teenage,
went with groups of friends to see certain films.
If we saw the logo of Hammer films, we knew that
it was a very special picture,
and we knew that it was a certain kind of film.
A surprising experience, usually, and uh,
shocking.
- The art direction, of course,
was absolutely superb.
- Bernard Robinson, an art director for
certainly all the original horror films.
Very, very clever man in making a lot
out of not very much.
- They had an excellent team, and they got
marvelous sound from this comparatively small orchestra.
- We never went over budget or over schedule.
- There were many times where I didn't finish a score,
until maybe the morning of a recording.
- And we delivered them, so we delivered the goods.
- They made films in all sort of genres.
They made war pictures and, you know,
program movies.
- We took a few more chances, perhaps,
but the structure, the family feeling, the flavor,
the units, the directors, remained very much the same.
- Listen to the themes of James Bernard,
and you can hear the citadels of the film's titles.
- She who must be obeyed.
- Technically the pictures were very good.
You know, Jack Asher's camera work
and the James Bernard scores were exceptional.
They seemed to be doomed to do the same thing
and just have to keep repeating themselves
over and over.
- Bernie Robinson.
Brilliant.
An awful lot of what we got away with,
and I can actually say got away with,
was due to Bernie.
In Yesterday's Enemy,
it was the Burma war.
Bernie did revolving jungles, that they used.
Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was president of the
Burma Star Association, sat next to me at the premiere,
and during the picture he said, "I know that place.
"Now where did you shoot that?
"I know that place."
I hadn't the heart to say on stage three at Shepperton.
And then they had a set there which was
a ruraltarian village which was
a stand by set they kept the whole time,
and had to keep repairing it.
- Suitably redressed, this ruraltarian village
became Parisian back streets,
alleys of Victorian London,
or the docks of Hong Kong.
- Have you ever had your bones scraped, Captain?
It is painful and extreme, I can assure you.
- You have sinned against the goddess Kali.
Those that sin against Kali must suffer the pain
of never looking upon her face again.
- The incredible truth about India's thuggees,
the butchers of Bombay.
Deadlier than their native cobras.
- For the 1959 remake of The Mummy,
Bernard Robinson's art department
and construction crew recreated the tombs of
Ancient Egypt.
- It was a very good movie.
Looked absolutely wonderful.
It looked like a multi million dollar film.
You know, the real stars of Hammer, in my opinion, were
people like Bernard Robinson, the art director.
- Help!
- He who robs the graves of Egypt, dies.
- Pre-production art puzzled me.
I saw a poster of The Mummy striding through the
countryside and a light shining through his body
as though he had a car headlamp or something.
Now I said to Terry Fisher,
"We mustn't cheat the audience.
"Could I take the harpoon in the study
"and run it right through old Christopher,
"and he can just break it off and carry on regardless?"
- No!
- But it did enable me with movement
and with the eyes and the thought in the eyes,
to create a character.
The movement is terribly important.
I reach out a hand.
When you reach out a hand, is it to take somebody,
or is, you know,
because you're desperately seeking help?
- Tony didn't think The Mummy was serious enough.
And then by this time, he's now steeped in the
true gothics, and it's quite true.
The Mummy is a little more colorful
and a little bit more adventurous.
I liked doing it.
In fact the only horror films I ever personally
made were the two Mummies, if not three,
I can't remember.
I enjoy directing of course, yes.
I mean, I don't know anybody who wouldn't enjoy directing.
- How did he die, man?
- Dr. Pepper signed the certificate natural causes.
I should have thought by the look
of the poor fellow that he died of fright.
- Starring Peter Cushing as the person
who knew every secret of the night creatures.
- Kenneth Hyman, son of Hammer's silent partner,
and later head of Warner Brothers,
proposed a Sherlock Holmes series to begin
with The Hound of the Baskervilles.
- Some revolting sacrificial right
has been befalled.
The depths a human being can sink to.
- What human being could have done this?
- That is precisely what I intend to find out.
- How can you be so certain that somebody
took one of the bishop's spiders and deliberately
placed it in Sir Henry's room?
But it wasn't in the luggage he brought
from South Africa.
- Elementary, my dear Watson.
There are no tarantulas in South Africa.
- What do you want me to do?
- Identify anything I may find.
Strange things are to be found on the moor.
Like this, for instance!
- The bad guys.
In fact, after doing The Curse of Frankenstein,
the next part I played was the romantic lead,
Sir Henry Baskerville in the Hunt of the Baskervilles.
That was before I did Dracula,
I think I'm right in saying this.
I'm sure if I'm wrong, I'll be instantly corrected.
- Swine.
You thought it was going to be easy, didn't you?
Didn't you?
You won't be the first of your family who thought that.
And you won't be the first to die because of it.
- Alas, Holmes did not inspire a string of sequels,
like Dracula or Frankenstein.
- Which way?
For heaven's sake, which way?
- Playwright Wolf Mankowitz received double
Hammer's usual salary for this Freudian twist
on Dr. Jekyll.
- For God's sake, man, don't kill him.
- Let me alone, Jekyll.
Let me alone.
- Jekyll?
- I deserve nothing better than you.
- Desire drove her to deception.
Jealousy drove him to madness.
- Will we ever know who we really are?
Who are you, Kitty?
- The fascinating new Dr. Jekyll.
- Who are you?
- A terrifying new Mr. Hyde.
- Where is Henry?
- Good evening.
Your husband is here.
- But audiences didn't warm to the film,
nor to the handsome Mr. Hyde.
The picture was a financial failure,
under several titles.
- At that time, we actually were doing, in my opinion,
some of the best films we ever made.
Hell Is a City, one of the first and the strongest
of the police type of drama.
I mean, the fore runner of all the things that
eventually came out on television,
and very much the American police type drama.
- I want children, Julia.
- Oh no, don't start all that again.
- Look, Julia, we're both still plenty young enough.
We could have some fine kids.
Your life wouldn't be so empty.
- Factual, you know, shot on the streets.
Val Guest directed.
I did a war story, a very strong story,
about war crimes and how a crime is a crime when
it's done by the enemy, but when it's done
by your own troops, it's supposedly, you know,
you had to do it, but to survive.
