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(OMINOUS MUSIC)
(VOICEOVER MONTAGE)Hammer Films set what I consider to be...
the modern tone of the horror genre.
Hammer was successful because of...
a certain alchemy and a certain magic.
They were very...
lurid, shocking, Technicolor.
You know, they were the opposite of the old Universal horror pictures.
When Hammer came round, it took it to a whole different level.
It just felt different from everything else.
Hammer Films gave us this amazing brand of...
spooky castles and vampires.
And suddenly, this small British studio was gonna become a force.
It was something people wanted... they wanted to see more of.
CHARLES DANCE: A small British film studio,
born in the early 1930s,
came to define the entire genre of horror cinema.
From humble beginnings, it rose to legendary status,
becoming a cultural touchstone...
that still entertains audiences and creators alike.
We're about to embark on a voyage
through the chronicles of Hammer Films,
exploring the lives of the visionaries behind the scenes,
how and why they created such groundbreaking films...
..and the lasting impact they've had on cinema and culture.
This is the story of the heroes, legends and monsters...
of Hammer.
Oh, where did it all begin?
Hammer was my father, surprisingly enough.
KINSEY: Hammer Film started as the production arm of...
a film distribution company called Exclusive Films.
Nineteen, take one.
It was a family-run unit, run by two families.
MICHAEL: My grandfather, Enrique Carreras...
..and a man called Will Hammer, or Hinds.
He was a...
successful businessman and a failed comedian.
He failed because he wasn't really very funny.
He and another chap did a double act years ago,
comic double act, and...
cos his...my father's business was centred in Hammersmith,
they called themselves Hammer and Smith,
and the name Hammer started from that.
William Hinds worked in his family business,
which was FW Hinds the jewellers.
He was someone who...
combined his hobbies and his business skills.
In other words, if you like racing bicycles, then, oh, maybe we'll do some of that.
He had a bicycle shop, but he also had a particular interest in the theatre.
He had his own booking agency,
used to book his own shows, had his own theatres.
Gradually, his theatrical interest...
started to take a different direction
when the motion picture company started.
He was very passionate about filmmaking at that time,
which is why it was his idea
to start the production company, use his name.
Will Hinds gave his stage name to the fledgling company.
But what of the other man responsible for Hammer's creation?
Enrique Carreras was Spanish.
Then he came over here in 1909,
and it seems to have been a fairly bold,
entrepreneurial kind of figure.
He had a chain of cinemas, which was called the Blue Halls,
which he'd sold to ABC.
And it was him that had formed Exclusive Films,
which was now distributing movies.
Will Hinds joined with him.
And that was in 1929.
Hammer became two families -
the Hinds and the Carreras - all the way through its career.
Interesting family. Very.
They made five films between 1934 and 1936.
The two notable ones was...
The Mystery Of The Mary Celeste, with Bela Lugosi...
I didn't forget you.
..and Song Of Freedom, with Paul Robeson.
Paul Robeson was a massive artist.
I'd like to sing you a fragment of a song,
which I've never sung in public before.
So it was a real coup to have those headlining their films.
Unfortunately, they didn't do particularly well.
(SINGS) I hear the voice of my...
And the Hammer company was, at that point, allowed to lapse.
They continued running Exclusive, which did quite well during the war.
And after the war, Enrique's son...
Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Carreras, came back and joined the firm.
This is where the...
Hammer film company proper comes in.
PIRIE: It's often said...
that no-one succeeds like a son who saw his father fail.
And I often think of that phrase when I think of James Carreras.
Who is he? I don't know!
James went to Manchester Grammar School...
..where he left at 16 without any qualifications of any kind.
He was a salesman... absolutely personified.
There is even a story that he sold a car without an engine.
He could sell the proverbial ice cubes to Eskimos.
Well, James Carreras was exactly the kind of man
who had what you call 'a good war'.
He was successful. He was greatly loved by his people.
You couldn't have a nicer person work for than Jimmy Carreras.
What a distinguished, beautiful-looking man he was.
He wasn't a skirt-chaser.
He became a colonel in a fairly short space of time...
and liked to be called the Colonel for a time after the war too.
And then he came back, and he took over the company.
The power is mine,
and I shall use it as I please.
Well, he was your typical sort of...
old colonel...type, very well-spoken,
upright man - quite a nice guy.
And that's when Hammer began...
to accelerate its commercial activities.
The idea of Hammer was to make money.
And James Carreras was obviously into the idea of making money.
Which is... Who can blame him?
My father was a businessman, a salesman. He wasn't a film maker.
He was really good at schmoozing people.
Our efforts...would be considerably less effective...
without the cooperation of you gentlemen.
Through his social life and his work for the Variety Club,
which he loved, he made contact with American producers.
Who needed what you might call half-arsed British product
with fading American stars...
to produce what were called 'quota quickies'.
There's no question that Jimmy Carreras,
in his backslapping, glad-handing,
Variety Club way...
was a genius of promotion.
Through James Carreras' networking abilities...
he was able to take advantage of the first key opportunity
that arose for his new production company.
In a post-war move to grow the economy,
the UK Government aimed to boost the British film business
by taxing American movies,
creating greater demand for home-grown features.
You're lucky it all worked.
Lucky? This is only the beginning.
So James Carreras...
reintroduced the Hammer brand, Hammer Films was made again,
and they started making little stocking fillers.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Dick Barton was, in fact, a radio serial...
on the BBC Light Programme,
which pre-dated The Archers.
And from there, in a very small way,
we started to make a series of radio-orientated characters
and bringing them to life in the cinemas for the first time.
We actually had a production programme of six pictures a year,
all based on the radio series.
And from that, slowly, whatever the company policies were,
in changing names, but Exclusive seguewayed into Hammer Films.
And we were then...
the first British company to have a permanent American relationship
and actually get American release
for what were, really, some very small British pictures.
Oh, we've done it! (LAUGHTER)
The Hammer set up at that time is that, really,
James Carreras is leading the company.
And Will Hinds' son Tony, who's now joined, Tony Hinds,
is Hammer's primary producer.
(GONG CLANGS)
TONY: I went to see Jim Carreras. We seemed to get on alright.
And he said why didn't I join.
I'd just come out of the air force, and I really hadn't anything to do.
So we got together, and I joined the firm.
On the production side, and later, screenwriting side,
Anthony Hinds was...
extraordinarily important force at Hammer.
He was born in 1922, in London.
