Where is the Ghoul?

Has it ever struck you that we have no idea where The Ghoul is set?
Me neither, until relatively recently. But when you watch a film as often as I’ve watched this equally beloved and maligned Tyburn showstopper (I believe the correct medical term is ‘too often’), it is inevitable that you start to think about it in ways and to degrees that its infrastructure was never designed to reward or uphold. 

Now, some films tell you where they are set and some films don’t: no big deal.
But The Ghoul is intriguing because it mentions one location and one only: Land’s End, the ultimate destination of the car race that lands the four heroes in so much cannibalistic trouble.
But we don’t know if they actually get there, or, if not, how close they get by the time disaster strikes. And we don’t know where they start from either.
I had always lazily assumed that it was indeed in the vicinity of Land’s End that they find themselves stranded, but we are never actually told this for sure. The unhelpful local policeman has some kind of a Westcountry accent, but we are not explicitly informed even of the county. I also assumed, even more lazily as it turns out, that they started from London, and was frankly amazed, when I double-checked, to learn that my assumptions are completely unsupported by anything in the film itself. Neither is it at all likely, since the only assistance we are given is the observation that Land’s End is “over a hundred miles” from where they begin, immediately corrected to “more like two.”

Land's End, Summer 2012

Every year the wife and I spend a week with my parents at an inn just inland of Land’s End, and most mornings I get up at 5 and enjoy the lonely cliff walk to England’s most southerly point as dawn rises.
As many of you will know, Land’s End itself is now a giant tourist attraction, a shopping village cum theme park which is, I’m sure, a living hell during the day, when it’s crammed with soggy visitors and you have to pay to get in. But first thing in the morning even this is beautiful: eerily quiet (and who doesn’t love the idea of wandering through a totally deserted tourist attraction?), the whistling wind the only sound, and dozens upon dozens of rabbits the only living things in sight.
I’d like to say I spend most of my time on these walks pondering the deep mysteries of existence and the universe, and it’s true, when the first rays of the sun hit those timeless rocks, standing now just as they have through the whole history of human life in this most primitive and inspiring of lands, I do have my moments. But by and large, I’ll be honest, I’m thinking about The Ghoul.

There’s a large, somewhat eerie, strangely melancholy white house en route (above), all alone in extensive but featureless grounds, that I always liked to think was the original location of Dr Lawrence and his oddball household. But now it seems unlikely that Daphne, Angela, Billy and Geoffrey ever got this far.
Just how near did they get?

So, over breakfast one morning I put the matter to my dad, who’s much better at this sort of thing than I am.
Here’s the challenge, I explained: Four people in the 1920s are attempting to drive to Land’s End. Let us suppose that they live in a reasonably large town, given their wealth, awareness of fashions in an age of limited media, and the large number of like minds attending their parties. Their destination is between one and two hundred miles from the start point, and somewhere, along the shortest and most reasonable pre-motorway route, they pass through boggy moorland and become stranded. (Since both cars separately end up there, it is reasonable to suppose that neither took a wrong turning.) So where have they probably started from, and where have they probably ended up?
The first thing you can do, he told me – long before you need to get specific with a map and compasses – is rule out London. Given the distances involved and the time taken, it is simply not a logical candidate for home base at all.
Now, if you draw two circles on a map, one representing 100 miles from the radial point of Land’s End and the other two hundred, and assume that the start point must be somewhere within those two circles, the range of possibilities is surprisingly small. A lot of it, of course, is underwater, and given that our heroes travel by car we can rule that out as confidently as London, if not more so.
Among the dry bits, my father reckons, the most likely candidates, from a shortlist that also includes Southampton, Yeovil and Salisbury, are Bristol, Bath and Bournemouth. I have decided to go for Bath, because I happen to live there, and it’s nice.
Now, where do they end up? Not a lot of moors on that route, and the only possibilities are Exmoor, Dartmoor or Bodmin Moor, with the latter by far the most likely, and the only one in Cornwall. It’s an appropriately misty, marshy and mysterious place, with many secluded corners, steeped in folklore and legend. (Not sure that any of its inhabitants needed to sleep inside mosquito nets, even in the 1920s, but we’ll allow Anthony Hinds that much dramatic license.)
Therefore, I propose that they set off from Bath and, with their target almost in sight, became stranded somewhere on Bodmin Moor.

I hope that’s put your mind at rest.

If only they had made it, I'm sure they'd have spent a more than comfortable night  in this splendid art deco hotel on the cliff walk between Land's End and Sennen Cove ...

... but they'd probably have been made less welcome at this magnificently austere temperance hotel on Land's End itself.

The other mystery about The Ghoul, of course, is just how that poor bugger ended up the way he is in the first place.
All we know is that he joined a decadent, evil sect and was corrupted by the experience. But then what? Did he catch a disease, or was he cursed, or what? By what process does falling into bad company leave you with rotten green skin and the desire to eat people?
And what happens if they don’t give him human flesh? Will he die – surely for supernatural rather than physiological reasons, if so? Would his system really know the difference if they brought him pork chops and just pretended it was prime cuts of Veronica Carlson?
These and other questions will be explored in my forthcoming five-volume study What Kind of Ghoul Am I?