- You won't understand what I'm saying.
It doesn't really matter anymore.
Two days ago, I had a wife.
A wife I loved very dearly.
You murdered her.
I still have a five-year-old son.
My last prayer is that he will live long enough
to forget your vile, inhuman...
- Holy cow.
- And then Tony found The Pony Cart,
which I think was a play if I'm not mistaken,
and turned it into a very strong film, a warning,
never take sweets from a stranger.
- That's right, that was the only film
I photographed for them, yes.
Which I thought was a very good film.
I think that's the trouble if you have a sort of
a trademark like Hammer, you have to keep producing
the same films.
- Don't put that little girl of yours
on the stand to testify against my father.
Now don't do that.
- Get out of here.
- They'll tear her apart, and they'll do it
on my instructions!
- Well maybe she had something on.
- Maybe you had something on.
- I didn't, I didn't!
- Maybe you were fully dressed the whole time
and this whole outrageous story of Mr. Olderberry
making you undress is a lie.
- It isn't, he did.
I like dance.
- With nothing on?
- Sometimes.
- Do you do it often?
- Sometimes after my bath.
- In front of other people?
- For daddy and--
- Oh.
So your daddy likes to see you dance naked?
- Yes.
- Well, what a very unusual household.
- Your honor, I object...
- The problem there was that the critics never
forgave us for being successful.
There's no doubt about that and,
when they saw this film, which was serious,
they accused us of really trying to capitalize
on the elements.
It was a very, very wrong criticism, in my opinion,
and it was started by a couple of critics
who actually never, ever gave a Hammer film
of any sort a good critique.
- The Damned.
An intelligent and subtle science fiction thriller,
also lost money at the box office.
- Joe Losey on The Damned,
he took a lot of interest in the music.
The people in sort of frightening looking uniforms
who had to go in and visit the children
who were being kept underground to survive
after the world had been blown up
by an atomic bomb.
It had a sort of slow, sinister kind of walking
little themes.
"I need some little high sound."
I didn't know what he meant,
as often directors don't know, really,
what they want.
They know it's not what I want, they do want,
but they don't know how to explain it.
So John Hollingsworth said to me,
"Jimmy, go to the piano and stand over the strings,
"not by the notes, but over the strings of the piano,
"and when I do that, just plink one of the strings."
And we did that
at certain moments, and Joe at the end said,
"Perfect, that's just what I wanted."
- Even a picture like These Are the Damned,
which is one of my favorite Hammer films which
is kind of an atypical Hammer film,
it's sort of intellectual and I don't think that
the studio really was that crazy about the movie,
is the ads in Britain are basically big, busty shots
of Shirley Anne Field and,
you know, the intonations of incest and, you know,
all sorts of dirt.
- Don't ever do that again, Joanie.
- I'll do what I like, King.
- Do you think I'll let a man put his
dirty hands on you?
- And the American ads are no better.
They have children with, like,
icicles hanging off their noses or something.
That's really a much maligned and not very
appreciated picture, but I think one of the
best things they ever did.
- Let me go!
- Why are you doing this?
What's it all for?
What are you trying to make out of these children?
- The financial failure of these
experiments convinced James Carreras to stay
within the proven formula.
It was hard to argue with success.
Michael Carreras ordered the back lot
transformed for a film about the Inquisition,
but the Catholic League of Decency threatened
to ban it.
Luckily, Jimmy Carreras sold Universal on another movie
on the basis of a poster.
But Hammer had to absorb the cost of a Guy Endore novel,
Werewolf of Paris.
With no money left,
Tony Hinds became a writer out of necessity.
- And all I know is I was landed with a set
of Spanish sets.
- British census objected to everything.
Violent conception of the werewolf child,
his sacrilegious birth on Christmas day.
Even a nobleman picking a scab from his nose.
Hammer argued that the film was less graphic
than Hitchcock's Psycho.
The censor replied, "Terrence Fisher is not
"Alfred Hitchcock."
- Oliver Reed was one of the many
who got early breaks with Hammer.
Including Lesley-Anne Down, Donald Sutherland,
and Freddie Jones.
Recurring character actors like Michael Ripper,
Richard Wordsworth, George Woodbridge,
and Miles Malleson, gave the films the cozy feel
of a Rhett company.
- The quality of acting in those pictures was way
above what you would usually get in that kind of film.
People realized that good actors could indeed
find elements in these characters that really
brought out some of the drama.
- Professional frustration caused
Michael Carreras to leave in 1961.
- I mean, I went off and did my thing for a couple
of years.
I did a musical, which I always wanted to do.
I made a western, which, things I would have
never been able to do at Hammer.
- Executive chores fell to Tony Hinds
who handed the producer's reins
to Tony Nelson-Keys and later, Aida Young,
one of the first female producers in England.
- I don't think Aida was as dedicated as we were.
She, um, rightly so, in a way,
her idea was just to get the film through.
- Everybody who worked for Hammer loved
what they were doing.
We didn't have enormous budgets.
We worked very long hours, in very cramped facilities.
It was only a big old house,
and we did remarkable things.
If you look at the old films, the old horror films,
that were made in that old house,
it's quite remarkable.
You'd think we'd shot it at MGM or Pinewood.
- It was Tony Hinds' unpleasant duty
to keep costs down.
Jack Asher's pain staking photography took time.
Time was money.
Other cameramen like Michael Reed and Arthur Grant
became regulars.
Budgets were stretched to the limit.
- I said, "There's one way you can make them.
"You can make them back to back."
That is if to say we do a picture,
same cast, same sets, and do two pictures.
- I remember seeing Rasputin the Mad Monk
and The Reptile and they were all shot
on the same sets and Dracula Prince of Darkness
and Plague of the Zombies were all shot
on the same sets.
So, it was sort of like watching the same picture twice.
- I think it's probably the best thing
Christopher Lee's ever done.
Rasputin was supposed to have had this ability
to hypnotize people.
Well, Chris practically developed that ability.
It was an incredible performance.
- Tomorrow you are taking the little czar
to the frozen river.
While you are there,
you will see to it that he meets with an accident.
He will be hurt,
and you will send for me.
You will go away
and destroy yourself.