When he came out of the RAF after the war,
they were making a film called Death In High Heels,
and the Producer disappeared, went AWOL.
They got Tony Hinds in to do it.
He did a good job, and that was the start of it. From then...
..something really extraordinary happens - a creative flair...
I don't think anyone had dreamt was there.
And in a sense, that is where we identify, I think,
the uniqueness that was Hammer.
Tony Hinds was a filmmaker.
I mean, Tony Hinds, was a better filmmaker than I was.
He was, you know, a definitive filmmaker.
Tony only lived to make films.
Anthony, in particular,
is what you might call a producer-auteur,
because his handprint is definitely visible
on all of the films he worked on,
whether it was in a production capacity, a producer role...
or whether he wrote the screenplay,
which he often did under the pseudonym John Elder.
And it was a joke on an old Art Director that worked for Hammer,
called James Elder Wills - he took the name from that.
PIRIE: He was described by the Daily Cinema as looking like
'a doctor of divinity about to take his finals.'
There was one thing he did which enraged everybody.
He decided to put a microphone...
on the stage...
linked to his office,
so at any time he could listen down what was going on on the set.
And if he felt, 'Hang on, they're not filming,'
and there was a bit of a lapse and things had slowed down a bit,
and he knew what the schedule was...
he would then race down onto the set and get them to sort it out.
Nose to the grindstone.
(DOOR CLOSES)
It was often said that if they were running behind schedule,
he would get the script and tear a page out.
There you are. You're back on schedule now.
And he was quite a revered producer within the Hammer company.
And Michael Carreras started off as his assistant.
I would say the monsters of Hammer...
..like all monsters, are good and bad.
And I'd say they're James Carreras and Michael Carreras.
You know, men who created greatness.
And yet something within them...
kept them from communicating...
or achieving peace within themselves.
And that's the essence of what a monster is.
When I first reported for work as an office boy in Wardour Street,
I soon, luckily with influence,
became Director of Publicity,
which entailed putting six black-and-white stills,
and a poster, into an envelope and...
sending it off to the cinema that was going to show an Exclusive film.
And that... As nobody else was doing it,
I was Director of Publicity within minutes of joining the company.
The fastest promotion you've ever heard of.
Michael Henry Carreras was born in London,
on 21st December 1927.
His parents were James Carreras and Vera Smart.
There seemed to be a very uneasy relationship between father and son.
James Carreras was very much the architect of Hammer from the...
business point of view. Michael had...
..you know, multiple talents. He wasn't his father.
I wasn't a businessman.
Michael was a creative force at Hammer.
The different skills brought by the father-and-son team
were initially of great benefit to Hammer.
But in time, Michael's focus on creativity over business
could well come back to bite him.
Michael was born when James was only 21,
and I think it was very much a surprise.
Their family history is steeped in horrificness,
and in things that are almost Gothic.
I'm not sure if James really wanted to have a kid at that age.
Did James want to be a father?
I suspect he did, in fact,
but not at that time.
I don't know why I put up with you at all.
I should have drowned you at birth. Thank you, Father.
His father, James,
ended up putting his mother, Vera, into a sanitorium for a while.
That's a Gothic trope.
And Michael had to come and live with his grandparents.
I'm going to disown my son and send him away to the country.
It's a Victorian-slash-Gothic horror movie,
which is exactly where they found their...
ironically, their power and their strength.
The most curious family history.
Michael was a kind and jovial character.
He got involved, stuck in, with all the films,
and all the people that worked on the films.
He was very good at bringing creative people together.
He was a Producer that was hands-on.
Michael Carreras was doing everything - he was...
playing with electrics, with sound, with casting.
He had the best sense of humour.
Oh, my God. He made me laugh so much.
Michael Carreras' and Tony Hinds' skill sets and personalities
turned out to be an unlikely...
but successful pairing.
We're totally opposites, and that was great too, because...
certain types of films that he enjoyed making, I didn't,
and certain types of films I liked making, he didn't.
They kind of had a sort of instinct for genre,
I think, adventure, suspense, swashbuckling -
all that are ingredients of Gothic.
They made one film at a time, and the same crew came back,
film after film after film.
And their crew were the envy of the British film industry.
REYNOLDS: You realised you was working at...a special company.
When we went to various offices,
you said you was from Hammer Films.
Then they all knew who you were talking about.
The changing winds of the media landscape
were about to blow in Hammer's favour.
Although they didn't yet realise it,
Hammer's cottage industry approach,
utilising the same crew again and again,
was starting to pay off.
It was about to allow them to take advantage of another opportunity.
We are on the edge of a new dimension of discovery.
It's a great chance to leave our vices behind.
So, 1953 is really a pivotal year for British television,
and historically, radio had always been...
the medium that was the sort of nation's favourite.
But the big thing that happened in 1953
was that a lot more people got television sets
because of the Coronation.
More people got hold of a television in the two months
in the run up to the Coronation than in any of the preceding two months.
In 1953, until...
for another few years after that, television is BBC television.
There is nothing else in this country, just the one channel.
And a lot of the plays that were on were adaptations...
of stage works or had a literary basis.
So there wasn't much that was truly original.
And the BBC script unit was two people -
Nigel Kneale and George Kerr.
Nigel Kneale was an enormously talented writer. Enormously.
My name is Matthew Kneale,
and my dad was...
uh...Nigel Kneale.
WOMAN: Eleven, take one.
Nigel Kneale was a... Boy.
He had a falling out with...
famously, with John Carpenter in Hollywood.
He was not a nice man. Not a nice man at all.
HADOKE: I wish Nigel Kneale had had a happier time of everything.
He created Quatermass, which is one of the seminal sci-fi texts.
It's a landmark of television,
and then it's a landmark of film.
It spawns so much that came after it.
(CACOPHONOUS CLANGING AND RINGING)
VOICEOVER: Three men went into outer space. Only one of them came back...
came back a strange, distorted creature,
haunted and possessed by something beyond human understanding.
And it doesn't seem to have made him...
particularly happy, and I think that's a shame.
Don't cry, please.
Probably The Curse Of Frankenstein would never have been made
had not Nigel Kneale done the Quatermass series on television.
My father was actually born in Barrow-in-Furness,
and both his parents were from the Isle of Man.
The Isle of Man is steeped in legend,
and steeped in folklore, and steeped...
if we're thinking about how he writes dialogue for people,
steeped in the oral tradition.
MURRAY: He actually developed a form of skin sensitivity to sunlight.
