Top Fifteen Hammers:Part # 3.

Posted as an extremely belated addition to what was the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon.

5. Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973)

All of the Cushing/Fisher Frankenstein movies are great, but for some reason it’s this final entry that sticks most strongly in my memory. Although they ploughed on with a few more ill-starred ventures in subsequent years, for me ‘..Monster From Hell’ really marks the bitter end of Hammer horror, and, clearly doing its best to stretch out a shoe-string budget as unrelenting gloom descended over the whole British film industry, it is a conclusion to the Frankenstein saga as sickening, pitch black and claustrophobic as one could hope for.

Many of Hammer’s later films made a point of including gruesome asylum sequences, but nothing they offered up was quite as relentlessly grim as the institution that houses the goings-on here, with almost the entire movie confined to a cramped, brick-walled dungeon that is the polar opposite of the Matte-painted fantasias beloved of Fisher’s ‘50s and ’60s films. The twinkle-eyed humour and theatrical winks of earlier productions are also stone dead by this point, as a character like John Stratton’s incompetent asylum director, who might have been a chortlesome comic relief figure in earlier instalments, is rendered simply as a weak-minded, lecherous fool. No laughs here, just cowed, brutalised inmates, bully-boys with rubber hoses and nothing no escape to outside except the cemetery. The “monster from hell” itself is – deliberately, I think – a fucking travesty of a thing, a pathetic, drooling disaster that looks like a shaved gorilla drunkenly superglued with random off-cuts from the Pinewood make up department; it’s almost painful to look at.

We all know who the real monster from hell is though, and towering above everything, Cushing. Of all of his increasingly nuanced portrayals of the Baron, I think this final outing is arguably the best. By this stage of course, his character had just about reached rock bottom, the combined weight of his previous outrages having reduced him to a truly abysmal set of circumstances. But when he first appears, Frankenstein, ever steadfast, refuses to acknowledge this at all. On the contrary, he seems like a force of order and stability, a champion of progress within the otherwise stygian and entropic world of the asylum… making the gradual realisation of how insane he is a truly ghastly thing to behold.

We know it’s coming of course, we’ve seen it all before, but even here Cushing can still make it seem fresh. The key moment for me I think is when, after it becomes clear his piss-poor gorilla-monster is nothing to shout about, he immediately starts making preparations for ‘mating’ the misbegotten thing with mute servant girl Madeline Smith, casually discussing what a triumph the off-spring of their union might be as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, leaving us to join with juvenile lead Shane Briant in our slack-jawed disbelief at such a cracked, barbaric, just plain CRAZED leap of logic, emanating from a man who still just about maintains the exterior of an efficient, gifted scientist. It’s rare to watch a Frankenstein film in which we actually, personally, feel the urge to smash the Baron’s instruments and burn the place to the ground, but that’s the level of queasiness that’s induced here.

And yet, still some sympathy remains. More than just the end of Hammer Horror, ‘..Monster from Hell’ is a grisly full stop at the end of the whole golden age of international gothic horror cinema that ‘Curse of Frankenstein’ kicked off some fifteen years earlier, concluding the cycle on a note of anguished, gore-strewn bleakness, as Cushing’s drawn, cadaverous face stares straight to camera, calmly addressing the crowd of senseless, unwashed lunatics who have just bloodily torn apart the innards of his final, hopeless monster; “Go back to your rooms. There is nothing more for you to see. It’s all over now… all over.”

4. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

Although I have a soft spot for the general oddness of Conan Doyle’s characters and tales, I’m not really a big Sherlock Holmes fan to be honest. The central business of investigative logic and puzzle-solving has never interested me much… just give me mystery and monsters and inexplicable hullaballoo in my Victorian pulp. Thankfully, Terrence Fisher and his collaborators seem to have broadly agreed with my sentiment, and there is precious little investigative padding to be found in Hammer’s only proper Holmes movie – a film I would point to before any of the Frankensteins or Draculas as a perfect distillation of everything that made Hammer’s late ‘50s / early ‘60s output so special.

I wrote about it a little bit here, but to reheat a few key points; like ‘Captain Clegg’, Bernard Robinson’s gorgeous gothic production design and Jack Asher’s photography render this a horror movie in all but name – I honestly think it’s one of the most beautiful films Hammer ever made. Just about every element of the colour, lighting and mise en scene pleases me greatly on some deep, sub-conscious level. And even more so than ‘Captain Clegg’, the cast is a phenomenal assemblage of oddball British talent. Cushing and Morell are so definitive as Holmes and Watson, I get unbearably disappointed whenever I see the characters played by other actors, and in addition we’ve got the combined ham-age of Francis DeWolff, John LeMesurier and Miles Malleson to contend with, plus Christopher Lee in what I think is one of his most tolerable and sympathetic performances as the nervous and incompetent Sir Henry Baskerville, a great villainous turn from the somewhat-less-renowned Ewen Solon, and Marla Landi as a memorably deranged femme fatale. Despite being assembled from elements that could very easily have produced a film as static, dated and dreary as anything to come out of Britain in the ‘50s, Fisher as usual keeps things moving at a steady pace, with no shortage of exciting goings on thrown in at regular intervals (sacrificial knife murder! spider attack!), and, well… like many of the films on this list, it’s just BLOODY GOOD essentially, and on some days there’s no higher accolade than that.

3. The Devil Rides Out (1968)

Brief thoughts on this one can be found in my old 25 Favourite Horror Films run-down, and probably don’t need repeating in a similar format here. But if you’ll allow me to begin on a bit of a tangent: did any of you lot catch all the controversy surrounding the blu-ray re-release of ‘Devil Rides Out’ last year? I had it pre-ordered and was really looking forward to catching up with it again (I’ve currently still only got it on an old VHS), until I caught wind of the new edition’s compulsory ‘improvements’ (see here for details), at which point cancelation was the only option.

My refusal to accept these changes has less to do with a kneejerk hatred of digital tinkering with old films (although I’ll admit, there’s probably an element of that), and more to do with the fact that they’ve gone and 'fixed' some of the things that I actually liked best about the original film. I know that writers and fans often tend to gripe about the poor quality of the effects in ‘The Devil Rides Out’, and that apparently the filmmakers weren’t entirely satisfied with them either, but I would like to go on record as saying that, personally, I think those scenes are great. I like the fact that the supernatural apparitions in this film simply appear, plain as day, with no thunder or lightning or palaver. The way that bug-eyed genies and giant spiders just turn up like they popped round to borrow a cup of sugar makes things all the more frightening, and surprising, and just plain weird. So many of the more ‘sophisticated’ Satanic cult movies that followed tried to present their demons in a more allegorical or hallucinatory terms, but there’s no need to worry about the devil’s subtle machinations here – look, there he is, over there! The Goat of Mendes himself! Quick, run the bastard over!

In some ways, ‘The Devil Rides Out’ seems like a film that should have been made in 1938 rather than 1968; it seems absurd to think that a treatment of the material this pompous and straight-faced turned up in cinemas mere months before the far more modernist, self-aware approach taken by ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, but (and you probably saw this one coming) the sheer, bloody-minded imperial old-fashionedness is precisely what makes me love it so much. Throughout the history of cinema, black magic / Satanism movies have tended to be a rather peculiar business- even going back to ‘The Black Cat’ (1934 version) and ‘The Seventh Victim’, they’ve been couched as grotesque dreams or ambiguous psychological mysteries or as unearthly fantasias of some kind. But there’s no room for any of that bloody nonsense here. All you need to take on Hammer’s Devil is the love of God and an elephant gun. And a firm handshake, an aristocratic title and a state of the art motor car would probably help too. And look out for those foreigners – they’re sure to be up to no good, with their bad manners and shifty pagan ways. Who knows what really goes on in those dark, sultry nights in the depths of…. what? Well I don’t care if he is from Birmingham, where did he go to school for god’s sake? Keep an eye on him, that’s all I’m saying. Praise the lord, and pass the brandy.