- Gregory, no!
- Two weeks into the shooting of my Rasputin,
Tony Hinds came to me and said,
"Don, we're in trouble, we've got to save money."
"Now, we've worked out possible savings.
"There's this way of doing it,
"and this way, and this way.
"Each of those would save 25,000.
"Look at these suggestions, take 'em home,
"think about them over the weekend,
"but on Monday morning, I want a decision from you."
But this was the marvelous thing:
he left it to me to decide
which would do the least damage in telling the story.
He left it to me to say,
"Alright, we can keep that sequence but
"we don't have to build that separate.
"I can put it into a set we've already used."
- Cary Grant suggested he'd like
to try a horror picture so Tony Hinds reworked
Phantom of the Opera,
but Grant dropped out.
The role was played by Herbert Lom.
- Young woman.
You must come with me.
- More than in any other film,
Terry Fisher emphasized the romance and sadness
in the story.
Because the script was written for Cary Grant,
the dirty business was left to a homicidal dwarf.
The distributor publicized the film widely
as a horror story.
- But as anyone knows who has read the
Gaston Leroux novel, or seen the
Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, it is a tragic romance.
Missing the point, Time Magazine called the Phantom
about as dangerous as dear old grand dad
dressed up for Halloween.
- Christine!
- The distributor blamed the failure
on Terrence Fisher who did not direct
for Hammer for two years.
The all new climax for Brides of Dracula
was revamped, too, if you'll pardon the expression,
by Tony Hinds in Kiss of a Vampire.
Director Don Sharp proved as adept at gothic eroticism
as savant Fisher, even more so than in Dracula,
vampirism is linked to sexual appetites.
- I don't think anybody could replace Tony Hinds
with that same understanding of the basic plots
that would adapt to the genre.
I don't think anybody else had the same sympathy.
The same feeling for quality.
- Richard Matheson, author of
The Incredible Shrinking Man, adapted his novel,
I Am Legend, but the script proved too intense
for the census.
Hammer sold it to Robert Lippert,
who shot it in Italy with Vincent Price
as Last Man on Earth.
- But Matheson also adapted a classic
Dennis Wheatley novel, retitled by American distributors.
They worried that audiences would assume
the Devil Rides Out to be a cowboy movie.
- The premise is what makes it work.
You don't get any idea and then say, "Well I'm gonna
"turn this into a scary picture."
The premise has to be frightening to begin with.
- Rex.
Do you believe in evil?
- As an idea.
- Do you believe in the power of darkness?
- As a superstition.
- Now there you are wrong.
The power of darkness is more than
just a superstition.
It is a living force,
which can be tapped at any given moment of the night.
- I remember Tony Hinds ringing me
and saying, "Jimmy, you've got to do a very good
"job on this because I don't think it's working."
And he was quite wrong in his judgment, wasn't he?
- The lights.
- Now what about the lights?
- They seem to be dimmer.
Terry Fisher was back as director,
and whenever he gave me a close up,
I'd make a point of walking up to him
and slipping a fiver into his hand.
The crew really believed I'd bribed him
for a close up every time we did it.
- I felt kind of guilty because I,
I spoke ill of that picture
for quite a while.
Mostly because it seemed to me it had been miscast
and that several of the special effects were very
cheap looking.
- But any movie that dealt with the fantastic, okay,
it all automatically got a,
I forgave anything, right?
Any single thing that went wrong with it.
- As I watch it again, I overlook those things,
and it had some very good stuff in it,
and Christopher Lee was wonderful,
as Charles Gray wast, too.
- That light in the hall.
- Peggy.
No!
- No.
- Let me go!
No!
- I tell you, it's not Peggy.
- Peggy!
- In 1968, Hammer Films received
the Queens Award for Industry for bringing two and
a half million pounds into Britain for three
consecutive years.
- They weren't given the Queens Award for Industry,
whatever, for nothing.
I mean, they were really making a dent in
the American market in a way that I don't think
anybody has made since.
- The creators of the Avengers brought Hammer
a movie idea inspired by a lunch time joke.
- Brian Clemens was sitting there,
and Brian sat there and said, "I know what happens.
"He mixes up the potion, he drinks it,
"and he turns into a woman."
We all fell about laughing.
It was a very funny idea, but, he wasn't laughing.
He went home and he wrote the script.
- Ralph Bates played one of the title roles,
but the company had some difficulty coming up
with Dr. Jekyll's better half.
- There was some talk about me playing Sister Hyde.
It was considered for Dr. Jekyll.
Then a very fine actress went on to play.
There was quite a bit of nudity and I wasn't, uh,
that keen on that.
- David Booth, I think was the the one that said,
"Oh, Martine.
"It's perfect, you've come at the absolute perfect time."
And they said, "They've got the guy, and they really,
"and it's Hammer."
And I said, "Michael Carreras?"
He said, "Yes."
And I read the script and I realized that they
had some nudity and I said, "Okay, fine, top,
"but not full nudity."
I agreed to do that because I thought it
was an important change, and in fact I still think it's
probably one of the best scenes in the film.
- But of course once you saw the two of them
together it was a brilliant piece of casting.
And she did it very well, too.
- But unfortunately, he was pressured.
I think everybody was pressured, including Hammer,
was being pressured, into going into more nudity
and more nudity, you know, to compete with
what was going on.
And, um, they decided to go even further
to full frontal nudity.
When I got on the set and I said,
"I did not agree to that."
So we had a bit of a corporator.
However, I used all of that sort of nervousness
and that sort of rage and anger and stuff
to birth myself, really.
I mean, when I am there, I don't know anything
about my anatomy.
It is I who exists, Dr, Jekyll.
Not you.
It is I who will be rid of you.
Rid of you!
An interesting idea, the male into the female,
and oh, this could be so great.
They could have taken it so much further.
- It's Hyde, isn't it?
How is your brother?
- He hasn't been himself of late.
- Years later when I saw Roy Ward Baker,
he said to me,
"Martine, I wish we had really gone into the male/female."
- And that they did do.
As the 1970s progressed, the new formula became
a little more blood, and a lot more flesh.
Victorian costumes lent themselves to fascinating visuals.