Which he regarded almost in a Manx way as a kind of curse.
For the whole of his life, really, he had to stay out of the sun.
His brother gave me a wonderful phrase -
'Nigel was always walking in the shadows.'
(SCREAMS)
I think it's fairly easy to make the link
that somebody has to stay out of the sunlight - what do you do?
In those days, you sit and read.
What does that do to your imagination?
Kneale was always writing stories,
a lot of which are embedded in the Manx folklore of his childhood.
He was a very interesting writer...
and forward thinker.
He went to London and trained as an actor at RADA,
and around the time he finished,
his short stories were published as a volume.
I think he was interested in the meeting point
of the rational and the irrational.
And he won the Somerset Maugham prize
and thought he was set as a writer - a book writer, a prose writer.
He went travelling around Europe with the money he got from...
the Somerset Maugham prize.
Came back expecting to be...
rich with royalties - found there was nothing.
Where's my money, then? Where is it?
He looked around for a job and found something in the BBC.
And he became a scriptwriter.
In 1953, there was a gap in the schedules...
of six weeks, where he needed to...
provide them with something, and it was to be an original work.
He had a relatively free hand and...
came up with the idea for a science fiction series called Quatermass.
And...that was the beginning of it all.
It might be significant.
The original Quatermass Xperiment was the most modern...
present-day science fiction thriller that had been put on television.
Kneale was definitely kind of influenced by...
by what was going on in the real world.
1953 is the time when...
that kind of idea of the Space Race was just starting to come along.
That idea of, 'OK, we're sending rockets into space.
What happens if we do that?
What will they bring back? What will they encounter?'
When Kneale first wrote the synopsis for the story,
it was a character called Professor Charlton.
As he fleshed it out, he wanted to give the character a better name.
When he looked in the phone directory, and in the Isle of Man,
a lot of the names - in fact, almost all the surnames -
begin with a K or a Q-U, and he found Quatermass.
He had a good eye for the name,
and I suppose 'mass' sounded slightly scientific.
And it's a dramatic name, so it was a good choice.
The original TV series of The Quatermass Xperiment
was a real success.
Viewing figures were good, the reviews were very good.
Even before it finished going out, there was conversations going on
about...can we turn this into a film?
Tony Hinds and others at Hammer pricked up their ears,
and then Hammer put in an offer,
which was way over what they should have, perhaps, put in.
I've seen people refer to it as a bad business decision. It wasn't.
So at that point,
Nigel Kneale is very happy that his television series...
is being looked at to be made by a film company.
He is delighted by that.
History tells us that Nigel Kneale didn't remain delighted for long,
and he remained undelighted...
for the rest of his days.
When my dad wrote the first Quatermass television series,
for the BBC, he asked, 'Well, what would happen if it was sold on?'
And he was told, 'Oh, of course you'll be recompensed.'
And then after Quatermass became such a hit,
the BBC rather... changed their minds about this.
And my dad felt that he'd been mistreated.
Hammer's newly acquired rights to create films based on Quatermass
could be a turning point for the company.
But how should they approach this sci-fi feature?
Violence, gore and nudity...
would mean an X certificate,
restricting a film's potential audience.
This could certainly present a challenge
for Hammer's debut horror sci-fi feature.
But where lesser men saw only problems...
Tony Hinds saw opportunity...
..an opportunity that could define Hammer forever.
The Censors, basically, were a huge help to Hammer,
because it gave something to push against.
It forced them to be creative.
The Quatermass Xperiment was called The Quatermass 'Xperiment',
because they were exploiting the X rating.
The X thing was still relatively new, so now it's a thing of,
'This cannot be shown in the presence of anyone under 16.'
HADOKE: The X certificate was a very powerful thing
in terms of making people come to see those films.
And marketing-wise, it was huge.
A young man died of a heart attack during that movie,
but the whole thing...
was bathed in the music of James Bernard.
I thought he was an unbelievable composer.
The score for Quatermass...
is like a precursor to Psycho.
James Bernard is certainly a hero,
because the music is...
is often phenomenal.
His music is, like...
it's as important as the direction, the setting, the actors.
James Bernard did actually have some musical lineage in his family.
One of those was Thomas Arne...
..who was the composer of Rule Britannia.
James Bernard was born in the Himalayas.
He then went to the Wellington College in England.
Eventually, he would actually end up at Bletchley Park,
and he was part of the team that were helping
to try and crack the codes of the Enigma machine.
He worked with Christopher Lee,
who was actually stationed at the same place as James.
And this is where he first ever encountered Dracula.
I'd just become an officer, and I was billeted...
in a sort of...in an old rectory...
adjoining an old church in a remote village in Buckinghamshire.
It was a full Hammer set, the whole thing,
and it was a terribly cold winter.
And I was reading Dracula,
Bram Stoker's original, for the first time.
And I tucked myself up into bed with Dracula...
with the book, I mean. (CHUCKLES)
And I was really enjoying it enormously and totally engrossed.
I suddenly realised I was freezing cold.
So I got out of bed and went to the kitchen of this old rectory,
and made myself a hot water bottle.
And I filled this with almost boiling water,
took it back to bed, clutched it to my chest,
went on reading Dracula, thoroughly absorbed...
fell asleep with the book on my nose,
woke up in the morning and the bottle was clutched to my chest.
So I removed it.
And underneath it was a huge, angry, white blister.
And the blister went,
but the scar remained for years and years and years.
And I think it only finally vanished...
when I'd written the score for The Scars Of Dracula,
which was my last Dracula film.
VOICEOVER: There is no escape from...(BAT SCREECHES)
James first started working in music for Benjamin Britten.
He would copy the sketches for...
Billy Budd the opera, but after that...
Benjamin Britten told him that he should make his own way,
because if he stayed with him,
he would just swamp him,
and he would not be able to,
you know, make his own way as a composer.
James was very keen to work in film.
He had to find a way in.
Television hadn't really started up again properly since the war.
His way in was radio plays.
Now, he did a bunch of those
for what is effectively now BBC Radio 3.
I think it was The Death Of Hector...
was the first, which was...
directed by Sir John Gielgud's brother.
One of the next ones he did was called The Duchess Of Malfy.
It's basically a horror.
Everybody pretty much ends up dead by the end.
And the Duchess Of Malfy was actually recorded to tape.
The Quatermass Xperiment was originally...
assigned to John Hotchkis,
and unfortunately, John fell ill...
and couldn't continue.
