Hammer Horror Research Articles

Dracula unseen: The death and afterlife of Hammer’s Vlad the Impaler

Abstract Few production companies have been as synonymous with one genre as Hammer Films and its horror output. However, for every ‘Hammer Horror’ successfully produced, several potential projects failed to make it into production. This article will utilize five separate drafts of the unmade Hammer project Vlad the Impaler, an adaptation of a BBC Radio 4 Drama produced in 1974. Utilizing Vlad the Impaler as a case study will allow for a further contextualization of Hammer’s production methods between 1975 and 1979, a period in which Hammer only produced two theatrical films. The project was also developed further throughout the 1980s/1990s, at a time when Hammer did not produce a single film. More broadly, this article will use Vlad the Impaler as a methodological case study, and examine how we can expand on existing works within the field on unmade adaptations.

Immersive theatre and the aesthetics of decadence: on the ruined worlds of Punchdrunk, SHUNT and Hammer Film Productions

ABSTRACTThis article considers how an aesthetics of decadence underpins approaches to design and audience engagement in work by Punchdrunk, SHUNT and Hammer Film Productions. Punchdrunk's The Masque of the Red Death (2007–08) invited wandering audiences to inhabit the ruinous landscapes of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, recognised posthumously as ‘decadent’ fiction. SHUNT's The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face (2014) guided promenading audiences through a series of discarded shipping containers, each containing a lonesome occupant appearing in a state of disturbing physical decay – a dystopian reflection, perhaps, on the decadence of capitalism. And Hammer Film Productions’ Hammer House of Horror Live – The Soulless Ones (2017) staged a macabre homage to Hammer Horror films, complete with necromancy, blood-sucking vampires and orgiastic rituals. In this article, I explore how each performance, in its own way, gestures towards a decadent imagination identified and unpacked in light of criticism that informed its evolution in the nineteenth century, alongside more recent analysis that has reset the parameters of its study. This article also presents a challenge to scholarship that narrows focus to the enervating qualities of immersive theatre by considering ruination and decay as important themes informing the design of each performance, and the engagement of audiences both with and within ruined environments both actual and artificial. I argue that the decadent imagination is of much relevance to the study of aesthetics and politics in work that either sensationalises or questions its atomising tendencies, and that such work has much to offer to how decadence is understood, not just as a mutable concept, but as a radical practice.

‘I have a picture of the Monster!’: Il mostro di Frankenstein and the search for Italian horror cinema

Abstract Typically accounts of Italian horror cinema have highlighted the production and release of Riccardo Freda’s I vampiri (Lust of the Vampire) in the late 1950s as marking the beginning of Italian engagement with the horror genre. The logic that follows is often that the nature of fascist censorship impeded any explorations of the genre in the 1920s and 1930s and that in the post war period it was only the commercial success of Hammer Horror that tempted Italian producers to venture into horror film-making. In this way Italian horror cinema is considered to have no antecedents and is frequently seen in relation to its readiness to ape production successes elsewhere. Increasingly, however, Il mostro di Frankenstein (The Monster of Frankenstein) (Testa, 1921) is being identified as Italy’s ‘first’ horror film. Yet as a lost film that has left little material trace, evidence of its generic position is, at best, ambiguous. This article will examine a heretofore underexplored and obscure film in order to interrogate the extent to which it can be seen as Italy’s earliest engagement with horror production. In so doing it allow us to see much more complex and nuanced developments of the history of both Italian and European horror cinema, challenging previous assumptions about the history of the genre as a whole.

Poetics of early Hammer horror films: a statistical style analysis

This paper investigates the construction of the first seven horror films produced by British film Studio, Hammer, in the years 1957–1960. It is a poetic study using statistical stylistic analysis. The Hammer films are compared with a control sample of seven independently produced British horror films from the same period. Each of the 14 films is analysed shot-by-shot and data recorded for a range of formal technical aspects, each considered to be ‘under the control of the director’: average shot length, shot size camera movement, shot angle. Inferences are then drawn from this data to address the problem: on a formal level, what constitutes a Hammer horror film?