As early as 1959, Hammer added nudity
in The Man Who Could Cheat Death.
- Which is a remake of the Man in Half Moon Street.
Anton Diffring was one of the premiere actors
of the Berlin theater.
- I've been taking this fluid every six hours now.
- It's madness.
- It is what keeps me alive.
- It was very necessary, it was in very good taste.
But England at that time would have no nudity.
So there was a version which they paid me extra for
for Europe, and it was very beautifully done.
- It was beautifully done exploitation.
- I think camera films were exploitation films.
I mean exploitation films basically are
films that are designed to exploit the advertising
a particularly sensational aspect and if you ever
look at the British ads for Hammer films,
they are incredibly tasteless.
I mean, they really make the pictures look like
AIP pictures from the 50s.
It was the American ads that tend to be models
of restraint, actually, in comparison.
- A keystone of having an international appeal
were the lovely ladies they used on screen.
- Because I want to see you die.
- Unlike actors, actresses were often
used as window dressing,
rarely appearing in more than two or three films
for the company.
- I'd been doing a poster for an English campaign
called Lamb's Navy rum, and apparently
he used to see this big hoarding,
or this big poster everyday.
Supposedly he said, "Find that girl and bring her in."
And then I was put onto contract for a year,
which is wonderful.
But no, no duties, no official duties.
- I had a photograph on the front page
of one of the tabloid papers in England one Sunday
and Jimmy Carreras saw it and said,
"I'd like that girl for the next Hammer film."
He would take care of you, he was a fatherly type figure.
And he had everyone's respect.
- Outside producers approached Hammer
with a Victorian ghost story by Sheridan Le Fanu.
- Harry Fine and Michael Style came to me
and asked me to do it.
But they were reading into it a great deal of lesbianism,
which I don't think Sheridan Le Fanu would have ever
sort of dreamed of, and neither did I, incidentally.
It was the old story, a hundred of number of
pictures have been made.
What on Earth can we do next with vampires?
"I know, we'll make 'em lesbians."
Brilliant.
- It's very funny actually, because I walked onto
the set the first day of my shooting.
Peter Cushing was in the process of decapitating me.
I don't know, it made me swallow.
It was quite funny when he stabbed her
and pulled her up and slashed her head off
and held this head up high.
And I thought, "Oh, that's me."
And I remember showing the photograph of it
to my mother and she laughed and I thought,
"Funny, mother."
The fangs kept falling out
and they kept falling into Kate O'Mara's cleavage
and the crew wanted to help retrieve them.
- And it's easy to make lunatics or vicars
or indeed, lesbians, or homosexuals of various kinds,
to make those figures look fun.
- You must die.
Everybody must die!
- To me, that is fatal.
I think that's, well, it's downright rude and vulgar
apart from anything else.
- Co-production funds came from Hammer's
opposite number in Hollywood,
American International Pictures.
- I had a certain amount of criticism while I was making it.
That it wasn't going to be juicy enough, you know,
and all that.
- Ingrid Pitt proved as enticing to co-star
Ferdy Mayne as to the camera.
- I met her in a picture called Where Eagles Dare.
I won't forget that one.
She used rather provocative language
in between takes.
And it was rather delicious to be bitten by her.
You know, we knew each other.
We'd met and worked there together
and she said, "Oh yes, I remember you.
"You played a small part, didn't you?"
When she became very pleasant and rather sexy,
I accepted this as a full turn of character.
It wasn't so small anyway.
- In the Vampire Lovers film,
somebody throws a dagger.
And the dagger goes straight through her,
and she just disappears.
It's a romantic view.
An essential element in horror pictures,
which has been almost, well now totally lost.
- Even before the film was finished,
an ill-fated sequel began on the same sets.
- And we start with a title.
We think to ourselves, "What's a good title?'
And we think To Love a Vampire.
And so then we make a poster.
And with this poster, I go around and see
these distributors and say to them,
"How would you like to have a picture called
"To Love a Vampire?"
And they say, "Wonderful, when can I have it?"
So I say, "Well perhaps we can deliver it
"in about six months' time."
And I say you "You wanna see a script?"
or, "Do you wanna know who's in it?"
And they say, "No, don't bother.
"This is a Hammer film and we know it'll be alright."
- Yutte Stensgaard replaced Ingrid Pitt
as Carmilla.
Peter Cushing dropped out because of illness with his wife.
He was replaced by Ralph Bates.
Terry Fisher was scheduled to direct.
- And Terry got sick and in about within
two or three weeks of starting shooting,
and they asked me would I like to do it.
And I said yes.
I did it without much muscle.
I hated the movie, hated it.
- I spent the whole of last night
going through Giles' researches.
And believe me, they are powerful evidence.
- Evidence?
Of what?
- That you are a vampire.
- You say that
and tell me you love me?
- Prove to me that you're not.
Love me.
♪ Strange love
- I hadn't even seen the first cut,
and I remember I go down to the seat
and they have some love song in it.
It was really quit embarrassing.
I mean really, incredibly embarrassing, actually.
I mean, maybe fortunately nobody in the audience
knew who I was, but I still went under the seat.
I curled up, I died.
♪ Strange love
- I hope to become known as an extremely good actress.
And I hope to get an article sometime.
- With Yutte Stensgaard, I don't mean
to demean her talent any way, I think she's
very talented and did a lovely job.
Her claim to fame was a toothpaste commercial,
and, uh, very well endowed and also, which helped, I'm sure.
- Doubly endowed were Mary and Madeleine Collinson,
Playboy's first twin centerfolds,
stars of the third spin off directed by John Hough.
- The Devil has sent me twins of evil.
- The Carmilla character was reduced
to a bit part.
- They kept doing the same things to death.
I mean, it was like a big thrill to have
a lesbian vampire movie which it turned out to not
be something the people particularly wanted to see anyway.
- Sometimes the sex was worse than arbitrary.
So James insisted that Terry Fisher shoot
a rape scene in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
for the United States version.
- That was a big disappointment to me,
and it was to Peter as well.
We talked about that a lot.
We were not very comfortable about it because
we'd almost completed the whole film.
There was no reason.
I had no reaction to Frankenstein
as if he'd raped me, even though the scene was put in
the film much earlier.
