2. William Hinds, the founder of Hammer Horror films first registered his company in 1934
which at the time was called Hammer Productions. He got this name from his stage
name William Hammer which he had been titled because he lived in Hammersmith.
Without hesitation Hammer Productions got to work on their first film, “The Public Life of
Henry the Ninth” which was released in 1935. Shortly after this he met Enrique
Carreras, a former cinema owner. The two worked together to make a film distribution
company called Exclusive Films.
It was only in 1946 that Hammer Film Productions was revived. Because of the war
there was a shortage of films and Hammer took this opportunity to released a number
of film to be aired in cinema.
Before Hammer Horror
3. Birth Hammer Horror
Hammer Kept producing a number of films, none of which experimented with the horror genre
up to 1954. It was only in 1955 with the release of his adaption to the science fictional
It was after this that Hammer Films went onto doing horror genres. A big turn in the company
was the release of the film The Curse of Frankenstein, which was also their first film in colour.
This was released in 1957 and was also the first of many sequels of the Frankenstein series.
The world wide success this film had spurred on lead to many remakes of previous films such
as Dracula (1931) which had been remade as Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Mummy
which was a remake of the Universals film also titled The Mummy.
television series of The Quatermass Experiment which he had re-titled
The Quatermass Xperiment. The film was an unexpected big hit and
shortly after lead to the sequel Quatermass 2, which was just as big as
the first.
4. Cast
Hammer films had a tendency to use the same actors in a number of their films. Some of such
actors are;
Peter Cushing. An English actor who's famous roles were Victor Frankenstein in
the Frankenstein series and Van Helsing in the Dracula series.
Christopher Lee. An English actor and Musician who had performance in his blood,
a great grandmother he was unaware about, Marie Carandini who was once a
successful opera singer.
5. Cast
Hammer films had a tendency to use the same actors in a number of their films. Such actors
were;
Peter Cushing. An English actor who's main roles was Frankenstein in 6 of the 7
Frankenstein films. The one he did not appear in was The Horror of Frankenstein,
This was because it was not considered a sequel but a spoof of the original, The
Curse of Frankenstein. He was also famously known for his role Dr. Van Helsing in
Dracula. Cushing also started in many other Hammer films. After becoming well
known as an actor he appeared in many other well known films, like the 1976 Star
Wars episode IV: A New Hope.
6. Cast
Christopher Lee. An English actor and Musician who had performance in his blood,
a great grandmother he was unaware about, Marie Carandini who was once a
successful opera singer.
His first appearance to Hammer was in the 1957 Curse Of Frankenstein, as
Frankenstein's monster, He also starred in 7 of the 8 Dracula films as Dracula.
His reason for not taking part in the 2nd
Dracula film are un conclusive but there's
debate that he wouldn’t accept Hammers offer, or that he didn’t want to become
seen as a typecast, however coming back to the other films went against this, but
its been said that he was in a way blackmailed to come back into the films.
7. Later Life of Hammer
In the 1970, Hammer Horror made fewer films because horror films where going out
of fashion and they wanted to get away from horror scene and slowly lost their
reputation.
In the 1980 they brought out a television series called Hammer House of Horror, It
had 13 episodes in the series and each episode ran for roughly an hour. One of the
episodes starred Peter Cushing.
About 4 years after the first series 2 episodes of a new series called Hammer House
of Mystery & Suspense aired, but it was only carried on in 1986 with another 11
episodes.
After being into hibernation for a while in 2000 Hammer have announced there
return, they've released just under a dozen films over the years and in 2009 they
announced that they have teamed up with Alliance Films and they working on a
remake of the play The Woman in Black, which I can say from experience is a very
scary and gripping play.
