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Hammer horror

Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles
  • Posted at 2:42pm
  • 20 June 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

The first production released by Hammer studios for over 20 years comes with a very clear warning: "Contains very strong supernatural horror, sex, drugs and gore." (If that's not an invitation to view, I don't know what is.)

It's called Beyond the Rave, and revolves around a vampire cult in a very creepy English woodland. Beyond the Rave is available to view for free on social-networking website MySpace, where it has been unfolding weekly since April in 20 four-minute chunks.

It is, you must admit, thoroughly modern, though it is also thematically in keeping with the British production house that redefined horror at the cinema in the late 1950s.

In the modern climate, where horror films seem exclusively aimed at teenagers and "torture porn" is all the rage, it's easy to label the early Hammer horrors such as The Curse of the Werewolf and Evil of Frankenstein as quaint.

In fact, they were incredibly important. They made British cinema exportable; with success in America, we were in effect reclaiming Dracula, Frankenstein and werewolves from the Hollywood screenwriters and directors who had appropriated them from European legend and British and Irish literature in the 1930s.

These early Hammers also pushed the boundaries, even running into trouble with the censors in 1957 when The Curse of Frankenstein was slated for showing gruesome horror in colour.

Hammer produced far more than just endless retreads of Dracula and Frankenstein. It also delved into Sherlock Holmes with a magnificent adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring those Hammer horror icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

Twenty years later, in 1979, Hammer rolled out the last film of its first coming, a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. It wasn't a glorious end to an era, but it was miles better than another of the studio's contributions to the 1970s – three On the Buses movies, "containing sex, middle-aged lechery and dangerous driving".

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