Tony Hinds, at Hammer, said to a man called John Hollingsworth...
'We're in a real pickle here,
and we need a composer as soon as possible.'
So John Hollingsworth remembered James Bernard,
who had conducted the score for The Duchess Of Malfy.
Now, because they had the tapes to The Duchess Of Malfy,
He rushed to go retrieve these and play them to Tony Hinds.
Tony Hinds loved it, and immediately, on the spot,
James Bernard was hired and paid the princely sum of £100
to write the score for The Quatermass Xperiment.
If you listen to The Duchess Of Malfy,
and you listen to The Quatermass Xperiment,
you're gonna see a lot of similarities.
Because James Bernard was basically touching upon
what he already knew how to do,
and that was writing for strings and percussion.
So they basically have almost the same instrumentation.
When he then went on to do The Curse Of Frankenstein,
he would actually quote, musically, some of his themes and motifs
from The Duchess Of Malfy.
Hammer's Quatermass Xperiment was successful across the board.
Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in cinema
became one of Hammer's driving forces.
The X certificate was nothing to be feared...
but something to bear with pride.
James Carreras felt, instinctively,
that this was the route to success for Hammer,
but were this band of British creatives charting the right course?
After the success of The Quatermass Xperiment film,
they speak to audiences, and they speak to distributors, and they say,
'This horror thing, this is great. This is what we want.'
So the obvious thing is to try and do a Quatermass sequel.
INTERVIEWER: You tackled your first feature, which was X The Unknown.
Right. How do you feel about that?
We were sort of sitting around the office one day
trying to come up with a story.
I was Production Manager at the time, and...
..it was Tony Hinds and Mike Carreras,
and we were batting around ideas.
And it seemed at the end of a session,
I'd come up with the most ideas, so Tony said, 'Go away and write it.'
I said, 'I'm not a writer, I'm a production manager.'
And he said, 'Well, write it. If we like it, we'll buy it.'
So I wrote it. And he liked it. And he bought it.
Jimmy Sangster started with Hammer in 1948,
on a film called Dick Barton Strikes Back,
as a Second Assistant Director.
He later becomes First Assistant,
and he's the youngest First Assistant Director in the country.
And in 1954, he becomes a Production Manager with the company.
Around this time...
..Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg come to Hammer
with an old-fashioned Frankenstein script.
It was called Frankenstein And The Monster.
And it was recommended that they make a film...along those lines,
probably just another of their black-and-white quickies.
Studying the script, they realised that it was actionably similar...
to the old Universal Frankenstein films.
Anthony Hinds reads it and says,
'We can't use it, but this is an idea - to do Frankenstein.'
So they paid off...
Rosenberg and Subotsky...
and launched with their own script.
Which was written by...
Jimmy Sangster.
I don't think I read the Mary Shelley book, actually.
I mean, one knew the Frankenstein story.
I don't think I read it. I'd just seen all the...
all the old Frankenstein movies.
In the wake of Hammer's newfound success,
Tony Hinds would need to find the right director
to deliver his frightening Gothic vision for their next picture,
particularly if they were to unlock its financial potential.
Hinds needed a safe but creative pair of hands for this vital role.
His solution was to turn to his longtime collaborator Terence Fisher.
Terence Fisher being the Director who's given us most of the classics.
I remember that he always wore a jumper and a shirt.
RIGBY: Terence Fisher kickstarted the Gothic trend at Hammer.
Probably a sort of crimson-colour jumper.
And he was a really good director.
Possibly with a jacket.
I understand, originally, Hammer wanted to...
knock The Curse Of Frankenstein out in three weeks.
They offered it to my father, and...
he said, 'I can't possibly do it in three weeks.'
He said, 'It's got to be six.'
He took a while to go away and think about it, a long while,
and then came back and agreed.
But it wouldn't have been the innovative,
extraordinary film that it was...
if someone hadn't said to Hammer, 'No, I can't do it in three weeks.
Give me six.' (CHUCKLES)
We don't want to be over-hasty, do we?
He's the Director, whether you know it or not,
you think about when you think of Hammer, I think.
He went to boarding schools at a very early age,
went to prep school and then to Christ Hospital.
I think of the two results that boarding school can have...
with pupils is that they either get this arrogance and confidence,
or else they're... just completely cowed.
He was such a dear...
kind, cuddly little man.
Very shy.
(WHISPERS) He was very quiet. He talked like that.
So he gave direction. 'Would you mind very much if you...
moved over here... moved over to there.
Thank you very much. And then he would disappear.
A quiet one, are we?
You've hardly said a word.
My father joined the merchant navy,
and he travelled all round the world...
but never talked about it unless you particularly asked him.
After the merchant navy,
he went back to London...and hadn't a clue what he wanted to do,
but...there was a shop round the corner.
It was Peter Jones - a big department store -
and he became a window dresser there.
And he always said it was quite a good introduction
into setting stuff into a frame.
Terence Fisher began in the film industry in...
various different capacities, but...
I think he really found his footing as an editor.
And I think it was his experience as an editor or a cutter,
as he preferred to call it,
that really is the key to his work,
really, because he edited the films in his head,
and this made him a very prized collaborator,
because Hammer liked to keep costs down.
You know, they were a smallish operation,
and they were making very lavish looking films...
but on a budget.
Their budgets were minuscule - The Curse Of Frankenstein,
in 1956, made for £80,000.
Dracula, in 1957, made for £90,000.
Yet you look at those films,
and they look like they have bigger budgets.
Anthony Hinds made another huge jump here,
where he said it should be in colour.
It was pretty amazing when you consider James said yes to colour,
when colour would have cost 10% of the entire budget,
just changing from monochrome to colour, but he did.
Now you can see the blood, and the blood is gonna be red.
And from a marketing point of view, it's pretty genius.
This was an enormous breakthrough - not a single person was thinking of making horror films in colour.
The Americans weren't doing it either.
The critics went mad, you know? They thought this was vile.
But the public absolutely loved it.
And from there on, I think you could say...
the Hammer brand is born.
It was the Gothic cycle in colour for the first time.
World audiences were waiting.
And there's another wrinkle here, which is very interesting -
by a strange, quixotic turn of fate,
colour was what allowed them to evade the censorship,
which would otherwise have prevailed.
Terence Fisher said, 'Oh, we never had any problem with the Censors,'
which was the most ridiculously disingenuous thing to say.
Because Hammer had titanic problems with the Censors.