(By Matthew Coniam Photographs by Angela Coniam)

Simon Helder returns!

This was waiting for me in my in-box this morning:

Dear Matthew,
We thought you might be interested in the feature film we are about to shoot, called 'Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein'. The cast includes Hammer veteran Shane Briant, as well as real-life baron Clement von Franckenstein.
Synopsis:
1898. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson travel to Germany to investigate a strange case in the village of Darmstadt.
Who is the mysterious scientist who digs up corpses and steals their limbs? Could these events be related to the nearby presence of Castle Frankenstein, whose name is closely associated to Mary Shelley's horror novel? Everyone is a suspect...
Best wishes,
Gautier CAZENAVE
Marteau Films Production

And yes, it would seem that Briant really is reprising his old Monster From Hell role!
Follow the link here to find out more.

Taking the New Hammer plunge

Calling yourself ‘Hammer Films’ can work for you and it can work against you.
On the one hand it gets you and your films more attention from the first than any other fledgling independent film company could dream of – would you have even heard of Beyond The Rave otherwise? – while on the other it automatically creates a weight of expectation that is almost impossible to honour.
Some will want you to succeed whatever, just because of the name. Others, probably more, will want you to fail whatever, for the same reason.

Then there are those who’ll say, simply, what’s the point?
You can call yourself what you like, but it won’t result in any kind of instant metamorphosis. It’s interesting that there is an Ealing Films currently trading too, but oddly subjected to neither the same scrutiny nor the same challenging response to its product. There is a protective passion for Hammer out there that is almost impossible to please. Stray too far from the classic template and they’ll call you senselessly revisionist, pastiche it too accurately and they’ll call you hopelessly dated.

I suppose if I belonged in any of the categories above it was the ‘what’s the point?’ one, though as a certain devotee of Hammer House of Horror I had no inflexible objection to the name’s revival, and on the whole I liked the idea. But I wasn’t all that excited about the films themselves. I managed about two minutes of Beyond the Rave (I gather that’s a world record) and a heroic fifteen or so of Wake Wood (which it turns out isn’t really a Hammer film at all).
But The Resident I enjoyed, because it worked efficiently within its remit, and obviously because it brought Christopher Lee back. The New York setting was a touch provocative (though it shouldn’t be forgotten that the original Hammer psycho-thrillers it referenced were by no means predominantly English-set), and however much a casting coup Hilary Swank may have been, they should have known that you really need a dolly bird for woman-in-jeopardy roles.

Still, I liked it overall, but much more importantly, I found when that red Hammer logo flashed across the screen that I did care after all, and I do like seeing the name up there again.
So that’s why I went to see The Woman In Black last night in a well- rather than ill-disposed mood.
Better yet, I came out the same way.
It’s a film that has done the seemingly impossible: justified the use of the Hammer name, honoured the traditions of the studio’s past, evoked much of its style, and at the same time managed to appeal to a broad, modern audience that have no interest in, or perhaps even awareness of, the original films. As a film it’s good, as a juggling act it’s amazing.

There have been some tellingly dogmatic objections, of the sort to which even as hopelessly romantic a reactionary as I can raise only a weary ‘so what?’ in response: the original Hammer never made a supernatural ghost story; they cut the film to get a 12 certificate; Daniel Radcliffe is too young; George Woodbridge isn’t in it. (Okay, I made the last one up, but you get the idea.)
These are a priori obstacles, the kind of thing no amount of competence in the actual product can circumnavigate.
I can’t think of any defining reason why they wouldn’t have made a ghost story back at Bray; and they certainly had a long and fascinating history of cutting their films to match a certificate (including an A certificate once in a while). Curse of Frankenstein is a 12 these days too, and all I can say is that if I had seen Woman in Black at twelve years of age I’d still be talking about its seminal influence on me now (the way I do about The Ghoul). You won’t go short on scares, believe me. You will go short on people being lashed to chairs in basements and tortured with garden tools, but then that’s not what you came for, is it?

There are the expected anachronisms of course, of the sort which no modern film set in the past could now be expected to avoid, annoying though they are all the same: designer stubble, men walking about in the rain without hats, characters suggesting they “get the hell out” of places, and ugly modern metaphor-speak (Radcliffe’s boss urges greater commitment from his employee on the grounds that they “don’t carry passengers”).

And Wizard Boy is too young; there’s no point pretending he isn’t. But neither would it be right not to add that, given that initial handicap, he delivers a truly excellent performance that does everything possible to make you forget, or at least excuse, his fundamental unsuitability for the role. His commitment and intensity cannot be faulted – his facial acting alone has to carry a good fifty percent of the film – and if he never quite convinces us he’s a widowed lawyer with a four year old son, well… Julie Ege wasn’t my mind’s idea of an Edwardian feminist adventuress. Can’t say that worried me unduly either.
These are precisely the kind of eccentricities that Hammer must be allowed.
The rest of the film? Well, it’s not especially original and it’s not especially ambitious, so hyperbole would sit ill on its frail shoulders. But in terms of the limits it sets for itself, it’s really hard to find anything wrong with it at all. Almost everything works a treat.

