Jason Zinoman
The director John Carpenter has said that seeing The Curse of Frankenstein, the first gothic hit by Hammer Film Productions, as a kid transformed him. Another esteemed veteran of the genre, Joe Dante, said the same movie lived up to its tag line promise to ?haunt you forever.? And Martin Scorsese has described an obscure sequel, Frankenstein Created Woman, as ?close to something sublime.?
What makes the enduring reputation of Hammer, the tiny British fantasy factory, even more impressive is that the company all but disappeared right as the horror genre boomed. Hammer struggled financially through much of the 1970s, ceasing production by the end of the decade. What?s more surprising perhaps is that since then reviving Hammer, built on sequels and remakes, has proven far more difficult than reanimating Frankenstein?s monster.
A group of admirers, including the director Richard Donner, looked into buying Hammer in the 1980s before discovering that it didn?t own many of its best-known properties. A consortium led by the art dealer Charles Saatchi did buy Hammer in 2000, announcing plans to make new films but never doing so. Then in 2007 Simon Oakes, a cable television executive who had noticed the frequency that Hammer was mentioned in the press, spearheaded the acquisition of the company?s film library and raised what was reported as $50 million to make new movies. His focus has not been on remaking Hammer movies, although he?s not ruling that out.
His challenge is capitalizing on the affection for Hammer while updating the company to adjust with the times. In its heyday, which roughly spanned a decade starting in the mid-1950s, the films broke ground with their lush Technicolor, sexual frankness and unlikely mix of teasing exploitation and classically trained class. None of those elements are new anymore. As popular as Hammer is among horror buffs, it is also relatively unknown to young audiences reared on Paranormal Activity.
The early efforts by the rebooted Hammer, including the acclaimed remake Let Me In and The Resident, have not found huge box office success. But Oakes, the chief executive and president, said that those were only ?building blocks? setting up his ambitious next move, a $13 million adaptation of The Woman in Black, opening Friday. Like the classic Hammer movies, this ghost story, shot in Britain, is a period piece with a high-toned pedigree. (Adapted from a Susan Hill novella, it also was a long-running West End play.) In keeping with Hammer tradition, it has a star. In his first post-Harry Potter film role, Daniel Radcliffe plays a guilt-ridden father and lawyer who starts seeing ghosts while going through the estate of a recently deceased woman. ?For Hammer to succeed, it has to honor its legacy,? Oakes said by Skype.
What that means is not obvious, since Hammer has a long, colorful history full of reinventions. But the upscale direction of the new Hammer is a far cry from the company?s origins. It was founded in 1934 by a group led by a music hall comic named William Hinds. While the company dabbled in comedy and science fiction, its most sustained and successful movies were gothic costume dramas that revisited the classic Universal Pictures monsters.
This cycle kicked off in 1957 with the taut Curse of Frankenstein, a significant departure from the Boris Karloff classic, although many of the changes were ones of necessity. While the novel was in the public domain, the earlier film?s signature neck bolts were not. Hammer beefed up the doctor character and made the monster appear more recognizably human. The streamlined script kept the shooting schedule short and cut the rampaging villagers because, well, crowds are expensive.
The company?s house screenwriter Jimmy Sangster?s memoir was tellingly called Do You Want It Good or Tuesday? And the tireless go-to director Terrence Fisher was famously efficient, scrupulously storyboarding and never taking lunch. While they worked quickly and on a shoestring, this gave them urgency and a bare-bones intimacy. In a decade full of flying saucers and atomic age-inspired beasts, the scares in films like Curse of Frankenstein were often found in close-ups of the human face.
Hammer began to face stiff competition in the early 1960s from low-budget American horror, including Roger Corman?s series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. ?The Hammer films were a fraction more obvious,? Corman said in a previous interview. ?I was trying to be a little more subtle, but basically we were doing the same things.? That was not the case with the horror explosion of the following decade, when more urgently contemporary and brutally harsh horror movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Exorcist made Hammer seem stuffy.
The push for more explicit and outrageous material in horror has hardly abated, but instead of trying to compete, the current Hammer is going defiantly upscale. Hammer, like horror itself, has become more mainstream, but its challenge today remains maybe even more formidable. John Landis?director of An American Werewolf in London and author of the insightful horror history Monsters in the Movies, a recent release that features a Hammer photo on seemingly every other page?put it in historical context in an e-mail: ?The new Hammer just has to make intelligent pictures, something harder to do in today?s market than you would think.?