That was a very difficult thing for me to do.
And it was difficult for Terry, too.
He was very sensitive about it and,
in the end he just said, "Enough is enough."
And he cut the cameras.
He just didn't want to continue.
- Ironically, it was later cut as unnecessary.
- Doctor, you'll perform an autopsy.
- On a body that's turned to stone?
- Why'd you want you want Paul out of the way, Namaroff?
Is it because you're afraid he'll take
Carla away from you?
Or is it because you think he'll find out
about the secret that you share with Ratoff?
- Yes.
- Do you realize that you get uglier
each time you get old?
And you can't go on killing forever.
- Why not?
- Female scenes never found the audience
of the male monsters.
Actresses fared better with the non fantasy thrillers.
Susan Strasberg in Taste of Fear.
- Father?
- I'm going to give you a sedative, young lady,
and in the morning when you wake up,
everything will be alright.
- But don't you understand what I'm trying to say?
My father is dead, his body's in the summer house.
- Tallulah Bankhead in Fanatic.
- You must die.
Die, my love.
- Bette Davis in The Nanny.
- You mustn't make it difficult for nanny, Master Joey.
- Working again with Kenny Hyman,
Michael Carreras found an interesting mix
of fantasy and flesh.
- And also it wasn't that much more expensive.
I mean, we went on location which was the great thing.
With She we went to Israel.
With One Million Years we went to the Canary Islands.
- They didn't like to have too large an orchestra.
I think the biggest I ever had might have
been possibly for She.
Michael Carreras might have let us have up to 40.
I think She had 50 minutes, which was a hell
of a lot of music.
- Now, H. Rider Haggard's overpowering
adventure classic, She, comes to the motion
picture screen.
- I thought it was boring, I must tell you simply again
because it's all very well to say
"Okay, let's do a remake."
But when you look at the original,
and it's so marvelous, and it's got scenes
of thousands of people,
and they give you four pence to do it,
I mean the color then shows up all the imperfections.
I mean, I'm not saying that Ursula Andress
is an imperfection.
She is a delight, and delicious.
But you couldn't make the film.
I mean, I kept referring to the old film and everything
we shot looked like a poor imitation.
I mean, we were the poor relatives.
Yes, color.
But we couldn't make the film.
I thought we tried to do too much
for too little money.
- We must stop this.
- How far do you think we'd get in?
- Don't forget, sir, they were gonna take
a knife and talk to Mr. Lear.
- The first time I filmed that I remember
there was a double bill that played at the
little theater in Bar, and the poster for that
featured both Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress,
both in the state of semi undress,
and I would have been 15 or 16 years old,
and it was an unmissable double bill.
Two films for the price of one.
- I was called on the telephone by Dick Zanick,
who head of the studio then.
He said, "We've got this fabulous project
"for you Raquel.
"It's called One Million Years B.C.
"and it's a remake of a Victor Mature, Carole Landis movie
and I said,
"Oh my god, not a dinosaur movie.
"Man, I'll never live this one down."
I figured, well Steve McQueen got away with The Blob,
you know, maybe I can get away with One Million Years B.C.
You know, nobody will remember this thing.
I can shove it under the carpet, you know?
But, uh,
people remembered it.
For the kind of films that Hammer makes,
I thought that they always do a very good job.
They have a certain budget, and they have a certain
look they're trying to achieve.
It's not Gone With the Wind.
It's not a David Lee movie.
Relatively speaking, I thought it was a pretty
well done movie.
Ray Harryhausen who was a kind of genius of sorts
to do all of these special effects
and his frame by frame photography and it was
all explained to me, you know, in great detail.
- So I took on the project with the Hammer company
in London.
It was a pleasure to get back to dinosaurs again.
They were my first love.
- The man was a genius.
The frightening thing of course is that when
you're looking at the rushes after a few days work,
you go into the theater the next day,
you've got six frames, you know.
It's better to hold them up to the light
'cause otherwise, they've gone through so quickly.
- Carl Toms really made the most of this little
doe skinned number that I was supposed to wear,
so this costume got smaller and smaller
as the production went on,
and I felt a little self conscious with this
very brief thing on all the time.
Alternately, I would try to
sort of strut my stuff to make the most of it
because I figured, obviously this is why they've
cast me in this movie.
Not for my acting ability, because I have no lines.
- I think if cave women in the early days looked
like Raquel Welch, well we've regressed considerably today.
- When you were doing it, it just seemed
so ridiculously silly.
I felt like a fool.
- Jamaican born Martine Beswick writhed her way through
her portrayal of the naughty Neanderthal.
- What was happening was Raquel had this lovely,
everything was like perfect,
and mine looked like a rag, you know?
So I was a bit jealous.
And she had more makeup and she had eyelashes,
and I had to go like a pig woman.
- And then you have this big girl fight in the middle.
The queen of the Shell people and the queen
of the Rock people had to have a girl fight,
and we had to do Destry Rides Again in the caves
of Tenerife.
The whole thing was kind of like a dance.
Martine and I worked out this whole routine together.
I just loved to do the action stuff.
I should have been a boy.
- That got on really well with everybody,
particularly John Richardson.
We didn't actually marry, but we were, for a long time,
we were together for a long time.
- My leading man was like to die over.
He was probably, when I first saw him,
one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen in my life.
I was like dumbstruck.
I thought, "Man, look at this guy."
I mean, those blue, I mean that fa--
I mean, he's the pretty one.
I look butch next to him.
- We often wonder whether the attraction
of Miss Welch or the dinosaurs were the important thing
in the picture.
- It started me off.
So, I guess Dick Zanick was right, you know?
- We had some set standing from One Million Years B.C.
The idea came on to make a quickie.
- And he said, "Martine, I've got something."
He said, "I want you to be my queen."
I said, "Oh?
"Alright darling, what?"
"Well I want to do this film called..."
- Slave Women of the White Rhino,
I mean what else can I say?
- You've got to be kidding.
Why did you come?
- I can only believe the fates brought me here.
- And they brought you to me.
And all the little blondies had these,
they just came right out acting school,
and everybody had these like really English
voices like this, and it was hysterical.
I am queen here.