Even rendered in tacky digital format, the art direction is astounding, the photography is rich, the locations are beautifully atmospheric. Did you not dream of seeing a Hammer character making his way up and down a baroque staircase left of frame again? Dream no more!
At least two of the big scare moments work better than anything comparable in any of the similar films to which this has been compared, and the lingering sense of dread that strings them together is better yet. There’s even a slightly sappy ending that, a meaningless close on the Woman in Black’s face notwithstanding, honours the original Hammer’s commitment to ultimately restored order, even to restored order within a framework of Christian dogmatics.

I liked the casting, too, which seemed to me chosen by the classic Hammer method: an attention-catcher in front, sturdy support from traditional talent (Ciaran Hinds is splendid) and a fine third-row of well-chosen rhubarbers (David Burke, probably tv’s best ever Dr Watson, gets a line or two as the village bobby; Victor McGuire gets one as an anguished father).
It’s good to see them, and they have the feel of a new Hammer repertory. If any of them showed up again in the next one it would be wonderful. (As my compadre Mark notes in his review of the film here, it would be good if they used Radcliffe again too, perhaps in a more villainous capacity, playing his easy good looks against expectation in the Shane Briant manner.)
It is in such matters as these that the true Hammer flavour can most usefully be recalled. What the studio really needs is an overarching identity that links its new films to each other, rather than something that links any of them to the past.

What am I bid for Hazel Court's nude scene?

When I first saw the original Karloff Frankenstein, on British television in 1983, it was still missing the famous sequence in which the Monster innocently throws the little girl into the lake, expecting her to float.
The notorious cut from his moving towards her to her father carrying her sodden body through the streets, vastly more unpleasant in its implications, was still unaltered, and there was little realistic expectation of the lost footage ever being restored.
When it did turn up not long after I can still remember the excitement, but now that it’s the official version and no longer surprising, I feel perversely privileged to think that I was around to see the film when it was still missing.

These sort of thoughts are foremost in my mind because of the recent announcement that Hammer is mounting a search for missing footage, and has highlighted the quest with a Top 6 hit list of dream snips.
There is a difference, though. While the Frankenstein footage was a major chunk of the movie, the absence of which disrupted the narrative and left the film genuinely incomplete, what Hammer are looking for are for the most part merely trims, a second here and there of gore which crossed the censorial line in the fifties and sixties, and wouldn’t any more.
But it’s the very fact that such moments as the head-in-acid-bath scene from Curse of Frankenstein, identified as the number one dream restoration, are no longer shocking enough to be excluded that makes their restoration an academic exercise at best. The film is not robbed by its not being there, and surely, after the first few frissons of unfamiliarity for those of us who have already seen the film a billion times, it won’t be enhanced by its being back either.
There’s something a bit defensive about the exercise, as if the studio is saying to young, modern audiences: if you think Hammer has a reputation for tameness, that’s not our fault, and just wait until we start splicing all the juicy stuff back in…
But an eyeball here and a cut throat there won’t make any difference to the story construction – which is what really dates the films – nor will it make the films any more shocking or thrilling or scary. For the first few watches the film will seem overbalanced by the new shots, in that they will command a share of the attention paid to the film overall that they were never intended to do when shot, then eventually we’ll get used to them and they’ll fade back into the woodwork again. It’s an interesting exercise for people like me and probably you, but that, surely, is about as far as it goes.

That said, the studio’s six most wanted list does make interesting reading.
There are a few surprises. No mention of Dracula’s full death scene from the ’58 original, complete with blistering face and extended shots of his crumbling hands, nor that odd shot that crops up in stills of Harker’s corrupted body after his staking. (Of course, this may have been omitted because it makes no sense: Valerie Gaunt’s body becomes that of an old hag because that’s how old she’d really be: there’s no more reason for Harker to deteriorate in this way than Lucy.)


In the absence of the above, the continued fascination with the acid bath shots from Curse of Frankenstein is intriguing, especially since they have been at least partially restored now: the version currently available on DVD has shots that were still missing when I first saw the film in 1984, notably of the lowering of the head into the tank (covered at the time by a meaningless cutaway to Robert Urquhart looking stern, spliced in from earlier in the scene.)
On the other hand, what is this “eyeball” shot they’re looking for? Surely not the close-up of the eyeball through a magnifying glass? Yes, it’s excised in the Warners TV print that still serves as primary source for reissues, but it was present and correct in the version I saw on television in Christmas ‘84. Not missing at all, just absent sometimes.

The only other inclusion in the list that I predicted would be there is the tongue scene from The Mummy. Ever since I was a boy, long before I’d seen the movie, I had been fascinated by the ‘before, during and after’ shots in Alan Frank’s book Horror Movies, and especially by the look of genuine revulsion on the face of the slave looking at the flaccid tongue in the third image. It was weirdly shocking to catch up with the film and discover these shots were not there. (The same goes for another on the list: the broken bottle stabbing from Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell, reproduced over two full pages in Frank’s later book Horror Films.)