Though it may have arrived a few decades late, it was ‘The Devil Rides Out’ that really set the standard for the kind of ‘normal’ Satanist movie that subsequent entries in this persistently strange sub-genre would proceed to mimic and spoof and deny and generally trample all over, and rightly so of course – the whole thing is antiquated and offensive and ridiculous. But for establishing the instantly dated rules and proceeding to stick to them with stiff upper-lipped determination as everyone else looks on and laughs, and for still managing to produce a powerful, entertaining and captivating film in the process, I will love Terrance Fisher & co. forever.

2. The Damned (1961)

Jospeh Losey’s ‘The Damned’ (‘These are The Damned’ to US readers) was one of the first films I ever wrote about for this site, and whilst I honestly wouldn’t recommend you go back and read that review (say what you like re: recent content here, but I’ve certainly got a lot better at writing about movies over the years), the film itself remains a mindblower.

Though it’s probably not a film many people would recognise as a Hammer production after the opening credits have rolled, said credits reveal that ‘The Damned’ was indeed part of the studio’s core output rather than one of their “farmed out” ventures, with such familiar figures as Anthony Hinds, Michael Carreras, Bernard Robinson and Arthur Grant all taking a bow on this decidedly uncharacteristic and controversial feature… and who can forget James Bernard’s singular (I hope) attempt to get down with the kids and play some rock n’ roll (“black leather, black leather, crash crash crash..”)?

Presumably ‘The Damned’ was initially cooked up to cash-in on the previous year’s successful ‘Village of the Damned’, but in Losey’s hands the material takes on a far more challenging, conflicted and multi-faceted aspect than the rather one-dimensional allegory of Wolf Rilla’s Wyndham adaptation, or indeed any of the era’s numerous other British sci-fi films. Never less than immoderately ambitious, and on fine straining-at-the-leash form here, the director mixes up a whole mess of decidedly unusual parallel story arcs – Oliver Reed’s pre-Clockwork Orange psychopathy and quasi-incestuous domination of his sister, Alexander Knox’s anguished humanism and self-destructive pursuit of cold war oblivion, Viveca Lindfors’ rootless beatnik sculptress – ploughing them all into a central aesthetic conflict between the quaint, parochial atmosphere of contemporary British cinema and the brutal reality of military-industrial Ballardian bleakness lurking just around the corner, beyond the barbed wire fence on the clifftops; Losey (as usual) offers no apologies to anyone as he instigates what must surely be the most unrelenting torrent of politicised, quasi-avant garde b-movie destruction ever wrought upon the quiet streets of Weymouth.

A ridiculous, unsettling and completely unique car crash of pulp sci-fi absurdity, misunderstood teenage nihilism, eerie seaside atmospherics and tormented mid-century paranoia, I think it’s safe to say that anyone who enjoys the kind of stuff I write about on this blog but hasn’t seen ‘The Damned’ should rectify that situation immediately. Since I wrote my original review, a cheap, dandy looking Region 2 DVD has become available, so now you have no excuse – see it, see it, see it, as critics who get quoted on the side of buses are apt to say.

1. The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

The tone of this list has focused heavily on the nostalgic reveries and general comfort factor of watching Hammer films, and as such it seems fitting that it took me about 0.3 seconds to decide that my favourite one is ‘Plague of the Zombies’.

Few would contend that it’s the studio’s BEST film (although it’s pretty damn solid), and it’s certainly not as weird or challenging or accomplished as my top tier of favourite non-Hammer British horrors, but nonetheless, it’s the one that provides the warmest memories for me – the one that I can watch again and again without ever getting sick of it. It’s like a member of the family. I wish I could marry it, or take it on long walks, or… well, probably best end this paragraph right there. You get what I mean.

I ranked it at a surprisingly low #13 in my Favourite Horror Films list a few years back, and, as per ‘The Devil Rides Out’, you can read some of my primary thoughts about it there.

I don’t think ‘Plague..’ was the first Hammer film I saw during my formative years of late night TV viewing (if memory served, I might have sleepily suffered my way through ‘Satanic Rites of Dracula’ and ‘Lust For a Vampire’ before getting to this one), but it was the first one that I REALLY LIKED; the first one that really struck a chord with me, that made me laugh and made me feel shivery and enchanted and made me want to watch a lot more films like it and find out about who made them, and where, and why. As such it played a pretty pivotal role in bringing me to where I am now, writing this blog and so forth. Most of the late night horror films I watched in those days, I enjoyed simply because they were funny and crazy, but (whilst it still had a lot of knowing humour about it) ‘Plague..’ was the first one I remember seeing (beyond some of the obvious classics) that I felt I could watch seriously, as a good story well told, and could enjoy for its rich atmosphere, and for the craftsmanship and obvious enthusiasm that went into its production design and performances. It’s the first one that really drew me into the British (and by extension, European) Horror World, so to speak, rather than just leaving me a smirking spectator.

I liked it so much in fact that I recall I sampled most of the dialogue and music from it, pushing a microphone against the mono TV speaker, ostensibly to use it in some sort of botched music project, but actually just so that I could walk around playing it in my headphones, reliving the experience of the film, meaning that to this day I can recite half of Andre Morell’s dialogue from memory, and do most of the voodoo chanting too. Quite what inspired such obsessive behaviour, who knows. I’m sure I could bore you senseless talking about how superb I think Morell’s performance is in this film, about how my respect for John Gilling as a writer and director grows each time I (re)watch one of his films, about how utterly jaw-dropping and endlessly evocative the graveyard dream sequence with Jacqueline Pierce’s decapitation is, and how it pretty much encapsulates everything that I love about horror movies in the space of about three minutes…. but I’ve done all that before, and probably will again, so let’s just leave it at that, and say that after viewing it approximately once a year for about a decade, I still can’t wait until the next time I get a chance to sit down and watch ‘Plague of the Zombies’ again. It really makes me happy.

Top Fifteen Hammers:Part # 2.

Posted as part of the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon.

10. Cash on Demand (1961)

At the risk of making them sound like a particularly successful biscuit factory, there is something about the level of craftsmanship and quality control Hammer maintained during their peak years that really sets their films apart. A combination of technical know-how and creative self-belief that allowed them to take to take an unambitious b-picture like this one and turn it into something special – an engrossing, affecting and quietly timeless little number, with all the requisite elements for a fine, low budget motion picture, all in their proper place.

In lesser hands, Jacques Gillies’ source play could easily have become fodder for a teeth-grinding exercise in quota quickie tedium, centring as it does on one of the more polite bank heists in cinema history, as bullish conman Andre Morell forcibly intrudes into the hermetic world of tyrannical suburban bank manager Peter Cushing. Whilst the film’s setting may be quaint however, its crime elements are excellently handled, exemplary in their edge-of-seat tension building, generating a sense of menace and suspense here that the makers of higher octane thrillers would do well to match.