Hinds worked out if he showed the Censor the films in black-and-white,
but he would say to them, 'Yeah, of course it's in colour,' early on.
Then he'd show them the black-and-white.
No-one remembered that in a letter, six months earlier,
he said, 'By the way, it's in colour.'
And then the Censor realises the film is in colour, and they immediately say,
'You've got to show it to us.' And there's a real problem.
Because the Censor has a terrible reaction to the film.
That really was like, 'Argh!'
They nearly had a heart attack. At that point, the real battle started.
And then they were able to force through a few more things
than they would ever have got before.
Hammer were really good at, in the end,
getting what they wanted onscreen,
because Hammer would always... they'd build in stuff they knew...
was gonna get cut out, and they'd put a little extra in too.
So they'd go, 'Well, if we cut out...
the bit that you don't like, can we have this in?'
And it'd become a bargaining point - one of the examples you hear about
is the disintegration of Dracula.
There was a much longer version that, for many years, was hidden,
because the Censors at the time thought it was too much.
And they wanted to cut some stuff out.
And so they did, but they still got a lot of stuff in
because they'd piled so much into that disintegration.
(DRACULA SCREAMS, GASPS)
(GRUNTS)
Phil Leakey was a remarkably talented make-up man.
A very mild-mannered guy,
very much in the background, very quiet.
Very skilled, though.
So, of course, what they did was they hung onto him...
and hung on to him for as long as possible.
And they were very lucky he was still around
when the colour Gothic started up.
All make-up artists study anatomy,
and they study cuts and wounds.
But with Phil Leakey, I expect that he had...
a more kind of first-hand knowledge of it,
because of his parents, who were in the sciences.
He knew exactly what to do...
when he had to create a wound on someone's face or a bruise.
He'd know the bruise doesn't stay the same colour.
It can change colours.
And I imagine that that kind of medical background
would have helped him no end.
Though you think of him as being a make-up artist,
in fact, he was the very first make-up effects artist.
I think he was the first person ever to get that title on film.
What are you going to do?
Take the head off. It's no use to me, anyway.
He crossed a lot of boundaries -
for instance, on Curse Of Frankenstein,
he had to make a head that could be dissolved in a tank of acid.
Most make-up artists would never be able to do this
or be able to think about it in the right way. But...
that was Phil's job, and he said, 'OK, I can take that on.'
Using a cast of somebody's head,
he created it out of gelatine,
and he put some kind of latex film over the top of it.
It had a skull in it, a plastic skull,
that was buried beneath layers of gelatine muscles and gelatine veins,
and even had a brain in the skull.
And because it was gelatine, they heated the tank up...
so that it was basically boiling water.
And of course, what happens to the gelatine
when you put it in boiling water is it melts.
So they did this great effect where they put the head in,
and it looks like acid, because the head just dissolves,
and everything starts to come apart,
and the skin starts to melt.
It's so good... that it's not in the film. (LAUGHS)
But to be able to think in that way,
sort of lateral thinking about how these things could work,
and how the chemical compounds of various things
can be put together to achieve an effect is very, very clever.
The Curse Of Frankenstein gave me nightmares,
because of the...
Phil Leakey's make-up. Argh!
A lot of people up until that point, if they thought of Frankenstein,
thought of the Boris Karloff Frankenstein
and the Jack Pierce make-up.
We couldn't use the idea of a...
the Boris Karloff-type monster with a bolt through his neck.
They had a copyright on the monster.
In the tiny bit of pre-production that they had,
you had Phil Leakey and Roy Ashton...
tried just about everything they could think of
to make that creature - you know, latex noses,
and scars in different looks and things.
I did about three tests, if I remember right,
but they were quite dreadful - I mean, one of them made look like...
a combination between a wolf and a pig.
And the other...
was actually, surprisingly, quite close to the Elephant Man.
Part of me, you know, definitely does sympathise...
with what Christopher Lee was going through with those.
And then I think it was I,
or perhaps it was Phil Leakey, the make-up man...
We put our heads together, and...
I think I said, 'Look.
It's bits and pieces of other people, so...
it should be patched together.'
So there were lumps and these scars, and the one dead eye,
and the stitch marks and everything,
uh...which was pretty unpleasant.
And the blind lens that he wore over one eye as Frankenstein...
..would have made him blind.
Can't see anything!
Remarkably, on The Curse Of Frankenstein,
Hammer, in one coup, cast their two biggest male stars,
who were going to see the studio through all their great horror days.
The simple pairing of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee was phenomenal.
They were blessed with those guys.
It's the kind of thing you dream about. It's like RKO saying...
'OK, we have this tap dancer named Fred Astaire.
He's sort of OK. What are we gonna do with him?
We have this ingenue, named Ginger Rogers, who can kind of dance.
What would happen if we put them together?'
You know, and what happens is magic.
Peter Cushing, potentially one of the greatest British actors.
REYNOLDS: He was a lovely guy, very approachable.
Peter Cushing was the star. He'd come from...
1984 on the BBC.
He was celebrated. He was handsome.
(STAMMERS) You know, he was the guy at Hammer.
I think Christopher Lee is a real legend.
When I first met Christopher, I was just hypnotised by Dracula.
Like, he had such a beautiful, amazing presence.
Christopher Lee in terms of charisma and...
..sheer presence and...
behaviour onstage was unbeatable.
And Jimmy Carreras needs to be very thankful...
the day that someone looked over and said, 'There's this tall guy,
named Christopher Lee - you think he could be our creature?'
All they were looking for was a big guy.
It was nearly Bernard Bresslaw, wasn't it?
But they lucked out and got somebody who was not only a big guy,
a very impressive guy, but somebody with great presence, who could act.
They gave these solid performances.
I tried to get...
both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in my movies.
In Halloween, I wanted Peter Cushing to be the Psychiatrist.
Christopher Lee complained he didn't have any lines
in Curse Of Frankenstein, and Cushing said,
'Well, you're lucky. I've read the script.'
You're quiet. Cat got your tongue?
I think Jimmy Sangster was of the opinion...
that the success of a screenplay was down to 85% construction.
Construction, it's 85%.
Dialogue's not important.
I think he may have said that because he was well aware
actors tended to rewrite his dialogue.
The actors kind of change the dialogue, anyway.
Peter Cushing in particular did not like...
Jimmy Sangster's dialogue...at all.
At my early film classes at school,
we were given a script that had Peter Cushing's annotations on it,
where he corrected the script.