But the other Mummy trim, what the studio charmingly calls the “underdressed maidens”, is of an altogether different order.
I had always thought that this was not a cut, so much as an alternative take prepared for more liberal foreign markets, and so the question is raised: just what is the definitive, authentic version of a Hammer film? I would have said it was the version prepared for the home territories, perhaps with a bit of censor-fiddling undone if you really feel the need. The idea of adding extra sensationalism, however, via the insertion of footage that was never intended to be seen in Britain, might be thought to cross the line between legitimate restoration and artistic interference, like adding new CGI effects, especially since including the underdressed maidens would entail not merely adding footage to the film but removing some as well to make room for it.
I suspect that for many behind this project, the definitive version of any Hammer movie is going to be the one with as much tits and blood as possible, regardless of how, when or why such footage was shot. (And if the underdressed maidens do make the list, despite this reservation, surely it should have included the holy grail of Hammer alt-edits: Hazel Court’s nude scene from The Man Who Could Cheat Death?)


Intriguing too to see the studio’s admission that they did not keep the trims in their film library. No reason why they should, but it reminds us that they have a film library, and raises the much more interesting question of what they do have there.
I’ve often been struck, despite the massive cult interest in Hammer films, by how little has ever been seen by way of rare or behind the scenes footage. Call me an old fogey if you will, but I’m personally much more interested in the talk here of how “the original UK title sequence has been reinstated on Plague of The Zombies” – the first I’ve heard of such a thing – than in the prospect of seeing a few extra drops of blood on Christopher Lee’s cape.
If I were asked to compile my own personal dream list of missing Hammer footage, it would be things like test shots, outtakes, and whole scenes cut for time rather than taste.
So what else is still loitering in the archives?
Did they really junk the Peter Cushing sequences from Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb? Are there no pre-dub soundtracks with Ingrid Pitt and Susan Denberg and Mike Raven using their real voices? Interesting though it may be to compare the existing and an “extended, more explicit version” of The Viking Queen, I’d rather go looking for one of the original edits of To The Devil a Daughter, before they ruined the ending: it might even be enough to turn it into a classic.
As for my number one choice of all, it just has to be that legendary, perhaps even apocryphal, test sequence for The Hound of the Baskervilles, with an ordinary-sized dog on a scaled-down set, grappling with children dressed as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson...

POSTSCRIPT: As this page makes clear, as the BBC news report does not, the films on the list are those selected to undergo the first wave of restoration, with more to follow, so the top six missing moments refer to these films only, not the entirety of Hammer's output.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: As Holger notes in the comments, the reason why the search for the Dracula finale is not top priority is because they actually found it last year.
Just testing, just testing...

Vielen Dank, Herr Coniam

If you recently noticed a stratospherical jump in the quality of writing on this blog, then this is down entirely to one man:

Matthew Coniam

A while back as part of a Year End review I had asked whether anyone out there may be interested in writing for Hammer and Beyond and Matthew came to the fore. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that my little call to arms would result in such sterling contributions.

Anytime you see a really in-depth analysis of one aspect of British Horror Cinema, chances are that it was written by him. Over the months, nay: years, I often got compliments for pieces that weren't mine and had to set the record straight one reader at a time but I fear that all too often it isn't too apparent who wrote what. One really needs to be eagle-eyed and scroll down to the bottom of a blog post to notice the ID of the respective writer of the posts.

Up till recently the regularity of his and my writing was as it should be: I, as the nominal owner of this blog, wrote a handful of pieces; Matthew then had his say in a new post. I was always excited to be notified of a post by him as it put me into the position of a reader as well.

Then life came in the way and I haven't been able to post in yonks. In actual fact if it wasn't for Matthew nothing would have been published in the last couple of months. He singlehandedly is responsible for keeping this blog alive in the year so far. Every single post of 2012 until now has been his.

And for this I want to thank him from the bottom of my heart. This blog would have been moribund right now if it wasn't for you, mate.

See (now channeling my Dick Klemensen), amongst other nightmares that I won't go into here, 3.5 years ago I had to face being laid off from a well-paid job of 13 years. Not interested in getting back into the Kosmokokkick Korporate World I ended up becoming self employed and – as they say these days - “re-invented myself”.

First I set myself up as a private German Tutor and seasonal Tour Guide. Then I got myself a Massage Therapist degree and also offered mobile massages.

All of this went reasonably well but also left me enough time for all my other interests.

Downside was that every year in the winter months I had to dip into my savings, something that couldn't go on so I decided to take a temp job back in the Corporate World again to cover me over that lean period. And guess what:

I am still in that job full time.

And teach.

And provide the massages.

All in all resulting in crazy 60-70 hour weeks that I know can't go on indefinitely.

Looks like it is all either feast or famine with me these days and I need to come up with a reasonable middle way. Giving up on my projects is a definite No No but unfortunately regular part time jobs are practically impossible to come by. So I am working on my.... what is it now: Plan E?