I will not be denied.
Bosco Holder, Jeffrey Holder's brother,
and he did all of the dance scenes.
I sort of let loose after he choreographed it.
I thought, "Listen, this is my vehicle.
"I get to have eyelashes in this one
"and I get to have my costume fit.
"I am going to make this work
"no matter what he says."
- We made a huge mistake on that film
because we really should have had those wonderful
cartoon biff, bang, ouch.
It should have been done like that.
- Who are you?
- I mean those films did well.
But as a mainstay, they didn't have the running power
of the gothic horrors.
- International beauty Carita,
and a thousand other sights of savagery
and splendor are yours to behold.
The Viking Queen.
- Olinka Berova, a new star.
Remember the name, you'll not forget the woman.
- Val Guest directed the third saga
created in Sir James' typical manner.
- Do me a picture with dinosaurs,
and then there was a dinosaur with a girl in his mouth,
and they did this enormous, great poster,
with sex and bikinis.
And Jimmy said, "Fine.
"Okay."
So he sent that to America and said,
"What about a picture?
"Here's the poster."
And they set up the picture on the poster.
- The dinosaurs were created
by American Jim Danforth, unusual its past budget.
- He was a brilliant little guy because he used
to work out all those monsters with little
human traits to them, which I have never seen done before.
- Sir James came first with
producer Aida Young and Brian Lawrence
later would head the company with accountant
Roy Scaves.
- Wonderful.
They've got very good face.
Isn't it exciting to find someone new?
- It'd be exciting if you could find
somebody that looks like this.
I agree.
- She had to have a special kind of magnetism.
I can't describe it, but I'll know it when I see it.
And Victoria Vetri has it, I'm sure.
- That was a fait accompli yes, that came over.
She had been a centerfold in Playboy or something
and whoever was doing it, I don't know who the picture
was done for over there, it was AIP
or whoever it was.
Was it Warners?
Warners said, "Well give us some glamor that we know."
- Although there is a more final judge than me,
and that's the audience when they see Victoria Vetri
for the first time.
- But lightening didn't strike twice.
The distributor didn't push the film widely,
nor did audiences take Victoria Vetri to heart
as they did Raquel Welch.
Danforth received an Oscar nomination for their effects,
but lost to the Disney musical,
Bed Knobs and Broomsticks.
- When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.
- Cost cutting on Creatures the World Forgot
meant no dinosaurs, no dialogue, and no clothes whatsoever.
Hammer was now imitating its own films.
Unfortunately, so were a lot of other people.
- It's over?
- Yes, son.
It's all over.
As early as 1958, Eros films mimicked
the Quatermass style with a Trollenberg terror.
- Where there are mountains, there are always clouds.
- But this one remains static on the side
of the Trollenberg, it never moves.
- Freak of nature.
- A radioactive freak of nature?
- They also produced a technicolor chiller
with a script credited to Jimmy "Frankenstein" Sangster.
- It's sickening, isn't it?
- No longer could there be this indirection and
not showing things and people, you know,
describing things that had happened,
as opposed to seeing them.
The pictures were very graphic.
- Made in Hollywood by Herman Cohen
within months of Curse of Frankenstein,
this film reverted at the doctor's ancestral home
in England, creates in his lab,
or even stints of the address, 113 Wardour Street
West One, London.
- Well that's because Herman Cohen's office
was on Wardour Street.
In the same building as the Hammer Films office.
- But not all imitations were cheaply done.
Roman Polanksi made dunce of the vampires, also known
as the Fearless Vampire Killers,
spoofing Brides of Dracula and Kiss of the Vampire.
- You.
- Christopher I don't think ever forgave me.
He said, "How dare you?
"How dare you make a funny character out of the serious?
"Something that should be interpreted seriously,
as he's done it, of course.
- Nevertheless, Frankenstein and Count Dracula
himself returned in this musical.
- Real monsters, I've seen 'em all in the movies.
You've got Frankenstein's monster,
you've got Egor
and on the table is this beautiful chick,
long blonde hair goin', "Hey sweet cakes,
"how are ya?"
You got Frankenstein.
- Ah ha.
We have a visitor.
- And you also got the vampire.
- Won't you join our little party?
♪ You'll get the feeling, you'll lose your mind ♪
♪ Feeling make you holler one more time ♪
♪ You go oh, oh, oh
♪ The feelin' hits ya
- A funny one?
My god, he had no reason to criticize me.
Bring him up now and say, "I can see you."
- Hammer's use of color and period decor
beget the Edgar Allan Poe films in Hollywood,
directed by Roger Corman.
Hazel Court became a familiar sight
in these American international pictures.
- Your hands are so cold.
Well I don't think there's really any difference.
You just have better facilities here instead of a house,
you know, that leaks.
- We often found ourselves employed
by the competitors, like the partnership
of Rosenberg and Subotsky,
which was actually Frankenstein to Hammer
back in 1956.
- During the 60s, there were a lot of imitators of Hammer.
Amicus pictures looked virtually the same,
had identical casts, and I think the studio
started losing its identity a little bit.
- It's alive.
In someone on this train.
- You're a very good detective.
You've discovered everything except who is now the host.
- That's our next step.
- I thought this might come in handy.
- Oh, good idea.
- The two of you together?
That's fine.
But what if one of you is the monster?
- Monster?
We're British, you know.
- Hollywood began spending millions on films
we'd done for really nothing.
Great stars, elaborate effects.
And on the low budget end,
violence we'd used as punctuation
became the raison d'etre.
Nothing succeeds like excess.
The face of Hammer changed.
Tired of making quality films on diminishing budgets,
Tony Hinds retired at 46,
though he continued to write scripts.
- I think they went wrong when Tony Hinds left.
Other producers took over,
but, they were copies.
They didn't have that original inspiration that he had.
To me, Tony Hinds, was Hammer.
- So James used all his sales ability
to lure his son back to the foe.
- Money, I mean I needed that.
You know, I cleared my brain,
and came back and got on with the job.
- Inside Michael was another kind of producer
trying to get out, and I think Michael had
a lot more ambition for Hammer produce
and wanted to go very much further.
- We had a period of very good thrillers,
of which Jimmy wrote, Jimmy Sangster wrote many of the very
good ones.