That aside though, it’s the performances that really make it stand out. Seeing Cushing and Morell – two of my favourite actors – butt heads is very much the equivalent of a British character actor title fight, with both really punching on top form. Always a genial and domineering presence when he’s given a lead role to sink his teeth into, Morell brings the same sense of authority and determination that made him so memorable in ‘Plague of the Zombies’ and the BBC version of ‘Quatermass & The Pit’, but tempered here with a caddish, upper-crust kind of destructive criminality that makes his character a truly nasty piece of work. Cushing, for his part, always excelled at playing torn, schizophrenic characters – men either conflicted and uncertain, or else hiding their true nature behind a wall of repression – and here, in the character of Henry Fordyce, he finds an opportunity to fully express this theme within a real world context, leading to what is arguably one of his best ever performances.

Fordyce’s Dickens-inspired character arc, which sees him rediscovering his long-buried capacity for human feeling by means of a Scrooge-like last reel rebirth, could easily have been played as bit of cloying sentimentality, but Cushing instead adopts a deeper, more subtle approach to the part, making sure that hints of Fordyce’s humanity break through his shell even during his most intensely dislikeable moments. For all his evident faults and petty cruelties, Fordyce’s eccentric gestures and slight uncertainties of judgement serve all the times to suggest a parallel, internalised world in which he is indeed a man who feels and loves and does what he believes to be right, away from the eyes of his cowed employees, and probably even those of his unseen family. It’s the same essential key note that is repeated throughout Cushing’s numerous portrayals of tormented villainy, reminding us that though a man may be capable of monstrous acts, there is no such thing as a man who is a monster; that within the breast of even the most craven, despicable wretch, a human heart still beats. A fairly basic point, whether examined through the prism of a horror, a crime story or a straight drama, but it is rare to see it expressed with the level of lyricism and conviction Cushing brings to his modest part in this none-more-modest movie.

9. Brides of Dracula (1960)

Although it’s probably one of the best-loved Hammer horrors amongst fans, there’s something about ‘Brides of Dracula’ that has never quite sat well with me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I really, really like it – hence its position on this list. But something about it bugs me. I guess I see it as film of two halves really; the first half, set in and around Castle Meinster is admittedly stunning, no question. One of the most awe-inspiring bits of high gothic artistry ever produced in popular cinema. The sheer depth and scale of the illusion Fisher, Robinson, Asher et al create here from a few sets, a few matte paintings and a few lighting effects is truly remarkable, probably the zenith of Bray-era Hammer’s always excellent production design, with a grand and tragic narrative to match, including a devastating turn from Martita Hunt as the mother of our errant vampire. Not that making ‘60s gothic horror movies was a competitive sport or anything, but if it ever came down to an instant KO, bare-knuckled tournament, I think the opening half hour of ‘Brides..’ takes down Corman, and maybe even beats Mario Bava on points; incredible stuff.

After that though, for me at least, it kinda gets a bit lost. All that faffing about at the boarding school kinda saps the film’s momentum and, whilst I’ve frequently heard it praised elsewhere, I can’t help but find the conclusion a bit of a let-down. Yeah, the stuff with Van Helsing cauterising his infected wound is pretty damn cool, but I get frustrated at the titular brides’ failure to do much beyond just stand around, and the method of Count Meinster’s final demise just strikes me as bloody silly – the genesis of Hammer’s unfortunate tradition of killing off their vampires in increasingly stupid and anti-climactic ways, swiftly leading to a situation where their arch-fiends seem so vulnerable it’s no wonder Dracula spent most of his later outings lurking about in a darkened crypt. Between running water, hawthorn bushes, inconveniently shaped shadows and randomly angled pieces of wood, just walking down the high street must have been an obstacle course of death for the poor sod. But anyway – ‘Brides of Dracula’. Um, to be honest, I haven’t seen this one for a while at the time of writing – probably long overdue for a re-watch, so don’t take me to task too harshly if you disagree with my assessment.

8. She (1965)

Ok, so you’d be hard-pressed to really defend this one as a legitimately good film – by any reasonable standard it’s rambling, shoddy, unconvincing and dated. But on the level of pure cinematic comfort food, it’s perfect.

Claiming it as “the closest thing Hammer ever did to an Indiana Jones movie” seems a bit wrong-headed given the film’s origin in the H. Rider Haggard novel that at least partially formed the basis for the exotic pulp adventure aesthetic that the creators of the Jones films drew upon so heavily all those years later, but nonetheless, it’s a good one-line summation of what’s going on here, and Peter Cushing, in his tougher-than-usual portrayal of Haggard’s Major Horace Holly, is every inch the precursor of Harrison Ford, rocking stubble, leathers and an ever-present hipflask (pity he wasn’t around for casting when Sean Connery got the dad part in ‘..Last Crusade’).

Post-dubbed Ursula Andress doesn’t do a lot for me here I’m sad to say, but I suppose there’s only do much you can do with the role of a stone-faced 1,000 year old goddess, and needless to say, the rest of the cast more than more up for her lack of charisma – Morell! Lee! And, uh… Cribbins?! Well, why the hell not. It’s even kinda nice to see John Richardson from ‘Black Sunday’ as the juvenile lead, even if he is characteristically annoying. Likewise, you may chuckle at the polystyrene boulders and wobbly columns, but I’d defy you to make a better film set in the uncharted wilds of North Africa without leaving Herefordshire – well done people! (Actually it seems they headed over the Isreal for some of the desert stuff, but, uh… my point still stands, more or less.)

A perfect exemplar of my firmly-held belief that nothing that begins with Peter Cushing and Bernard Cribbins instigating a brawl in a belly-dancing club can possibly be bad, ‘She’ is utterly undemanding, hugely enjoyable, and basically I want it on TV every rainy afternoon from now until the end of eternity.

7. The Reptile (1966)

Another one I’ve written about previously, but what else can I tell you friends - I love The Reptile. I mean, you’d perhaps be forgiven for thinking that a b-level production with a plot synopsis that barely extends beyond “there is a reptile” might not add up to much, but as was so often the case during Hammer’s classic years, John Gilling and his collaborators really rise above. Fetid Cornish moorland atmosphere, weird echoes of high imperial decadence, Michael Ripper finally getting to step up to the plate for a steadfast hero role, Jacqueline Pierce’s big dark, dreamy eyes, and of course, Noel Willman’s sitar-smashing frenzy – one of the most brilliant and beserk moments in any Hammer picture. Yeah, an evening with this Reptile is time well spent.

6. Captain Clegg (1962)

So, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this one: how do you fancy watching an early ‘60s Terrence Fisher film based on Russell Thorndike’s Edwardian pulp classic ‘Dr. Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh’, in which Peter Cushing plays a notorious pirate captain who narrowly escaped the hangman’s noose, reinventing himself as the mild-mannered vicar of the rural Kent parish in which his former self is ‘buried’, and from which he now orchestrates an intricate smuggling operation? With the help of cohorts including coffin-maker Michael Ripper and two-fisted libertine Oliver Reed, Clegg and his gang gallop across the night-haunted marshes in the guise of luminous, skeleton-suited ‘marsh phantoms’, running rings around His Majesties sour-faced revenue-men in a noble quest to raise the living standards of the local peasantry and provide the upstanding folk of South-East England with a steady supply of cheap booze, aaaand… well, basically, if your aesthetic sensibilities are anything like mine, you are probably straining at the leash by this point to watch what surely must be one of the GREATEST FILMS OF ALL-TIME, much as I was before I finally tracked down a decent copy of this harder-to-find-than-it-should-be Hammer epic and sat down with some nut-brown ale to experience what was sure to be a rare state of Bodhisattva-like oneness with the universe.