Long story short: I am crazy busy and Matthew has valiantly picked up the gauntlet for me.

As my multi-million Euro/Pound/Dollar budget for this blog was slashed to nothing in the recession, I can't offer him riches or trips to sunny climes. But what I can offer is make you aware of the incredible talent that is Mr Coniam by listing all the posts he has written for us so far and pointing to all his other blogs with the urgent request to check them all out. I seriously don't know how he manages to write so much while still apparently living the regular life of a recently married family man. My hat's off to you!

Without further ado, here is a quick reference guide to all of Matthew's blog posts so far:

Rediscovering Mike Raven (part one)

Mock the Raven Nevermore!

Smart new Woman In Black poster...

Lee and Cushing after hours

Matthew's Watching Hammer Top Ten

How to say “De curse of de hound is on you!” in Italian

The ten Hammer films I’m most ashamed never to have seen (not including “Straight On Till Morning”)

RIP, Jimmy Sangster: The man who invented Hammer Horror

RIP Michael Gough, 1917-2011

Hammer what ifs and if onlys

“What Horror Means To Me” by Christopher Lee

The Stranger Came Home to Bray

Herman Cohen: An American Weirdo in London

If you want to read more of his, please also check out his own blogs. (Again: Just how does he do it?)

So thanks again, Matthew, I really am eternally grateful for all your help and hope that everyone who visits this blog will also start exploring all your other projects.

Oh, and should anyone be interested to follow in his footsteps and write something for Hammer and Beyond (either a standalone piece or something more regular), please do let me know. This blog is meant to be a voice for anyone interested in Classic Hammer and British Horror.

Smart new Woman In Black poster...

I like this a lot... and I must say I'm very cautiously looking forward to the movie too.
Until now, New Hammer have been very keen to stress the New, but there's a lovely retrospective feel to this poster image that bodes well for the film.
All it lacks is the legend 'A Hammer Film' emblazoned somewhere near the top.
Other than that, though - very nice indeed.

Lee and Cushing after hours

I'm sure you've all seen these before, but they're really good.
This is what the kings of Hammer got up to when they had a minute or two to spare.

Matthew's Watching Hammer Top Ten

Encouraged by Holger's decision to republish his Top Ten Hammers (see here), here's mine, also lifted from the fine and much lamented Watching Hammer blog.

Comparing the two lists, I guess I'm slightly surprised that mine and Holger's list have only one film in common; perhaps even more surprising is the fact that it's Dracula AD 1972!
Incidentally, I watched this again recently and was stunned by how little attention Caroline Munro gets: not only is she the first victim, killed off the moment Dracula reappears, but note just how little of the dialogue goes to her, and just how few close-ups she is given, not just in the party scene (where you can blink twice and even imagine that she's not present at all) but also in the ritual sequence - at which she ultimately proves the central presence. Watch as the camera pans around the assembled gang, and observe how few times it lights on Caroline.
For the studio's big new star discovery this is simply inexplicable.

Lovely to then watch Captain Kronos for the first time in maybe twenty years: the contrast was so great it almost nudged Kronos into a revised top ten.
In fact, in the year or so since I posted the below, I've caught up with several of the Hammer Films I had not seen at the time, and reacquainted myself with others I had only seen once and a while ago. I now think Curse of the Werewolf is a much better film than I remembered, and a few others have 'rearranged themselves' in my affections too.
But as my ultimate choice of ten, I stand by what I originally posted, as follows.


1. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1962)
Right. The brief is to pick my ten favourites, not necessarily the ten I think are the best. But pride of place has to go to Phantom, which is my favourite, but it’s my favourite because it’s also the best, and nobody seems to think so but me. Incredible how a film’s reputation can continue to be influenced by its original reception, and how people decades later can watch this so sure it’s going to be the lacklustre disappointment they all said it was in ’62 that they come away still believing it’s the lacklustre disappointment they all said it was back in ’62. Personally, I’d triple-bill it with Curse of F and the big D and challenge any newcomer to spot the difference – saving, of course the regrettable absence of Messrs Cushing and Lee, not that Gough and Lom aren’t fine and dandy in their roles. I can’t think of a single thing about this film that isn’t superb. It’s the best re-imagining of the plot we have on film, it’s atmospheric and spooky, and it has a terrific music score (including a fake opera devised for the film by Edwin Astley; my second favourite fake opera devised for a film after the one Oscar Levant wrote for Charlie Chan at the Opera). There’s also not an ounce of flab on it anywhere, which you can’t always say about Hammer in the sixties. You can slice big slabs of fat off Curse of the Werewolf and Dracula, Prince of Darkness, but here we’re back to the 82-minute tightness of the very originals. I’ve written elsewhere about the magnificence of the film’s editing but it needs repeating: just watch the scene prior to the abduction of Christine by the dwarf and note how superbly Fisher combines music, staging and (mis)direction, so that we get that magnificent shock when she opens her curtains, with the sound of the window being pushed down acting as a percussive bridge between the lush romantic music of this scene and the scary organ music of the next. A true masterpiece.

2. THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) and DRACULA (1958)
My mother wasn’t too keen on my obsession with Dracula and horror movies as a kid, and eventually being allowed to see them was a major milestone in my life, so nostalgia must inevitably loom large here: all those countless lunchtimes and midmorning breaks at primary school huddled over my friend Steven’s copies of Horror Movies (by Alan Frank) and House of Horror (edited by Allen Eyles), gazing at the pictures, and trying to imagine what those movies could possibly be like. I still get that odd feeling, when I watch, say, the brain operation in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, that I am watching a still picture come to life, as if someone had deliberately recreated The Night Watch on film or something. My memory tells me that the first Hammer film I ever saw – illicitly at a friend’s house – was The Satanic Rites of Dracula, but for some reason that didn’t make the kind of impression on me I would have expected it to, looking back. What did, was the short season of classics BBC2 showed at Christmas, 1984, when at last I caught up with Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy, the first two double-billed.
There’s no point me boring you with why Dracula is brilliant – everybody knows it’s just one of those movies with nothing wrong with them whatsoever; that you can watch over and over again without even slightly dimmed pleasure. I will, however, put in an extra word for Curse – fractionally my favourite of the two - as it is too fashionable now to claim that it is an enormously important film but not a great one, and that it was only with Dracula that everything really clicked for the first time. I’ve always found it a barnstormer from first to last, fully the equal of its more cherished follow-up. I love the grotty Eastmancolor, I love Hazel Court – always the queen of Hammer for me – and I love the rumbling opening bars of that theme music. It excites me rather more than Dracula.

4. BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB (1971)
Interestingly, that 1984 season consisted of the earliest Bray films and this – which, to make things even odder, they showed first. I’ve often asked myself if nostalgia is the main reason why I think this is far and away the best film the studio made in the seventies. But no, I absolve myself of the charge: this is a masterpiece, pure and simple. In a sense it is an original, of course, not really the fourth mummy film but a first adaptation of a Bram Stoker novel, very compellingly told with some beautifully photographed sequences, great music and – as it’s the seventies now – very gory scares. But it’s spooky in an almost Val Lewtonish way. I love the Egyptian flashbacks, filmed at night, and so much more atmospheric than the usual sort, bathed in unsubtle, baking arc light. And then of course there is perennial Carry On bit-parter-cum-set dressing Valerie Leon, who – let us first note – is entirely credible, and memorably otherworldly, in her one and only dramatic lead, before adding as supplementary information that yes, she is also built like the world’s most sexually attractive battleship. (If you can imagine such a thing.)

5. DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)
Funny thing, but I actually got quite blasé about Hammer after that. Talk about ungrateful. By the time I saw Risen From the Grave, some time in ’85 I think, it was like I’d been watching Hammer films all my life and I remember thinking ‘ah, look: here’s another of those cute little Hammer films I used to be obsessed with…’ Now I know better. It’s the best of the post-Dracula Draculas, and the most Bray-like, in its look and atmosphere, of all the post-Bray Hammers: those scenes of the young lovers scuttling over the beautifully designed rooftops are just gorgeous. And then we have Veronica Carlson; we have an excellent opening theme and title sequence; we have a fabulous (albeit physically and chronologically impossible) post-credits sequence; we have some fascinating theological angst involving a stuffy cleric and a cocky young atheist (borrowed, along with a couple of giveaway visual ideas, from the recent film of Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons); we have the heavy use of amber-edged filters which is always distracting but not unattractive; we have some complicated business about Dracula being able to pull the stake out that annoys vampire purists – always a good thing, and most of all, of course, we have a grand finale involving Christopher Lee falling off a cliff and getting kebabbed on a giant crucifix.

6. FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967)
Oh yes, we must find room for this in a list of favourites. Had it been the ten best it might have been just edged out by Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), but that’s such a bleak and mean-spirited film; never one I turn to for pleasure. Unlike this beauty: so weird, so Grimm’s fairy tale, such excellent use of sets and locations: Black Park at its most verdant and inspiring, the old inn, those windy streets… Susan Denberg, kittenish one minute, savage the next, is terrific.
“You see: the hair has changed colour…” Somehow, we never doubted it would, Peter.

7. LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1971)
I caught up with most of the studio’s seventies output in my middle teens, when ITV launched 24 hour television and suddenly realised there were a lot of hours that needed filling. Mircalla to the rescue! I’m virtually alone in my (strange) love for this, I know (though I seem to remember David Pirie being surprisingly positive about it). But once we get past that naff Mike Raven prologue this is a rich, ripe stilton of a movie, and of all the Hammers that pussyfoot around with nudity and sex it’s by far the most happily, healthily and uncomplicatedly sexy. Does Yutte Stensgaard give a bad performance? I don’t know: how would a fresh-revived 19th century vampiress attending a girls’ finishing school behave in real life, d’you think? Until you produce the evidence to the contrary my guess is pretty much the way Yutte gives it to us, so lay off her. I also like the outdoor aerobics class.