Cashing in on Dracula: Eastern Europe's Hard Sells

Just about over a decade ago the majority of ordinary Romanians, and particularly the inhabitants of Transylvania, were unaware of the international infamy of Vlad the Impaler and his literary counterpart, the chilling Count Dracula. It was only around the time of Ceausescu's regime collapse that news of the region's macabre notoriety trickled down to these lands. Soon thereafter, local entrepreneurs hastily acquired copies of Bram Stoker's book and ventured into developing small-scale tourist enterprises by copying the horror classic. Hotel buildings were designed to resemble castles, some restaurants featured Dracula-themed furniture (copied from Hammer horror movies on pirated videos) while others had the butter in their chicken Kiev coloured deep red.1 Live entertainment included actors in full Bela Lugosi gear hiding in a coffin in the hotel's basement and coming out to scare visitors at the stroke of midnight. Besides moderate growth in regular tourism, the commercial exploitation of Dracula and Transylvania got a boost through the increase in academic tourism, with several international meetings of scholars specializing in the horror genres. Since the mid-1990s the Romanian government has been engaged in plans to build a Dracula theme park and entertainment complex, a project that so far has been surrounded by controversy. According to domestic backers, the development would give an immediate boost to the economy of the whole region. According to international critics, besides failing due to shaky business planning and inadequate infrastructure, it would be an assault on cultural heritage and on the ecosystem. And, according to one Hollywood studio, Dracula as popularly known could not be freely used for commercial ventures as the character does not belong to the Romanians in the first place. This investigation will try to show that attempts intended to capitalize directly on Dracula's trademark image-like the high profile Dracula Park campaign- have run into unanticipated hurdles and so far failed to give any signifi- cant boost to Romania's economy, but that local film entrepreneurs have been much more successful in cashing in on Dracula by finding gentler and less direct ways to use the association between Romania and the infamous vampire. It is useful to compare and evaluate these different manifestations of the pragmatic yet idiosyncratic post-communist endeavor to make Dracula more bankable for Romanians. We will look at the curious mixture of entrepreneurial and state-socialist approaches revealed in the course of the attempts to profit on Dracula. We will see how image issues inform economic judgment (and vice versa), and how brash pushy entrepreneurs and refined highbrow cultural heritage defenders are driven by largely the same fiscal motivation. This study's main contentions are: * While the use of stereotypes is usually seen as an adverse act of one-way cross-cultural projection of preconceived ideas, in certain contexts stereotypes are embraced from within, developed and drawn on in a voluntary move of self-exoticism carried out by agreeable cultural entrepreneurs and other internal actors. However, in a globalized corporate-dominated world the fact that one may readily accept the association with a certain stereotype does not guarantee automatic access to the commercial exploitation of the same stereotype. * While nowadays almost all nations have to [. . .] mobilize themselves as spectacle and to attract large numbers of visitors, in poorer nations where the domestic consumer market is not solvent cultural entrepreneurship is underpinned by decisions made on the basis of perceptions of Western (entertainment) market demand.2 The development of large scale tourist projects here may be undertaken as national-scale enterprise and the respective attraction are often staged as representing the country. But such large scale attractions, in fact, enhance the sense of split identity, the consciousness of a perpetual differentiation between an image of oneself one projects outwards and presents as object of the tourist gaze and another true self, mostly characterized by being different, not identical with what is being projected. …

Zombies, Epiphenomenalism, and Physicalist Theories of Consciousness

In its recent history, the philosophy of mind has come to resemble an entry into the genre of Hammer horror or pulpy science fiction. These days it is unusual to encounter a major philosophical work on the mind that is not populated with bats, homunculi, swamp-creatures, cruelly imprisoned genius scientists, aliens, cyborgs, other-worldly twins, self-aware Computer programs, Frankenstein-monster-like ‘Blockheads,’ or zombies. The purpose of this paper is to review the role in the philosophy of mind of one of these fantastic thought-experiments — the zombie — and to reassess the implications of zombie arguments, which I will suggest have been widely misinterpreted. I shall argue that zombies, far from being the enemy of materialism, are its friend; and furthermore that zombies militate against the computational model of consciousness and in favour of more biologically-rooted conceptions, and hence that zombie- considerations support a morereductivekind of physicalism about consciousness than has been in vogue in recent years.