As it turns out, the reality of ‘Captain Clegg’ (better known in the US as ‘Night Creatures’) couldn’t possibly live up to my off-the-scale expectations, but that didn’t stop it from still being really, really good. With both feet firmly planted in the tradition of Hammer’s “pirate movies without pirate ships” half-term swashbucklers, there is perhaps a tad more theatrical faffing about and inconsequential toing and froing going on here than 21st century viewers may be comfortable with, but that aside, there is still so, so much to enjoy. Even though it’s not strictly a horror film, the fog-shrouded nocturnal atmosphere, the fixation with graves, executions and premature burials and the sight of the ‘marsh phantoms’ charging across the moors like precursors to the Blind Dead all add up to one of Hammer’s best ever gothic fantasias – an approach that is very much in keeping with the feel of Thorndike’s decidedly weird stories. Seeing Cushing transform from an absent-minded country parson to a merciless criminal gang leader in a split second is a sheer joy, and when the great man takes up his blade for a bit of chandelier-bothering swashbucklage towards the end, well… I’m certainly a happy camper. I probably don’t need to tell you that the supporting cast are superb, the production design is second to none, and aside from anything else, how great is it to see a Hammer film in which we’re invited to cheer on a bunch of booze-sozzled lags, decadent romantics and scurvy outlaws as they get one over on the forces of austere state bureaucracy? It’s like a version of ‘Whiskey Galore’ where shit just got real, and another kick in the pants to those over-reaching auteurists who’d seek to identify Fisher directly with the puritanical morality of his horror films.

To be concluded...

Top Fifteen Hammers:Part # 1.

Posted as part of the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon.

For no reason at all beside the fact that I enjoy making pointless lists, and that thinking about Hammer horror films makes me feel warm and cozy as I plod through the dreary complexities of the working week, I’ve recently found myself casually pondering what my favourite entries in the studio’s filmography are, and why. Just a bit of harmless, everyday nerd-think, but I thought it might translate into some nice, easy-going blog posts to keep things ticking over until I feel like I’ve got the energy to handle some more heavy duty movie review-age.

Not that cutting things down to a workable top fifteen was easy, mind you. I mean, I can reel off my top three at the drop of a hat (long-term readers with good memories may recall what they are), but beyond that, things get a bit murky. With the untouchable top level out of the way, my second tier of Hammer favourites consists of a large number of movies (most of the Frankensteins and Mummys, a few of the better Draculas, the Carmilla/Karnstein films and so on) that are just plain good - so consistent and enjoyable that it’s difficult to really pick any one over the others. They all do exactly what horror movies are supposed to do whilst still including enough quirks, nuances and unforgettable moments to make each one unique, and for that I am very grateful.

Perhaps inevitably therefore, the list below swings somewhat in the direction of the studios more eccentric and low-key productions - they being the ones that tend to stick most strongly in my memory. But that’s not to say that I couldn’t happily watch their more ‘routine’ offerings all day for the rest of my life and have a perfectly nice time in the process.

I’d imagine that most of this blog’s readers probably have more than a passing familiarity with the Hammer catalogue, but if there are any newcomers in the audience, I hope my list might lead you to some good entry points into the world of these films. And for the old hands out there, well, dumb lists like this are always a good way to spark discussion, and I always like talkin’ Hammer, so by all means feel free to let rip in the comments box.

Oh, and before we begin, probably also worth mentioning that this list is by no means supposed to be read as a complete or final judgement on the Hammer canon. Given prolific nature of the studio’s output, there are still plenty of their films that I’ve never even seen, so who knows, perhaps there are some whole other top twenty lurking out there that I’ve not yet even become acquainted with… and what a nice feeling that is.

So without further ado…

15. The Gorgon (1964)

 I wrote about this one pretty extensively here, and for me it remains one of Hammer’s most romantic, impenetrable and philosophically unglued outings, as the limitations imposed by a rather poorly thought out supernatural conceit are countered by one of the studio’s grandest fairytale gothic production designs, a chillingly ambiguous Cushing performance, and some soul-aching ruminations on the nature of entropy and confinement. Not exactly a good choice for a laugh and a few beers, but compelling viewing all the same.

14. The Vampire Lovers (1970)

 Amid all the misfires, oddities and strange diversions that comprise Hammer’s catalogue of vampire films, ‘The Vampire Lovers’ is one of the more straight-forward entries, and also, I think, one of the best. Delivering pretty much exactly what you’d expect in terms of lavish Victoriana, nocturnal cemetery hi-jinks, furtive hints of lesbianism and craggy-faced puritanical ass-kicking, Roy Ward Barker’s initial take on the Carmilla mythos essentially defines the agenda for the ‘70s Euro-vampire movie, setting a bar that the continent’s other purveyors of such material could proceed to soar above or mambo under as they saw fit. Although it never really achieves anything exceptional (beyond a gentle bit of first-time-in-a-British-horror same sex petting), ‘..Lovers’ is solid as a brick shithouse - as generic and satisfying as horror movies get.

13. Demons of the Mind (1972)

As noted above, most of my favourite Hammer films serve to evoke a warm, nostalgic atmosphere that I find very reassuring. This nasty little number though is a different kettle of fish entirely. With disorientating, bombastic direction from Peter Sykes and a script from the reliably out-to-lunch Christopher Wicking, ‘Demons of the Mind’ is a decidedly un-Hammer-like production that seems to be aiming instead to smash a hole in the side of your head, draining out the bits of your mind that think about the weather and what’s for dinner, and replacing them with endless close-ups of Robert Hardy’s sweaty moustachioed face, screaming in tormented delirium. Coming on like ‘The Black Torment’ on steroids, or a dark old house murder mystery spiked with some lethal extract of psychotropic mould, this psychologically assaultive, dark-family-secrets country estate slasher farrago simply defies description. Much like Coppola’s ‘Dementia 13’ a decade previously, you’ll know you’re onto a bit of a rum do when Patrick Mcgee turns up halfway through and actually seems like one of the more relaxed and well-balanced individuals on-screen.

12. The Lost Continent (1968)

Probably the biggest WTF in the Hammer filmography, this ill-starred Dennis Wheatley adaptation is a colossally misguided, schizophrenically inconsistent, directionless, crippled-at-birth vanity project disasterpiece that I’m afraid to say I absolutely love. The subject of so much behind the scenes aggro that it nearly tore Hammer apart, with James Carreras eventually stepping in to forcibly shut down his son Michael’s floundering production, the film that eventually emerged is so astonishingly strange, I’m surprised it hasn’t been cited more often as a bone fide ‘what-the-hell-were-they-thinking’ cult classic. I could say a lot more about this one, and hopefully at some point I will, but for the moment let us simply shake our heads in disbelief as a narrative framework seemingly requisitioned from a cynical ‘70s airport disaster novel stumbles headfirst into an anything-goes world of ridiculous stop motion sea monsters, fanatical Spanish Inquisitors, random tentacle attacks, descendants of marooned 16th century mariners bouncing around on giant, balloon-aided hovercraft shoes and, notably, no bloody lost continent. Incredible.

11. The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Another film that was been somewhat overlooked due to a perceived failure to directly deliver on the title, characteristically solid Val Guest joint ‘The Abominable Snowman’ has long been dismissed by monster fans as talky, stagy, uneventful. Once one can accept the fact that few bigfoot-related hi-jinks are forthcoming however, I think it can be appreciated as a very fine piece of work indeed – not a horror movie as such, nor a daring-do action-adventure flick, but as an atmospheric and intelligent study of men coming face to face with the unknown, finding their assumptions about the world mutating and collapsing, as physical peril and the quest for basic survival becomes ever more urgent. Whilst ‘..Snowman’s scientifically-inclined, remote location monster movie set-up was already pretty boilerplate stuff by the late ‘50s (there are clear nods here to both ‘The Creature From The Black Lagoon’ (’54) and Howard Hawks’ ‘The Thing from Another World’ (‘51)), Nigel Kneale’s script nonetheless takes a deeper and more challenging approach to the material than his predecessors, resulting in something wholly unique.