8. DRACULA AD 1972 (1972) and MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE (1973)
Two wonderful evocations of London in the early seventies, and how I look forward to the day when I will only need to bend over backwards justifying my love of the second one. I mean, don’t you think it’s about time we stopped pretending Dracula AD 1972 is anything less than a classic? For years we had to pretend it was irredeemable rubbish, painful to watch. Now it’s at the guilty pleasure stage, so bad it’s good and all that. True recognition will come, so why not just save time and say it now: it’s great fun, exciting, scary, moves like a bat out of hell, and the change of time and setting works a treat.
And Man About the House is basically more of the same, only without the vampires.

10. CHILDREN OF THE FULL MOON (1980)
Too young to have ever seen a Hammer at the cinema (I’ve still only seen one on the big screen: Dracula, at the Barbican in 1996) my memories of them are entirely bounded by the small – and square – television screen. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always nurtured a fondness for the TV films made under the Hammer House of Horror banner. Never saw any of those Mystery and Suspense ones; I gather they’re not so hot, but a good half-dozen of the first batch are more than commendable attempts to do what Hammer-proper died trying to do: make traditional but modern horror films. And this one is a masterpiece, as good as anything the studio did in the seventies, except for one annoying trait it shares with most of the series: an annoying pre-credits sequence that gives the game away before it’s even started. Unlike the majority, however, it does have a proper (albeit grim) ending, whereas most of them don’t end but just sort of stop, in a would-be Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected kind of a way, and you have to pretend it’s a Hammer feature film you set your video to record but the tape ran out two reels from the end. Set in a wonderfully creepy house in a wonderfully creepy forest, this has some great lines, real suspense, one of my favourite ever pull-back-the-curtains shock moments, Diana Dors being quite brilliant, and Robert Urquhart for circularity. A small thing of considerable beauty.

How to say “De curse of de hound is on you!” in Italian…

Okay, so now I've seen The Old Dark House (thanks, Holger!) and Shadow of the Cat (thanks again, Holger!) it really feels like I'm starting to get somewhere filling the gaps in my Hammer education.
I've also been dipping my first nervous toe into the waters of New Hammer, emboldened by the rather good trailers for The Woman In Black.
I'd been intending to post about all of these things, but the fact is I've also just seen Star Crash for the first time (damn you, Holger!!!) and I'm still recovering. My wife is feeding me hot soup and mopping my brow, and I'm wondering what I did with myself during the 38 years I spent before getting round to seeing it.
Someone remind me: what was the point of all those films that don't have Caroline in that outfit in them, again? This, surely, is what the movies are all about.

I once went to a film memorabilia fair where Caroline was appearing, but found myself - uncharacteristically, I must say - too nervous to approach her. Had I seen Star Crash at that time, I probably wouldn't have even had the courage to enter the building.

Anyway, while I'm still pondering the merits of The Old Dark House and The Resident, here is a little something that recently caught my eye.

I've known this picture all my life; for some reason my father possessed a set of the books, which were designed to accompany a BBC tv series on learning Italian. But the book gives no indication of who the sharp-looking cappuccino drinking girl is on the cover, and I never realised until I recently picked up second hand copies of the tie-in LP records.
As you probably know, it's Marla Landi, known best to we as the Spanish hellcat loose on Dartmoor in The Hound of the Baskervilles but in reality, of course, an Italian. Marla presented the series, but sadly, hers is not one of the female voices on the LP, so I still don't know what she sounds like in her native tongue. And one (but only one, oddly) of the three LP covers misnames her as 'Maria'. But she looks fabulous in her coffee bar clobber. I love the barnet, and the pointy shoes.
Now I just need to see her hosting Play School...

The ten Hammer films I’m most ashamed never to have seen (not including “Straight On Till Morning”)

In preparation for a forthcoming post on my blog The Dennis Wheatley Project, I watched The Lost Continent for the first time the other night.
I’d owned a copy of it for ages, but I’d been saving it until after I’d read Uncharted Seas, the Dennis Wheatley novel it’s based on. (I’m reading all Wheatley’s novels in order. Don’t ask. It’s a long story.)
As usual when I catch up with a Hammer film I’ve never seen before, I enjoyed every second of it, and was struck again by the fact that there’s just something... some weird, indefinable alchemical something... about Hammer films - all Hammer films - that perfectly suits my cinematic metabolism.

I can see that their best films are their best films, but even the ones that inspire nothing but complete disdain from even sympathetic reviewers – like this one – invariably give me nothing but pleasure.
From the first time I saw Lust For a Vampire I knew that it was a film I would be periodically watching again and again for the rest of my life. Dracula AD 1972 gets better every time I see it. I got The Vengeance of She as part of a box set and didn’t get round to it for over a year, so persuaded was I by its reputation as perhaps the worst of all the major Hammer movies - and when I finally gave it a chance I loved it from the first frame to the last. My most recent viewing was my fourth and it won’t be the last.