- Auntie, dear.
My sister's insane.
- Go away!
Don't come near me!
I'm like Simon!
I'm mad, I'm insane!
- Diaboliques.
I remember seeing that at first.
I didn't know what, my wife was highly pregnant
when we saw that, and I thought we'd nearly
lost the baby there, she was so frightened.
I thought, "I'd love to do a movie like that."
- Simon belongs to me.
No one shall have him
- If an audience thinks about Jimmy's script,
then you're dead, but Jimmy used to get them
rattling along at such a pace that the audience
didn't have time to think about them.
- Diaboliques.
I'm trying to remember the English title.
The Devils, it was called, wasn't it?
It was, it was.
I must have written that about four times, I think,
Diaboliques.
- So we had to do something else.
You couldn't just go on churning out.
I think it total, if I'm not mistaken,
we did 36 gothic horrors anyhow, so, you know,
what more could you want?
- When Mike took over Hammer,
he had Jimmy breathing down his neck saying,
"Oh you're an idiot.
"You can't do this."
So he was fighting that.
- I've never come across anything like that before.
Leave him!
- The sea.
You will see torture pits for forbidden lovers.
Barbaric sacrifice.
- No!
- Out on the starboard side!
- A living hell that time forgot
on The Lost Continent.
- Michael Carreras arranged a co-production
with the Run Run Shaw Studio in Hong Kong.
- It seemed to me that if we were going to go back
and make another Dracula type,
that we really ought to find a new way of telling the tale.
So, the Shaws, who I've always admired anyhow
in their attitude to film making,
it seemed to me a natural marriage.
- The idea of going to Hong Kong to make a picture
of course was,
wonderful, if you'd never been to Hong Kong.
The difficulties were absolutely enormous,
but I think the combination of trying to put
kung fu with straight forward power didn't work,
or at least we didn't have a script that made it work.
- Because it was kind of a cynical exercise in exploitation
of that market interest, as were most Hammer films, really.
But the result was absolutely brilliant, in my view.
It was, again, extremely intense,
wonderfully shot, and the zombies in that film were,
at the time, were the best zombies ever captured on film.
- Christopher declined this final indignity.
Instead, the Count was played by John Forbes-Robertson.
At least I had the honor of driving one final
wooden stake.
- As the seven brothers and their one sister
meet Dracula.
- If you're looking for trouble, you're staring it
right in the face.
- Shatter, you're marked.
You're waiting on the other side.
- The idea came on to make a quickie.
That was my idea, you know, shot on the streets.
A police type drama.
It wasn't at the peak of the kung fu.
It was a bit late.
Probably we were too late again.
But I think it's something else that didn't work.
I'm not saying that it necessarily makes for
a better picture to have those ingredients,
'cause you're fighting the believability factor
all the time.
The representatives of the major American companies,
they should have said, "This is no good."
But what they said instead was,
"If you can make it cheaper,
"or if you can show a little more of this,
"that, or the other, we'll do it."
And I think they misled us in a way.
- I think that had a lot to do with
the downfall of Hammer.
They lowered their standards,
because they had a, they had their own,
venue, their own way of doing things.
And then suddenly, because everybody was doing
nudity and because it was attracting more,
well it's happening again right now.
The same thing's happening now.
- I think they knew pretty much what
they could get away with so that when
the films were submitted for censorship,
they knew what they could get away with,
but definitely that was a ploy that they would use
to leave something in that they knew they
could take it out later without ruining the story.
But we wanted to keep on his good side socially.
You knew you had a problem picture coming up,
we took him to get him a good lunch,
Leison Best is one of the big restaurants
in town used by the film people.
- Knighted and respected, Sir James wished
to retire and sell off the company.
Michael wanted to keep it in family hands.
- I think Jimmy was bought out for a while,
though Mike got controlling interest.
- Our horror stories by that time were passe.
I mean, they were children's stuff.
You get into the chainsaw massacres and what have you.
I suppose I wasn't in tune.
I have to take the blame for this, I was in charge.
- And Mike swears that Jimmy went 'round the industry
and said, "Don't help my son."
That's Mike's end of it.
Jimmy on the other hand, I wouldn't put anything past him.
Jimmy got on with that wide eyed face and say,
"I wish him all the luck in the world."
- Everything
is born, it flowers, and then it fades away,
and eventually it dies.
- The Hammer period was like the last gasp of
world cinema.
- I think a moment came to an end.
Sir James left, retired.
I think the moment came to an end, you know.
There was a time, and then there wasn't a time.
- And as it happened, the horror thing
can't go on forever.
Sadly, some of the other streams that I tried to instill
into the company's product line just didn't work.
- I thought Vampire Circus was one of the best
Hammer horror movies of the whole lot.
I thought Robert Young did a marvelous job.
And there were some fantastic scenes where
the humans transformed into animals and animals
transformed back into humans.
It was all a very, very sexy film.
There was lots of sex in it.
I still think it was one of the very, very best
of the Hammer movies.
I played the circus strongman.
I went through the entire film.
So it was a really good part for me.
- No, it was none of the old gang.
We saw this disintegration happening
and we were rather sad for it.
Because the people who were concerned with Hammer,
really, other than Mike, were no longer around him.
- The novelty of color was now standard,
even on television.
Concepts often seemed strained.
- It is common to suppose that the vampire attacks
in only one way: by biting the neck and draining
the victim of blood.
The girls you spoke of,
they were not drained of blood, but youth.
Of life itself.
- But they wanted,
they wanted it to appear nude.
So we kind of came to a compromise,
in so far as my hair was a lot longer in those days,
and uh, and so that covered my upper chest.
- When we were making that picture,
I didn't realize that she didn't want
to show any of her top.
But it's become very apparent when you see the movie,
that she didn't show anything.
- And I think I actually used
some sort of gaffer tape or something to stick it down,
so I felt quite secure in that sense.
And then a pair of flesh color knickers, briefs,
and I was alright.
I was all set, so it was like being on the beach, really.
- Captain Kronos, in fact, I just watched Kronos today.
I was amazed that the fight in the cemetery
was all done on the back lot at Elstree which
was not a big back lot.