As with much of his best SF writing, Kneale here concentrates on mixing up the scientific with the sublimely mysterious, challenging both rationalists and mystics to come to terms with a more nuanced reality that fits nobody’s blue-prints. A careful balance of location and set-bound shooting (Hammer actually flew a crew out to the Pyrenees for this one, believe it or not) and a commanding central performance from Cushing really sells us on the reality of the on-screen drama as it unfolds, with Guest wisely taking a Val Lewton-like fear-of-the-unseen approach to proceedings, emphasizing Kneale’s conception of the yeti as not just a physical presence but a wholly alien, telepathic intelligence, and giving the film an aura that is both chilling and actually kinda beautiful, even as the bolts tighten on a subdued but persistently effective bit of survival horror.

To be continued…

GOTHIC ORIGINALS: The Gorgon (Terrence Fisher, 1964)

 

 

Contrary to the grand narrative that sees Hammer going from strength to strength following the establishment of their horror brand in the late ‘50s, the early ‘60s actually proved a pretty tempestuous time for the studio, and for their star director Terrence Fisher in particular. After a series of commercially misguided Fisher-helmed projects bombed at the box office in ’61-‘62, Hammer’s American partners were getting cagey, the BBFC were taking a stricter approach to the perceived excesses of the studio’s horror subjects, and both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, apparently uneasy about their typecasting as horror stars, were cutting down their Hammer commitments and seeking work elsewhere.

As a result, many were predicting that the studio’s run of international success would run out of steam entirely during ’63-’64, and this atmosphere can very much be felt in their biggest 1964 prospect, ‘The Gorgon’ - one of those movies that seems to be indelibly marked by turmoil and bad blood behind the scenes, all the more so given the assorted disagreements that resulted from the convoluted scripting process, which saw a three way tug of war between original writer J. Llewellyn Devine, Hammer writer/director John Gilling and producer Anthony Nelson Keys, none of whom came away satisfied with the finished product.

Although ‘The Gorgon’ marked the much-heralded return of Fisher, Cushing and Lee (together for the first time since 1959’s ‘The Mummy’), the resulting film hardly seems a likely candidate to revive studio’s fortunes, being perhaps the most troubling, uncertain and generally weird entry in all of Hammer’s ‘60s output, replicating the inexplicable decision-making that helped make ‘Curse of the Werewolf’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ such financial disasters, but with arguably even less on hand to help win over a hostile audience.

Quite what possessed Hammer to green-light inexperienced screenwriter Devine’s tale of a two thousand year old Greek gorgon roaming around a turn of the century Germanic castle is anyone’s guess, but, on the surface at least, it leads to a inherently absurd, underdeveloped b-movie premise that seems to simply hang in the void, disconnected from any of the more storied gothic traditions that provided Hammer with a readymade background and familiar dramatic arc for their other horror films.

As perhaps befits this peculiar storyline, ‘The Gorgon’ is chiefly notable to fans as one of the most ambiguous and oddly existential of Hammer’s ‘60s films – a kind of brooding, bad tempered fairytale that seems to hark back more to the gothic of Goethe or Ludwig Tieck than Bram Stoker - and as an odd diversion in Fisher’s filmography, in which the strict Christian duality and comforting sense of cosmic balance with which his work is often credited seems to break down completely, leaving an unsettling absence in its wake.

Our first clue that this is some slightly unusual Hammer business comes via Cushing’s character, Dr Namaroff. Given enough screen time to suggest him as a protagonist of sorts, Namaroff is a reticent and secretive sort of fellow who seems to bully and mislead those around him whilst concealing some greater purpose, and his inconsistent behaviour will initially have those used to the simplistic dynamics of pulp storytelling performing mental cartwheels trying to decide whether he’s the hero or the villain of the piece. Seemingly spending most of the movie brusquely dismissing people from his presence, denying knowledge and refusing to answer questions, Cushing’s performance owes a lot to his similarly forceful, manipulative portrayals of Baron Frankenstein, but with the central goal of that character's single-minded pursuit replaced with, well… what? We don’t know, and he’s certainly not telling anybody.

Normally Hammer’s scripts were tight as a drum, with logical plot progression and linear motivations kept paramount, however daft the initial premise might be. Here though, things seem to have been left to unravel, as if an unseemly sense of continental randomness has been allowed to contaminate the rational imperial brew.

With a basic storyline that sees the father, and subsequently the brother, of a bohemian artist who came to a bad end during the pre-credits sequence travelling to the inhospitable village of Vandorf to investigate matters, proceedings swiftly become rather drawn out and repetitive, with little action (none that makes much sense, anyway) to help lift the overall feeling of narrative inertia. The precise nature of how the hell this gorgon business came about remains frustratingly vague, as, more pointedly, does the extent and significance of Dr. Namaroff’s apparent relationship with his young assistant Barbara Shelley. An entire sub-plot about a mad woman Namaroff keeps locked up in his surgery, and the strange autopsy he carries out after her death, fades away halfway through, having served no narrative purpose whatsoever, and… so on.

The root of all this uncertainty perhaps goes back to the aforementioned conflicts over the film’s script, and it seems likely that Fisher and the cast might have been left to patch up the results on set as they went along. Fisher seems to have realised how flimsy the Gorgon premise is, and wisely uses it primarily as a metaphor to frame the film’s actual drama – that of a rather anaemic love triangle between two weak, troubled men and a lonely, isolated woman, all trying to seek happiness in a stifling, repressive world where the admission of love or affection seems tantamount to death, resulting in an emotional as well as physical process of petrification.

Thankfully, the central cast all to their best inject some life into the material, and must be praised for managing to invest this rather vague and inconsequential story with a believable emotional clout. Richard Pasco in particular is excellent as a far more interesting and conflicted protagonist/juvenile lead figure than you’d expect to find in a Hammer hammer – a strange man for a strange film - whilst Barbara Shelley excels in a role that allows her to get stuck into creating a real character for once. Cushing, of course, owns, seeming to enjoy the challenges presented by his ambiguous and guilt-wracked character, and the only weak link is Lee, blundering in for the final act as a kind of ersatz Van Helsing figure whose sole function seems to be to propel the story towards a conclusion. (Still, at least it hopefully stopped him moaning about how he never gets to play the hero for a few years.)

Also very much in the film’s favour is the fact that it is perhaps the most beautiful film Hammer ever made, with Bernard Robinson’s production design returning to the near Pre-Raphaelite sense of visual splendour achieved by his best moments in earlier films, and maintaining it throughout. The exquisitely detailed matte paintings and models used to establish the landscape around the village and the derelict, neo-classical interior of the hilltop castle are absolutely stunning, as is the hillside cemetery set where Pasco digs up the petrified body of his father and (rather disconcertingly under the circumstances) shares a tender moment with Shelley. Never has Hammer’s much-remarked upon debt to the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s been clearer than it is in these lush, technicolour romantic interludes, of which the film boasts several.

Classic-era Hammer cinematographer Jack Asher may have left the company by this point, but Michael Reed does a fine job picking up where his predecessor left off, and even James Bernard’s music is at its best here, easing back slightly on his usual orchestral bombast and instead synchronising the voice of a lone female soprano with the sound of an early electronic instrument called the Novachord to beguiling and otherworldly effect, resulting in one of the only Hammer soundtracks that I might actually consider listening to outside the context of the movie. In all technical departments in fact, the film is impeccable in its creation of a rich, brooding atmosphere, exemplifying all of the expertise and attention to detail that makes the production design of Bray-era Hammer such a joy. Utterly unreal though it may be, the world of ‘The Gorgon’ is one of the studio’s most complete aesthetic creations – a confined, threatening landscape in which human warmth is just another mystery, lurking forever out of reach.

