Swedish vampires! What won’t they think of next? Actually, though it sounds weird the first time you hear it, it’s no stranger than putting vampires in New York or the Louisiana bayou; at least Scandinavia is part of Europe, where the folklore of nosferatu-like vampires originated. Besides that, if there’s one horror subgenre that could […]
Oh, how I’m going to hell for that post title. The final vampire picture produced by Hammer Film Productions saw the studio going out with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a comic SPROING!!! noise. At least that is the sound it makes in my head, because wow is The Legend of the 7 […]
Oh yes; Hammer Film Productions was dead, it was just a matter of everybody finally agreeing to stop humping the corpse (after 1974, a grand total of two films were released by the company: To the Devil… a Daughter in 1976, and a remake of The Lady Vanishes in 1979). I can think of no […]
The release of Hammer’s seventh film in their increasingly-discontinuous Dracula series was preceded by two big pieces of news, one of them exciting. That was the announcement that for the first time in fourteen years, Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula would be set against his greatest opponent of all, Peter Cushing’s Professor Van Helsing. The other […]
By custom, fans of Hammer Film Productions in general, and of the Hammer Dracula cycle in particular, tend to regard Scars of Dracula as an exceptionally bad motion picture. I’m not completely certain that I agree with that. Not that Scars of Dracula is a good motion picture – without a doubt, it’s the worst […]
By the time that Dracula Has Risen from the Grave was released in 1968, the Hammer horror film was already looking a tad musty; and that watershed year only strengthened the impression that there was something fundamentally old-fashioned about the studio’s moody Gothic pictures in the age of Night of the Living Dead. That didn’t […]
Though it’s a perfectly fine vampire film, I’d have to admit if pressed that 1968’s Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is the moment when the first subtle hints of badness struck Hammer’s Dracula franchise, hints that would blossom into full-on wretchedness in just a few years’ time. None of the three prior films were […]
The 1960s saw Hammer Film Productions at the height of its popularity and, arguably, its creativity. Which perhaps goes to explain the strange six-year gap in the flagship Frankenstein and Dracula franchises, as the studio’s filmmakers saw fit to explore other avenues in the horror genre, as well as occasional forays into things like pirate […]
It was a foregone conclusion that Hammer Film Productions was going to make a sequel to their massively successful Dracula. After all, The Revenge of Frankenstein had already been released in 1958, just a year after its predecessor, and the whole “color remakes of classic monster movies” concept was proving to be an absolute cash […]
Despite the modern reputation that Hammer enjoys as the home for horror in the United Kingdom, the company spent its first two decades of life as just a random British B-picture house, producing mostly forgotten adventure films. That started to change in 1955 with The Quatermass Xperiment the first in what would ultimately prove to […]
Sometimes a movie just comes right along and punches a hole in your gut, and for me, Vampyr was just such a movie. Like any halfway decent connoisseur of paranormal horror and inordinately artsy European films, I’ve known about Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film for ages, but somehow I’d managed to go without seeing […]
In the misty depths of cinema history, when the very idea of a “multi-reel”, “feature-length” movie was still in its infancy, we come across a bizarre chimera: neither fish nor fowl, neither feature nor short. I refer to the serial, a form born and popularised in the early 1910s, and still alive and kicking in […]