I think he was looking at lines, going,
'I wouldn't say it that way. I wouldn't...
This needs changing round.'
Christopher Lee's scripts are hysterical.
They're like, 'No! I will not speak! Absurd!'
And Peter Cushing was...
did, indeed, rewrite the majority of it...
and the results were great. So, the sort of...
Sangster-Cushing collaboration, if you like,
you know, was a good one.
But, yes, Sangster was well aware that Cushing didn't like his work.
Despite the creative differences, tensions and challenges,
the Hammer team managed to make one of
the most financially successful films of all time.
The success of The Curse Of Frankenstein led to a...
an explosion of period pictures that were inexplicably...
accepted by kids,
who, ordinarily, would be watching hot-rod movies.
And obviously, they...
realised that they had found lightning in a bottle
and decided that they'll go through the old Universal catalogue
and revisit all the monsters...
except all gussied up with great photography,
and classy looking sets, and good actors.
And, of course, the even bigger hit...
came the next year, which was Dracula.
I remember seeing Dracula, or The Horror Of Dracula,
as we called it America, for the first time,
and it's this lurid colour...
that even the title has this Kensington Gore blood
splattering all over Dracula's name.
It was a very, very shocking moment. It seems so hokey now.
But in that moment, it was just genius.
Dracula was like...
..it sort of became a sort of thing with me.
Because I just thought it was rather fabulous,
except that it was a bit bloody.
It...pretty much cemented the entire run
of what the studio was gonna be doing for the next decade.
RIGBY: Jimmy Sangster was given Dracula to adapt.
What I remembered the most about Dracula,
there's no wasted time.
It's smart.
And over the years, Jimmy was always saying that people would ask him,
'Why did I write Dracula in that way?
Why did I adapt the novels in the way I did?'
And it was all down to money.
And he knew exactly what he was typing...
..would cost.
If you read the novel, if you see the Lugosi film,
it all starts in Transylvania.
And they jump on a ship, and they come to England.
Sangster was well aware that Hammer couldn't possibly afford that,
and that if they used stock footage, it would look rubbish.
So he cut it all together. Hammer's version of Dracula is...
to me, getting on for the definitive one.
And yet it takes huge liberties.
I am Dracula, and I welcome you to my house.
At this point, the Censor was waiting.
They knew what to expect.
And Audrey Field, the implacable opponent of Hammer, says,
'Right. We've seen this in black-and-white.
There are six scenes missing, and it's in colour. Show it to us now.'
So they did.
And there was, again, horrific reaction.
Argh!The Censors definitely asking for cuts.
Hinds putting things in that he could then take out.
And it all boils down to this moment...
when the Censor says they cannot have Mina Harker...
looking at Dracula in this immensely sexual way. We just can't have it.
And, basically, it comes down to two shots -
Dracula approaching... and her looking.
And Hinds and Carreras desperately wanted it.
They desperately wanted these shots in there,
because they knew this would change everything.
I've seen some of those Censor notes, going
'He can't lean over that way. This is outrageous,'
and they push it and go, 'Well, no, he's a vampire -
he's gonna bite her neck. Nothing else is going on.'
But to the audience member,
of course they're feeling the sexual power of those moments,
and that's what makes the film so strong.
And then Hinds sprang his surprise. He said...
'When you saw this in black-and-white,
you gave me to understand that maybe you'd be able to pass this.
I can't see it's any worse in colour.
And I'm sorry - I scored it.
I've set up an orchestra, I've edited it, I've dubbed it.
It's gonna cost me a fortune to change.'
There was a panicky meeting.
Hinds stuck to his guns. He said, 'It's gonna cost me a lot of money.
Censor was set up to protect them
from local authorities banning films.
It was meant to save the industry money, not create costs.
And he said, 'In this instance, we're gonna let it go.
But don't do it again.' (LAUGHS)
And so Hinds had his shot.
And the extraordinary thing is, you might say,
'Well, it was just an accident, the looks.'
No. Fisher, on the set, actually said to her,
'I want you to look at this... this guy coming towards you
as if he's the greatest love of your life.
You can't wait for him to be back.' And he got a performance.
He was very pleased with the performance he got from Melissa Stribling.
It's gone down in movie history, actually.
This is a really crucial moment,
because this was the point at which the vampire becomes erotic.
There is no going back after that - the floodgates had opened.
Three hits in a row had led Hammer to concoct a winning formula,
a specific blend of the Gothic,
the violent and the teasingly erotic.
But while the discovery of this formula
may have been somewhat accidental,
this serendipity would never have happened
without the right people...
in the right place at the right time.
Their creative achievements were the result of collective effort
and hard work.
The success of Hammer's early Gothic horror films
was very much founded on the team...
..that Hammer had got together.
They were... like minds, if you like.
You had Terence Fisher directing, Jimmy Sangster writing,
Tony Hinds producing.
Very often, James Bernard scoring.
The thing that I know about the Dracula score,
and how the Dracula theme came about.
It was James Bernard, and Paul Dehn the Writer...
who suggested to James, who was stuck on a theme,
'Why don't you just say... "Dra-cu-la" musically?'
(SINGS) Dracula.
I mean, those big chords would come in.
(BOMBASTIC MUSIC)
(SINGS) Dun-da-da.
That's the score. I can still hear it in my head.
And then he builds the rest of the theme on that.
And that went all the way through a lot of his scores.
You could always hear the name of the film being stamped out.
(DRAMATIC CHORDS FOLLOWING VISUALS)
The film scores were just one of the creative facets
that Hammer was becoming famous for.
The visual and design aspects were also drawing in audiences
ever more deeply.
Other members of the team were making their mark.
The real stars of Hammer, in my opinion...
..were people like Bernard Robinson, the Art Director.
Bernard was quite a thrifty person at heart.
Hammer loved that because it meant he didn't squander the art direction budget.
But I guess some of that thrift was a hangover from the war days.
You've got to remember that a lot of people...
working for Hammer had just come out of the war
and had brought their experiences with them.
The Camera Operator Len Harris was filming the beaches of D-Day
the day after the landing.
Harry Oakes the Focus Puller was one of the first person
to go into Auschwitz when the doors opened.
One classic example is Les Bowie, special effects pioneer.
Now, Les was a POW during the war.
He could draw like life. He used to forge passports.
So in Dracula, Hammer built the downstairs of Castle Dracula.
When you see those turrets and the mountains in the background,
that's a glass painting, which has been produced by Les Bowie.