The vast majority of the Hammer films I’ve seen, and all the most famous and important ones, I saw between the ages of ten and eighteen, in a lucky, happy time when they seemed hardly ever absent from British tv, on BBC2 on Saturday nights, and ITV in the week.
Heady days they were, and I was able to indulge so regularly and with such repeated pleasure that it’s only comparatively recently that its occurred to me that there are gaps still to plug here. In the last couple of years I've tracked down - and adored - those last few major stragglers, like Captain Clegg, most of those black and white Jimmy Sangsters, and, best of all, The Mummy's Shroud. (Even the fact that those fabulous stills of the mummy looming up behind a négligée-clad Maggie Kimberly turned out to be another case of the Susan Denbergs didn't spoil it for me.)

There remain, however, just a few significant chapters in the Hammer saga that still remain just titles and stills to me.
Here are ten of the most notable – accompanied by my pledge to catch up with all of them over the next year.
Anyone got a copy of The Old Dark House?

1. X- The Unknown
2. The Abominable Snowman
I’ve seen the two black and white Quatermasses, but never did get round to these remaining black and white proto-Hammer horrors, the first written by Sangster in Nigel Kneale mode, the second by Kneale himself and with Peter Cushing in the cast. No excuse, no excuse. I always thought it would have been interesting if Hammer had retained Nigel Kneale as a regular screenwriter and just let him do whatever he wanted: his obviously more cerebral approach would have made for an interesting counterpoint to Sangster and Hinds. I can't see Sir James giving him a free hand, though. Incidentally, my former day job brought me into contact with Judith Kerr, Kneale’s widow, last year, and necessitated me visiting her at their daughter's house - which has the largest tank of tropical fish I’ve ever seen. It all seemed very Quatermass, somehow.

3. Shadow of the Cat
Bit of an interloper this. Nowadays, the is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-true-Hammer-Horror battle is over, and the verdict is yes. But I got into Hammer at a time when nobody had even heard of it, and I lived through those bitter years when the pro- and anti- forces besieged each other. I sided instinctively with the nays, for some reason, despite my love of Barbara and André, and I’ve never really accepted it into the family, certainly not in the blasé way in which it now turns up in all the lists, without even a comment to indicate its mongrel status. But still, there’s no excuse for not ever having seen it.

4. The Damned
I’m beginning to notice a running theme so far: I’ve missed most of the black and white ones.
I’m sure it’s a coincidence (and in any event we’re switching to colour from this point on) but it’s certainly true that colour is, to me, one of the defining features of Hammer. Another is a certain traditional kind of ambiance, even in modern-setting productions. This, I’ll wager lacks the latter every bit as much as the former, and in truth I’m really not in any great hurry to catch up with this. For my money Joseph Losey, like Alan Parker, is one of those names that practically guarantees an infuriating time.

5. Terror of the Tongs
This looks like great fun, rather more so I should think than Stranglers of Bombay, a(nother) black and whiter with which it is invariably if mysteriously paired. Christopher Lee in Fu Manchu rehearsal, the docks of Peking recreated at Bray and the famous bone scraping scene... and all I can do is imagine it.
The same goes for The Scarlet Blade, and for The Devil Ship Pirates, and for...

6. Pirates of Blood River
I’m sure I'd love them all, but Pirates just edges ahead in my wish list because of its rare casting of two of my minor Hammer glamour favourites: Baskerville minx Marla Landi, whose uniquely mangled dialogue is a delight in that movie and I'm sure will be again here, and the incredible Marie Devereux, for whom no justifying comment is necessary.

7. She
8. Slave Girls
There are a few reasons why I really should get around to seeing this. It’s a key Hammer movie, of course, along with One Million Years BC (the closest I've got to a Hammer film I couldn't get all the way through) one of the anomalous smash successes among the studio's sandy adventure films that convinced them there was potential in the subgenre. A score of flops later they were still trying. But this one features both Lee and Cushing – which actually is a rarer event than you might have thought at Hammer – and I have, let’s not forget, seen The Vengeance of She four times, so it feels somewhat perverse to have never watched this.
And Slave Girls just looks like good fun, with Martine Beswick in a scandalously rare swaggering lead, the potential of which just pushes the film ahead of The Viking Queen and Creatures the World Forgot in my ten.

9. The Old Dark House
Can this really be as bad as they all say? Surely not.
I doubt it’s a patch on the 1932 original – few films are – but then, it doesn’t sound like it’s all that similar either. The prospect of William Castle working for Hammer is one to savour, and so is this cast: Janette Scott, Fenella Fielding, Peter Bull, Robert Morley, Joyce Grenfell...
I’m willing to bet that this is a little gem in hiding, desperately long overdue sympathetic re-evaluation. I can't even guess what it's really like. But will we ever get the chance to see it?

10. The Anniversary
I like The Nanny; love Bette Davis… So how come I’ve never made the effort to see this? Search me. Anyway, I promised to limit this list to ten, which means, as predicted, there’s no room for Straight On Till Morning.

What are the most glaring gaps in your circle of Hammer film acquaintances?

RIP, Jimmy Sangster: The man who invented Hammer Horror

“I can remember thirty years ago like it was last week.
Last week I can't remember at all.”
Jimmy Sangster, Inside Hammer

From a lifetime of memories...

Jimmy Sangster, 1927 -2011