Abstract
Ealing Studios’ Dead of Night (1945) is the first important recognisably British horror film. However, to view Dead of Night as marking the ‘birth’ of British horror cinema is rather problematic, for in many respects Ealing’s film is very different from the long stream of horror films that eventually followed from the mid-1950s onwards. This 1950s wave of horror was in large part initiated by the enormous commercial success of Hammer’s SF/horror The Quatermass Experiment in 1955. In seeking to explain the transition from Dead of Night to The Quatermass Experiment, as well as the virtual absence of horror from British cinema in the intervening years, the chapter considers both the broadly social and the specifically cinematic context of each film’s production. Such an approach reveals the way in which the identity of British horror cinema was subject to constant and substantial revision during this period.
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