Bernard Robertson started in the film industry in 1935.
During the war, he became a camouflage and deco expert
at Shepperton Studios.
And after the war, he met...
a chap called Tony Keys.
And Tony Nelson Keys later became an Associate Producer at Hammer.
I think he started on a Tod Slaughter film in 1939,
called Crimes At The Dark House.
And if you watch that film, you can see the sort of nascent Hammer sets,
you know, nearly 20 years too soon, as it were.
Hammer learnt very early on that it was cheaper...
to rent a country house...
and shoot the films in the rooms, and in the gardens,
than renting out expensive space at the established film studios.
And the most famous one was Oakley Court in Bray.
MAN: Oakfield Tower...
Right next door to Oakley Court...
was another country house called Down Place.
And in January 1951, Hammer move into Down Place
and convert it into Bray Studios.
COURT: There was a terrible thunderstorm.
Oh, God. The rain came down in sheets.
The roof's leaking, everything's leaking.
And Terry Fisher says, 'Carry on!'
I feel, already, this is my home.
The first proper home of my life.
Bernard Robinson was able to revamp a lot of his sets,
both in a production and between productions.
They had that studio to themselves.
So he could build things, leave them up,
and that's what saved them money.
Bernard Robinson's genius...
in so many Hammer films, was to reuse elements,
to redress them, reposition them,
redesign them, but nevertheless,
very cost effectively use the same stuff again and again and again.
When you look at Hammer films...
in, like, a series...
you see it's all Bray. And...
you see how cleverly they keep using the same rooms.
The classic example of this is in Dracula.
There was one particular set,
and they used it six times just by redressing it.
It started as a graveyard, and they redress it as a garden.
They then redressed it into the hall and stairs of Castle Dracula.
Mr Harker. I'm glad that you've arrived safely.
And by shooting from a slightly different angle,
they manage to get an entrance lobby and the second flight of stairs.
And then after that, they redressed it totally, again,
to the library where Dracula dies at the end.
And then, believe it or not, that library turns up,
practically the same,
in The Revenge Of Frankenstein.
..was sentenced to death on the guillotine.
It's impressive, actually.
There's a funny story of Bernard, about his thrift.
Sometimes, he would... he would be a bit cheeky
and order an extra roll of wallpaper.
And at the end of the production, he would take that home and use it...
in his own house.
He got busted when he made a film called The Two Faces Of Dr Jekyll.
He went to the premiere with his wife, and his wife was not happy,
and wanted to know why the new lounge wallpaper...
was deemed fit to be the prostitute's bedroom wallpaper
in The Two Faces Of Dr Jekyll.
A lot of the success of those early Hammer films
is down to the way his sets were lit by Jack Asher.
And it was often said that Asher painted with light.
And the films look gorgeous.
When you look at even a still from the pictures that Jack Asher shot,
the lighting is so subtle and so colourful.
He was a perfectionist.
The dreadful shame about it is that, eventually,
they felt he was too slow -
or, rather, he wasn't quick enough for Hammer.
And behind the scenes, the Hammer bean counters didn't like that.
Eventually, unfortunately, they brought in another chap called Arthur Grant.
He was a lot more commercial.
Still very good results, but he was faster than Jack Asher.
Which is a shame because the only time that Hammer ever got...
a BAFTA nomination for colour photography
was in a film called The Scarlet Blade that Asher did for Hammer,
which was his second-from-last film.
At the end of the day, time mattered and the schedules mattered.
Even in the face of financial constraints,
Tony Hinds and Michael Carreras had sculpted the perfect team,
which was working like a well-oiled machine.
Now the studio's challenge was to continue turning out films
that had the Hammer magic...
while keeping up with a global audience's shifting tastes.
Success was not guaranteed.
The right choices needed to be made,
or all Hammer had worked for could quickly come crashing down.
The notion of sequels was going to be...
terribly important for Hammer down the road,
and that was what, actually, James Carreras loved.
He loved a pipeline. That's what he wanted - a pipeline of product.
And he would just roll it out.
And then we can do more, and we can do more,
and let's saturate the world with it.
And, obviously, that is the law of diminishing returns.
It was, ultimately, very, very positive,
and it was ultimately the beginning of the creation of the brand.
But that was, perhaps, in there, a slight harbinger of doom.
(NOISY CLATTERING) I'm sorry, something's wrong here.
Not all of the Hammer team believed in James Carreras' strategy
of creating a succession of sequels.
James's own son was questioning some of his father's choices.
I think Michael had a difficult relationship with horror films.
Michael Carreras was very keen to get beyond the Gothic,
or when he was making a Gothic film,
he wanted to add other... other spices, other elements.
PIRIE: And he really, desperately, wanted to create.
He wanted to be an artist, and he never quite succeeded
on the level that he would have liked, I think.
I liked to diversify.
If I couldn't diversify the company,
I certainly liked to diversify my own...
participations where possible.
But James wasn't interested in that at all.
Sadly, some of the other streams that I tried to instil...
into the company's product line just didn't work.
And some of those were just dreadful.
Oh, Lord, they hurt.
They hurt to watch.
(EXAGGERATED SCREAMING)
Oh, can't you leave me alone?! I'm doing the best I can!
Then I went off and did my thing for a couple of years -
made a...I did a musical.
ALL: (SINGING) ..crazy world we're living in.
Things I would never have been able to do at Hammer.
ALL: (SINGING) ..we're living...
And that would be...
Things were beginning to go a little bit pear-shaped for the company.
Bray was shut down for a short time in the early '60s,
and people had to go off and get other jobs.
And then, of course, Hammer actually moves out of Bray Studios...
in September 1966, I think it was.
A very particular feature of that Bray flavour...
..is lost at that moment.
Once they left Bray, you're making films like any other company does
at Pinewood, Elstree or anywhere else.
The last film at Bray was The Mummy's Shroud in 1966,
and the films they made afterwards at Elstree...
don't look a patch on the Bray films.
The reason they had to move to Elstree was a lot of their films
were being released by the ABC Cinema company.
And ABC owned and ran Elstree,
and they were saying, 'If we're gonna release your films,
you've got to make the films at our studio.'
They were starting to make exterior sets on interior stages,
with a painted backlot outside Castle Dracula,
which just looked fake and looks awful,
and they started to look cheap.
External forces began to affect Hammer.
With its move from Bray,
the iconic production company had lost its spiritual home.
The things that imbued Hammer with its magic were starting to erode.