With its temporarily transformed human monster, its concentration on lunar cycles and incessant shots of the full moon, ‘The Gorgon’ could easily have been a werewolf movie, an idea furthered by its repetition of transgressive nocturnal journeys through the dark, dark woods, leading, inevitably, to the forbidden castle, where death or love or transformation awaits – a notion that connects the film on a near-subconscious level to a tradition of imagery that links everything from Grimm’s fairytales to 1941’s ‘The Wolfman’ to ‘Twin Peaks’.

At this point, it’s probably my duty to note that when Prudence Hyman’s Gorgon is finally encountered, the effects used in realising the monster are, shall we say, a little less effective than might be hoped. “The only thing wrong with ‘The Gorgon’ is the gorgon”, Lee was quoted as saying, but whatever consternation such drawbacks might have provoked at the time, hopefully by this stage we can at least appreciate the costume as an honest attempt to realise a creature who really only plays an incidental or allegorical role in the story Fisher and his cast are telling, making her failure to convince seem oddly appropriate (as well as continuing the noble tradition of lovably rubbish Hammer monsters that was to continue through ‘The Reptile’, ‘The Devil Rides Out’ and beyond).

As much as we might enjoy its assorted ambiguities and eccentricities though, there is still something frustratingly incomplete at the heart of ‘The Gorgon’. In the midst of its behind-the-scenes wrangling and disagreements over tone, content and commercial possibilities, it is a film that often ends up merely hinting at its possibilites rather than fully embodying them. Whilst it's certainly not one of the studio’s most immediately satisfying productions though, Hammer aficionados and fans of slow, strange horror films in general will nonetheless find plenty of finer points to appreciate within.

Gothic Horror Round-up: The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961)

The only werewolf movie ever attempted by Hammer, and to be honest it’s not hard to see why. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘Curse..’ exactly, but it’s certainly one of the most peculiar, loosely structured horror films the studio made during their ‘classic’ era, marred by a number of downright odd production decisions.

For a start, it’s supposed to be set in Spain, a circumstance that seems fairly inexplicable for a film made in England with a screenplay based on Guy Endore’s book ‘The Werewolf of Paris’. Apparently it was down to Hammer’s desire to reuse a bunch of sets that were lying around from an aborted Spanish Civil War film. Despite the best efforts of cast and production team though, this unconventional setting never quite gels, and the film is full of weirdly incongruous elements of ‘local colour’ that lend a certain feeling of dislocation to proceedings.

Funny isn’t it how a gothic horror film can purport to be set pretty much anywhere in central or Eastern Europe and still seem plausible as everybody storms about with English accents, but Spain just doesn’t ring true at all? (Hammer ran into the same problem again a few years later of course with ‘The Devil Ship Pirates’, only there it was exacerbated by the fact that the Spanish English were pitched against the English English, leading to confusion all round.)

(Whether or not this geographical detail gave the film a higher profile in Spain I’m not sure, but it’s an interesting point to ponder, given the possible influence exerted by Hammer’s sympathetic werewolf-hero on the wolfman created by Paul Naschy later in the '60s..?)

Perhaps more crucial to ‘Curse..’s commercial failure than the cockney Spaniards though is the decision to open the film with a whole half hours-worth of historical prologue, much of which seems less like a horror flick and more like some particularly morbid variation on an old Alexander Korda costume drama. There is at least an engagingly gruesome tale being told here, of a mute serving girl (Yvonne Romain) who, as the Mounds and Circles weblog put it recently, “..is unjustly imprisoned, raped by a feral lunatic, commits murder, gives birth to a werewolf and then kills herself”. Nice.

With an appropriately cruel and downbeat tone to them, these scenes – including Anthony Dawson’s fine turn as a cringing, debauching aristocrat - are actually very good, but with no central character or linear narrative to hang our hats on, even the most patient viewer will be asking WHERE THE HELL IS THE GODDAMN WEREWOLF ALREADY by the time the first half hour creeps by. Subsequently, we have a long segment detailing the adoption, christening and early life of our wolfman character, together with an extensive deviation into the nature of disagreements between a number of local shepherds and the ineffectual night watchman charged with protecting their flocks from wild animals, before we cut to ‘the present’ and our leading man Oliver Reed finally strolls on-screen with a carefree swagger just before the 50 minute mark.

Now, I don’t have to tell you that Oliver Reed as the wolfman is a bit of a hole in one and should naturally have been allotted more screentime, but in fairness to Hammer this was a good few years before Reed became a household name. In fact, like some of his other early b-movie roles (think ‘Beat Girl’ or ‘67’s ‘The Shuttered Room’), it’s interesting to see him cast not as the brooding tough guy, but as more of a feckless, happy-go-lucky young fellow, capering ‘round the screen like a bull in a china shop. Of course, being a werewolf and all, it’s not long before he gets to bring a more characteristic palette of angst, confusion and physical menace to the role.

As with ‘Baskervilles’, production values are top-notch in spite of the fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry sets, and from his introduction onward, the film really picks up steam, finally heading in the direction we might have initially expected from a Hammer werewolf movie starring Oliver Reed. Well, kind of. First our hapless young lycanthrope gets a job bottling wine at a vineyard (“there’s the labels y’see, and there’s the bottles – you put the wine inside, you put the labels outside” says his layabout buddy Jose, showing him the ropes –another great low-key performance from TV actor Martin Matthews). Then he cultivates an unthinkable, Romeo and Juliet style relationship with the daughter of the vineyard owner, a circumstance confounded both by a long-standing family enmity and, more pressingly, our lad’s frequent full moon rampages.

A lot of fun if you’ve got a bit of patience, there is much to enjoy in ‘Curse..’ – some fantastic moments, quality performances, Oliver Reed being a frigging werewolf, and a well-told, heart-string tugging take on the old doomed wolfman tale at its core. With it’s rambling prologue, frequent down-time and odd digressions into low-rent historical epic territory though, the overall impression you’re left with is less that of a classic Hammer, more one that’s just… kinda peculiar.

Gothic Horror Round-up:The Hound of The Baskervilles(Terrence Fisher, 1959)

Oh, what a treat. Perhaps unfairly neglected in the Hammer canon due to its nominal non-horror status, what could be better cinematic comfort food than this? Peter Cushing and Andre Morell portraying Holmes and Watson so definitively that I think they were occupying the characters in my mind long before I saw the film, and Christopher Lee essaying precisely the kind of role he's best at, the pompous and ineffectual Sir Henry Baskerville. John Le Mesurier is Barrymore the family retainer, world class ham Francis De Wolfe is Dr Mortimer, Ealing regular Miles Malleson is the doddering old bishop, and the cast is rounded out with a veritable coachload of other second string character actors, not a Bland Young Man amongst them. Even Italian actress Marla Landi gives it her best shot, adding a welcome dose of vengeful craziness to her role as the token pretty girl.

Everybody seems to be having a lovely time, and to be honest, when scheming gentleman farmer Ewen Solon invites the occupants of Baskerville Hall round to his place for dinner, I was sad that the damned plot got in the way, denying us a scene in which everybody sits around his rustic table, having a good laugh over a flagon or two of cider. Why can’t they all just get along?

