During the Halloween season I always treat myself to a couple of weeks of horror films. As a lifelong horror flick fan (thank you channel 56 Boston for your Creature Double Feature which capped off my Saturday morning cartoon watching throughout my childhood), I'll watch any horror film anytime but this season makes me really revel in it.
There are good horror films, there are lousy horror films, then there are Hammer horror films. Hammer Studios was a British based film company which, in the sixties and seventies, produced these incredible gothic horror films which reshaped the form. They are lush technicolor tapestries of diaphanous dresses and scarlet red blood populated by British beauties, gullible villagers, and dark production design touches that are just wonderful.
These films have hangings and guillotines, graves are frequently pillaged and vampires get all the girls just by staring at them. The fact that Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, both trained stage actors, form the core of the casting pool means that for the most part they are well acted and both leave their own interpretations on the canon of movie monsters.
Lee's Dracula is rough sex barely held under control, a cruel distant figure with painfully bloodshot eyes (early hard contacts that, covering his entire eye were evidently incredibly painful). Cushing's Dr. Frankenstein turns the mad scientist into the real monster as he goes about cutting up anyone he can find and stitching them back together again. He is a menacing megalomaniac with skin pulled so tight over his lean face and form that he seems to be an animated and malevolent skeleton.
It is really great stuff.
There are dozens of Hammer films out there and they do vary in quality a great deal. Many are hard to track down even with libraries and Netflicks to draw on. For collection development purposes two collections can pretty much do the trick.
The Hammer Horror Collection
is a must have, covering the core films of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy.
The Hammer Horror Series
gets you their iteration of the werewolf and the phantom of the opera as well as a variety of the "Hitchcock" style films they made as B pictures in black and white on the cheap.
1 comment:
I can relate ... one of my local stations also did the Saturday scary movie after cartoons ... our TV was in the basement and it kinda added to the horror experience.
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