It had houses pretty much all the way around,
but Captain Kronos, where the cemetery was shot,
was a small little hill.
And when you look at the show, it's just like up
the hill and down the hill because
the camera angles, as if it was filmed any differently,
would have had houses eventually within 25 yards
of that place.
- Her life will be yours.
Yours.
Her youth will pulse through your veins, my darling.
Replenishing, restoring, take her.
- To death.
Yes.
You bleed, my lord.
This is God's blade.
Forged for your black heart.
- A lack of audience response killed
Captain Kronos as a potential series.
- Possibly it was too romantic.
Maybe it was either ahead of its time, or,
you know, the other way.
Maybe it was kind of lost in time.
I'm not too sure.
The timing was wrong, anyway, I think.
- Hammer flowed with the tide of television
by adapting a BBC serial.
- And On the Buses is one of my least favorite films,
and I don't know anyone who would put that high
on their list.
Interestingly, it is without doubt,
the most successful commercially of all the Hammer films,
and still generates a royalty income for the company today.
- Hammer's last horror picture, so far,
was made in 1975.
- 98% of so-called Satanists are nothing but
pathetic freaks
who get their kicks out of dancing naked
in freezing church yards.
I have a feeling I'm dealing with the
other two percent.
- Richard Widmark challenges Christopher Lee
for the soul of a girl named Catherine.
- They got Catherine.
And we've got to get her back before it's too late.
- By then the so-called low budgets
net a half million pounds:
over a million dollars.
Hedging their bets, Hammer brought in
German Co financing, and an American star,
Richard Widmark.
Appropriately, Christopher Lee was the heavy.
- When this ceremony has been performed,
I shall destroy you, John Varney.
- The demons hate you, Rayner, they're waiting for you.
- Catherine.
Catherine.
- You are warned.
- It's me.
Don't!
Damn you!
- The nude permissiveness
extended to a nude photograph of
teenage Nastassja Kinski in the press book.
- Hammer's last theatrical venture
was made in 1979.
- The Lady Vanishes.
- Michael Carreras planned a
new version of the thriller by Hitchcock himself.
- He was a journalist.
She was a mad cap American heiress.
Miss Froy was an English nanny.
- I'm talking about the lady who's sitting right there.
- There has been no English lady here.
- There's a woman missing on this train.
I saw her.
And now people keep saying she was never there.
You saw her, I know you did.
- Ultimately, it was a Hammer film
in name only.
The dirty business was left to Phantom of the Opera's,
Herbert Lom.
- You're asking me to remove the bandages?
- No, no, not the whole business.
Just enough so we can get one teeny, tiny peak.
Just so we can see the face.
- But there is no face.
Nobody believes you now.
Nobody will believe you later.
- The Lady Vanishes received scant distribution,
a Loch Ness movie drowned in a sea of delay.
- Michael Carreras left in 1979.
Royce Keggs helmed the company through the
dungeons of the British film industry by producing
two TV suspense series.
- Bastard, bastard, bastard.
- He makes such a noise when anything unusual happens.
- Will you let me out?
Now?
- Oh no.
Not until you are trained.
Now please, we're not trying to thwart my plans.
If you cause me to close this hatch,
nobody will hear you.
Ever.
- The pictures that I worked on over there
were Hammer pictures, and they ended up in the space
of ten years.
So that's how important they were.
They provided so many jobs.
Now, if Hammer wasn't around, a lot of people wouldn't
have been in the business.
You know, and that's from art directors,
all the way through.
- I get asked time and time again in letters
and in interviews and things,
"When is Hammer gonna return?"
Or, "Will Hammer return?"
- It's a shame.
I think someone should really pick up the torch
and run with it.
- Now Hammer has contracted to make
horror, suspense, and science fiction films
with name stars and top creative talent.
- Hammer's changed hands a couple of times
over the last 10 years.
The new Hammer obviously has to move into
the 21st century with new techniques and new stories
and so on, appealing to contemporary audiences,
and that's what they plan to do.
But always with a respectful nod backward
to what the company has always represented.
Quality film making.
Once in a while, maybe some gothic horrors.
- Entertainment technology has changed radically
since the 1950s, yet Hammer thrives in this
new incarnation, inspiring a nostalgic cult
that reaches around the world.
- They've often said, "We grew up with you.
"You are part of the family.
"We'd go on a Saturday and see these horror films
"and scream and yell,
"so we've always considered you a part of us."
Which is wonderful.
- Fan periodicals, like Little Shoppe of Horrors
published by Richard Klemensen, savored the films
like fine old wines.
- Top professional tip their hats to Bray.
- Gremlins fashioned its climax
on the end of Hammer's original Dracula.
Director Joe Dante cast Christopher Lee himself
in Gremlins 2.
- He said, "But you have to remember, Christopher,
"that I and all my peers, and all my colleagues,"
and there's a great many of them.
Martin Scorsese, Brandon Palmer, John Landis,
Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante,
and many, many, many other who don't come
to mind at the moment, he said,
"We were brought up on your films
"when we were teenagers and young men.
"We were brought up on your films.
"We liked them, we loved them."
And I'm naturally very grateful for that.
It means that don't forget.
- I'm not giving you bullshit.
They were made by people who cared.
- While we were doing them, we were dedicated to them.
- As a matter of fact, as it were done,
it couldn't have been better.
- Those films will last forever.
- Mocked and vilified in their time,
these films are now revered in places
like the British Film Institute as classics
of their era, and the world has finally come 'round
to know what we've really known all along:
anything made by Hammer is the best.
- Quite ironic, it's got to be anything.
And here it is.
You know, they're showing them at the
Museum of Contemporary Art and the Lincoln Center,
all those horror films.
- It's in our blood.
Film is in our blood.
- Fun days.
- Hammer was one of the happiest studios I've ever
worked in in my life.
And it was a family.
- These motion pictures created an
insular fantasy world with fiery images of love
and innocence, of dark sexuality,
and hideous death.
- We who created that world
have a touch of immortality through them.
And you who share that world over the years
can revisit it as you would recall
a favorite fairy tale.
Secure that in the end, good will always triumph
over evil.
- That is, until the next sequel.