But intervene the plot must, and whilst I’m unable to pass comment on the extent to which this is a faithful adaptation of the story (never bothered reading Conan Doyle to be honest), it’s certainly a good script from Peter Bryan – sharp, characterful and well-paced as you could hope for from a bit of 50s/60s b-movie hokum, exemplifying all the virtues of ‘quality’ held dear by partisans of Hammer’s pre-’66 output. As might well be expected, Fisher’s direction follows suit, and after the groundbreaking success of their recent Frankenstein and Dracula movies the studio clearly made no bones about playing this one about as close to a gothic horror as was humanly possible, incorporating strong scenes of villainy and bloodletting (not to mention a memorable set-piece that sees Lee menaced by a tarantula) that seem mild today but must have been fairly startling back in ’59.

Above all here, the production design is absolutely suburb, the eerie fog-strewn moors, the abandoned chapel and the underground caverns all contributing some of the most richly atmospheric backdrops ever seen in a Hammer picture, the autumnal cinematography looking better than ever, with subtle deployment of blue and green lighting amid the deep brown n’ black raising the film’s exterior sequences to a level approaching that of Bava’s early ‘60s masterpieces or the first half of Hammer’s own ‘Brides of Dracula’ - a definitive piece of technicolor gothic.

I’m not one of those who insists that Hammer’s Bray-era output was automatically superior to their subsequent releases, but still, it’s sad that the ubiquity of some of their later, sillier efforts tends to leave superb, low-key films like this one in the shadows. Should you ever need an example of all the more refined characteristics that stuffier Hammer-heads maintain the studio lost amid their embrace of flares, boobs, dinosaurs and shoddy methods of killing vampires, ‘..Baskervilles’ is the one to go for.

#16 The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968)

It’s funny how I’ve always found Dennis Wheatley’s best-selling witchcraft potboilers to be an insufferable load of insufferable, sanctimonious guff, and yet somehow I love Hammer’s take on “The Devil Rides Out” - an adaptation that if anything renders its source material even more smug and puritanical.

In some ways, I’ve always thought there is almost something almost sweet about Hammer’s Manichean puritanism - something quite comforting and noble about the steadfast, upstanding heroes of their vampire movies, forever protecting their buxom womenfolk from the depravations of immoral monsters. Wheatley’s dire warnings against the forces of darkness by contrast just seem sleazy and hypocritical, like a public school master berating his charges for their ‘dirty thoughts’. Thankfully though, it is the former aspect that predominates in Terrence Fisher’s film, a thoroughly enjoyable affair that sets out to define itself as ‘the quintessential, old-fashioned witchcraft movie’ with such Victorian vigour that witchcraft movies made ten years before it end up looking modern by comparison.

One of my favourite scenes in all cinema has to be the one here in which The Duc de Richleau and his allies watch from a distance as evil sorcerer Mocata’s coven carry out their black mass on a starless Walpurgis midnight. Partly because their polite, fully-clothed ‘orgy’ is such a gas, but mostly for the moment when our heroes look on in disbelief as a giant, horned figure – “..the Goat of Mendes… the devil himself!” – rises at the climax of their ritual. I mean, that’s motherfucking SATAN, standing right right there guys! No messing around! And how do our heroes respond but by hitting the accelerator and driving their motor-car RIGHT AT HIM. Physical manifestation of the lord of all evil, pah - run the bastard over, that’ll sort him out! I can only assume it is the sheer, true-hearted bravery of our protagonists, rather than the hurled crucifix, that gets the job done, making The Horned One cut his losses and quit the scene in a puff of smoke.

It is this wonderful, bloodyminded literalism that I love above all about “The Devil Rides Out”. Faced with the prospect of trying to represent magical conflict and the evocation of demons in a movie, Fisher and co bypass all the go-to techniques usually brought in to make such subject matter palatable – excessive atmosphere, implication and subtlety, ‘monsters of the id’ style psychological peril, psychedelic freakout etc. – and instead misstep the audience by doing the last thing anyone would expect: giving it to us straight. There is something incredibly unsettling about the way the horrors of Mocata’s bestiary simply *appear* at his command, centre-screen in full light - a shock that mirrors the way one might actually feel if suddenly confronted with a boggle-eyed imp or a giant, spectral tarantula. The sequence that see The Duc and his allies under attack from the forces of darkness within their chalk circle is one of the most effective ever seen in a supernatural horror film – a masterclass in building tension and dread from almost nothing whatsoever. Whatever you do, DO NOT STEP OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE, or you will be lost. Rarely has the idea of cringing before the forces of goodness and light and promising not to be naughty seemed so tempting.

If Christopher Lee as The Duc initially comes across as a rather self-satisfied and bullying character, what with his dictatorial pronouncements, his haughty attitude to servants and his tendency to beat his friends about the head and kidnap them if he disapproves of their social life, he more than rises to the occasion when the supernatural shit starts to hit the fan – the very personification of stern, benevolent authority, with more gravitas than the cliffs of Dover. I’m not Lee’s biggest fan, but he’s great here - enough so to make me wish he’d had the chance to play good guys more often.

Although given a more low-key role than villains are usually allotted in a Hammer picture, Charles Grey too is excellent as Mocata – a casting decision that in its own way is as unusual as making Lee the good guy. Not in any way the kind cool, aspirational face of villainy more common to witchcraft movies, Grey cuts a chubby, smirking, manipulative figure – closer perhaps to the face of an actual ‘60s/’70s occult huckster. And, whilst we’re on the subject, I’ll also throw in a good word for Nike Arrighi – a striking actress who manages to turn the nothing-role of Tanith into a really engaging presence here, her demure looks and mannered performance placing her in a whole different universe from Hammer’s usual buxom beauties, and making her character all the more intriguing as a result.

For all that I enjoy it though, it must be admitted that there is a deep current of anachronistic imperialism, even flat-out racism, running through “The Devil Rides Out” that many modern viewers might find distasteful, beyond just the sight of our comfortable, independently wealthy heroes and villains cruising between country houses in their fleets of unfeasibly speedy and reliable motor-cars. I’m not usually one to try to project social consciousness onto a film that never asked to be judged on such terms, but the presence of a few black extras who are seem milling around whenever Mocata’s coven meets is a strange and completely unnecessary inclusion (perhaps trying to imply some spurious connection between Western witchcraft and African ‘hoodoo’, or merely warning us that people who consort with other races are not to be trusted), and it is hard not to read at least some sub-text into the film’s first supernatural manifestation, which sees The Duc and Rex Van Ryn reduced to stunned terror by the spectre of a semi-naked black man impudently grinning at them (“for God’s sake, don’t look into its eyes”).

But as noted, these few weird missteps aside, I find the old fashioned tone of “The Devil rides Out” perversely comforting. The staunch moralism always present in Fisher’s films is given perhaps its ultimate expression here, and, together with screenwriter Richard Matheson’s characteristically thoughtful approach to ‘us & them’ story dynamics, I feel that “The Devil Rides Out” succeeds in giving a more elegant expression to Wheatley’s dusty bluster, conveying a more genuinely humane take on the battle between good and evil. This is beautifully illustrated when Sarah Lawson’s Marie boldly steps forward to reclaim her daughter from Mocata’s altar, calling out the creepy Satanists not in the name of God, but of that which they truly lack and fear, that which ultimately separates our upstanding heroes from them - love without desire.

The Earth Dies Screaming (Terrence Fisher, 1964)

“The Earth Dies Screaming”. Wow. I mean, what can you say to a title like that? Awareness of the cynical processes by which genre movies are named/marketed or not, I’d defy ANYONE not to want to duck into a theatre with that one on the marquee (or, in a more contemporary setting, buy the DVD-R off the guy in Up The Video Junction in Camden market).

As it happens, the promises of the title are broken right from the outset here, as the chilling opening sequence of this British science fiction quickie portrays the world – or at least, the sections of it surrounding a rural English village – dying rather peacefully in its sleep.

Bodies slump to the ground on the village green. Cars wobble slowly into walls as their occupants suddenly expire. A locomotive crashes off the rails, its crew dead at the controls. What’s going on?

The first living being we see is an American, Major Jeff Nolan, played by Willard Parker. Driving his military landrover into a village square strewn with corpses, he shoulders his rifle and breaks into an electronics shop, where he proceeds to scan the dial on a radio, looking for signals.

He soon has company when another car pulls into town, containing the friendly Peggy, and a shifty, gun-toting Mr Quinn Taggert, who claims to be her husband. Having established that the intruders aren’t actively hostile, a surviving local couple soon emerge from hiding, and, being broadly sensible folk, the small group of survivors decamp to the comfortable bar of the local hotel to take stock of their situation over some scotch and soda.

In a development reminiscent of ‘Day of the Triffids’, it turns out that all of the survivors were in enclosed environments when the catastrophe occurred – Nolan was in the air testing an experimental jet, whilst locals Otis and Violet Had sneaked off from a boring party to spend the night in an airtight laboratory, Peggy was in a hospital oxygen tent, and so on. (Incidentally: Otis? Since when was anyone in the British Isles in 1964 called ‘Otis’?) With the certainty that becomes scientifically-minded folks in movies like this, Nolan reasons that England must have been subject to a deadly gas attack. “This was no accident - whoever did this clearly just won the war,” says the pessimistic Mr. Taggart, “Now they’ve just got to move in and take over – then it’s every man for himself."

It’s not quite as simple as that however, as the occupants of the hotel realise when a pair of spacemen wander into town. Violet makes the rookie mistake of assuming the spacemen are human and marches out to greet her rescuers, while the others are more wary and hang back. And wisely so, as Vi is unceremoniously zapped by the inhuman figures, falling amid the other bodies as the spacemen move on.

Roving spacemen may sound like a pretty goofy addition to the thus far fairly dour story, but in practice they are incredibly unsettling – whirring robot drones controlled by forces unknown, not dissimilar to the Cybermen who were making their debut in Dr. Who at around the same time, impassively hunting down and disposing of any remaining living creatures. Understandably, the film takes a somewhat darker turn from hereon in, evened out by an additional bit of melodrama as a rebellious youth and his heavily pregnant wife-to-be turn up, having recently run away from home, as the bodies of the deceased start returning to life, and Mr Taggart starts to make his sinister intentions clear.

As a film, the main failure of ‘The Earth Dies Screaming’ is also, weirdly, one of its biggest advantages – the fact it is so short it almost seems unfinished. With a running time that only just hits the hour mark, I can only assume the film fell victim to severe budgetary problems, time constraints or was simply kept short in order to make bottom billing on some triple bill line-up. Whatever the case though, the film never really gets the chance to explore its intriguing initial premise in much detail.

Hammer stalwart Terrence Fisher directs as competently as one would expect, and the opening sequence in particular is exquisite, with Elizabeth Lutyens’ brilliantly dissonant score mainlining cold war anxiety as the camera slowly panning up from a corpse-strewn field up into the empty sky as the film’s title descends Star Wars style.

But once things get underway the solid character dynamics that are necessary to keep the survival-horror plotline afloat are so quickly and broadly sketched that they are often flat-out unbelievable. The other characters are universally scornful of Otis’s excess emotion and descent into alcoholism for instance – hey, give the guy a break, his whole world’s collapsed and he just saw his beloved wife zapped to death by spacemen! And the final peril and save-the-day-at-the-last-minute ending the script sets up for our protagonists seems contrived and premature in the extreme.

In spite of all this though, it is the film’s perfunctory nature that also helps it remain so memorable and haunting over forty years later. I’ve been a huge fan of what you might call the ‘polite British apocalypse’ sub-genre ever since I learned to read, when books such as John Wyndham’s ‘Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Kraken Wakes’ and John Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’ were among the first stories to really capture my imagination, with their visions of an eerie, deserted version of normality hiding dark, unseen threats and of the thin veneer of civilization slowly crumbling as hunger and survival instincts take hold. These were sinister ideas of a kind I’d never seen explored on TV or in the family friendly movies I was allowed to watch, but always accompanied by the comforting presence of a rip-roaring adventure yarn, and well-behaved heroes who mean well, believe in the human spirit and treat their people with respect.


In so far as it is able to with it’s compromised run-time, ‘The Earth Dies Screaming’ captures the atmosphere of these books perfectly – all the more so for the perpetual sense of mystery that surrounds the film. I’ve always been a bit scornful of tidy apocalyptic stories (think the American blockbuster variety) that neatly define and rationalize their scenarios from the outset. Personally I prefer the idea that if an unexpected society-shattering series of events took place, the majority of the populace wouldn’t know what the hell was going on, let alone what they should do about it. And by virtue of simply not having any spare screen time to dedicate to the issue, The Earth Dies Screaming remains beautifully abstract and unsettling throughout.

Who DID kill everybody in the first place, and why? Where did the spacemen come from? Who’s controlling them? Why are corpses coming back to life, and accepting that they are, why only CERTAIN ones? – events move so quickly that the characters barely get a chance to consider these questions, and, rushing along with them, neither do we. Essentially, our initial question of “what’s going on?” remains unanswered throughout the film, right up do the unconvincing “why, this child might be the most important thing on Earth right now” conclusion. Much as in real life, shit just HAPPENS, and the fun comes from seeing the people who remain pull up their socks and react as best they can, or else fail to.

Which brings us neatly to another interesting aspect of “The Earth Dies Screaming” – namely, its curious similarity to “Night Of The Living Dead”. Trying to round up all the disparate movies that may or may not have ‘influenced’ Romero’s masterpiece has long been a popular film-geek parlor game of course, but I couldn’t get the thought out my mind when watching TEDS. The dynamic between Nolan (capable pragmatic hero), Taggart (shifty bald jerk) and the young couple who arrive later seems to directly mirror the character dynamics that made their way into the NOTLD script – not to mention the ‘fighting to protect mother & child in the basement’ angle taken by the finale. Stretching things even further, you could even draw comparisons between the eerie stillness of the opening sequence here, and the similar vistas of urban emptiness that Romero threw into the intros of both ‘Dawn..’ and ‘Day..’, or note the similarities between Lutyens’ menacing, modernist score (which seems to utilise morse code bleeps and radio static) and the droning, echoplexed library cues used so masterfully in ‘Night..’.

Not that I’m accusing Romero of sitting at the back of some screening of this one in Pittburgh in 1965 taking notes or anything you understand, but it’s always interesting to ponder these connections, trace the roots of these ideas, dontcha think? If nothing else, it would make for a great excuse to show “The Earth Dies Screaming” alongside Vincent Price in “The Last Man On Earth” and Powell & Pressburger’s “Tales of Hoffman” in a ‘films-that-kinda-maybe-inspired-NOTLD’ triple bill.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand: The Earth Dies Screaming is a simple but effective mid-century nightmare with a welcome does of cold war paranoia and complete weirdness that helps it remains an hour of brilliantly evocative viewing to this very day. I wish I know where it was filmed – does anyone know? The village looks oddly familiar – I feel like I might have been there at some point. Either way, I want to go there again and wander around soaking up the atmosphere and looking out for spacemen. Don’t laugh – I bet you would too.