Its previously confident steps...
were now beginning to become stumbles in the dark -
stumbles that only worsened
as key crew members began to move on as well.
The team that's headed into the depths of the 1960s
was a little bit different.
And the moment some of them are moving on to doing other things,
and it starts being diluted,
it's easy to lose your identity at that point.
It had such a strong identity, and...
..I don't know where it kind of went.
WOMAN: My father had broken his leg just after...
Frankenstein Created Woman, I think it was, and it became difficult,
for insurance purposes, to be on the set.
And he was getting older.
When Phil Leakey was asked to work for Hammer,
they put him on a retainer,
which I think was pretty much unheard of at that time.
And then he discovered, one day,
that they'd taken it away, and he didn't have it any more.
And so he decided that he was gonna part company.
But Phil Leakey and Terence Fisher
were not the only ones to depart from Hammer.
Over the next few years,
many more of the key members of the team also moved on.
Each exit dealt a damaging blow to the company,
but no departure shook the foundations of the house Hammer built
as much as the one that was still to come.
VOICEOVER: Prepare yourself for the greatest shock of all.
The loss of Tony Hinds was a blow to Hammer.
The reason he left Hammer was because of two events.
In 1968,
Hammer has collaborated on...
a TV series called Journey To The Unknown.
ABC decided they wanted to have a named producer above him,
which was Joan Harrison, who was Alfred Hitchcock's assistant.
And Tony Hinds nose was put out of joint quite a lot,
because he found himself, effectively,
working almost as her assistant.
And she took all control from him.
Now he had to make every decision with her, and she had to agree.
And he found that very frustrating, and it disenchanted him.
A year after that, in 1969,
he writes the script for Taste The Blood Of Dracula.
The son of Freddie Francis had submitted a script to Hammer
called Dracula's Feast Of Blood.
Now, there was some talk...
that Hinds had lifted two scenes
from someone else's script and put it in.
If that ever happened, I can only suppose he assumed...
that the script was fair game, that they owned it.
Tony Hinds was obviously quite upset, and he'd had enough.
And so he took retirement at the...
enviably early age of 48.
Creatively, that was a blow.
I think he left at just the point when...
things were becoming more permissive.
As Tony Hinds departed Hammer,
the wider world was changing, particularly in the film industry.
The British film censors relaxed their outlook on the horror genre,
drastically reducing the power
of Hammer's shock and titillation armoury.
If Hammer wanted to keep the proud badge
of an X certificate on their films,
they would need to step up the levels of violence,
gore and sex on screen.
But doing so could threaten to disrupt Hammer's magic formula.
Hammer had an elegance,
and no matter what kind of bloodletting went on,
there was always backed up by an elegance...
until they started ripping off all the clothes and showing everything.
The mystery had gone.
Their films had always been teasingly erotic
as far as the Censor would allow.
But now that censorship barriers were collapsing,
the eroticism was stepped up.
GORE: You could put a lot more nudity on screen.
A lot of the things that Hammer were brilliant at suggesting,
and not having to say, almost like existing within their own code,
suddenly became permissible in everything.
And I think they started pursuing that level of filmmaking,
and, probably, they shouldn't have done that.
According to Tony Hinds, Jimmy Carreras said to him,
'It's incredible, Tony, you can do anything now.'
Tony Hinds said, 'I'm not sure that doing anything
is what it's all about.'
Their push to more nudity, I think, was the demise of Hammer.
They wanted to keep and X certificate on the film,
so they had to boost up a bit more of the gore...
and a bit more of the sex and violence generally,
to make it to get that certificate.
They're losing their identity more in a quest to remain relevant
than in the quest to remain shocking, I think.
The real monster that emerges
is the sexploitation nature that the films turn to.
All these films, the more nudity in it,
and more sex in general, I think -
they threw it in whether the story needed it or not.
I mean, no, sorry. No.
Those lesbian vampire films.
Lust For A Vampire, Vampire Lovers.
It was Jimmy Carreras who...
..was keen to jump on that.
But at the same time, they were bringing in independent producers.
And those were, in fact, made by Harry Fine
and Michael Style of Fantail Films.
Just abominable.
VOICEOVER: Welcome to the finishing school...
where they really do finish you. (SCREAMS)
I was on set when Michael Styles was walking around
with these short stockings, and he's walking around pulling them.
The next minute, the Assistant Director had them.
And I said, 'What's going on?' And he says, 'Oh.
He wants one of the girls to be pulling these on,
but she's got to be topless in one of the bedrooms.'
I'm gonna mention one monster - Michael Style...
imported from who knows where.
With his sausage on set.
His portfolio of pornography.
His whispering in my ear...
..all sorts of uh...obscenities.
His unkindness.
And so he disgusts me.
Michael Style, in particular... had a very different approach
to the rather gentlemanly Hammer approach of old.
I'm dying in the bed,
because the lesbian vampire has bitten me.
And Michael Styles comes up to me and he whispers in my ear,
'You better hot this up,
because everybody will be falling asleep in the aisles.'
And Roy Ward Baker got hold of him
and pulled him off the set, quite literally.
I mean, he was vicious to me, and I didn't know what he meant.
But what it actually meant was I was meant to writhe about in the bed,
have orgasm after orgasm.
Of course, I didn't know what that was. I was so, so innocent.
Nobody can believe it. Roy Wood Baker came up to me.
And he said, 'Maddy, forget all that.
Just pretend you're having a nightmare.' And that's what I did.
(SCREAMS)
So that's Vampire Lovers. MAN: Yes.
Which I think was a smashing little film, actually.
We could have done without the bare...
I th... In my personal view, I think everybody would have
been quite happy without that, but there we are.
Hammer didn't really entertain these guys for very long.
But nevertheless, it's a... that sort of reputation stuck.
While some within Hammer were looking to exploit women,
others wanted to give female actors more significant roles
that they could really get their teeth into.
I think that when they chased the certificate
and moved from blood to sex,
one of the things they did that was really interesting is they gave women a much bigger part.
BURTON: The female parts all very striking, you know?
It's quite an amazing repertoire.
They allowed women to be villains,
and not just because they're controlled by Dracula,
but they have their own agency.
It gave rise to characters like Ingrid Pitt's characters,
you know, villains who are in control.
And that's not something you see very much,
those femme fatales, in the history of cinema.
You have Barbara Shelley, Caroline Monro.
I was a very shy girl. I suffered a lot with um...
Well, I suppose, not... Would you call it anxiety now?
But not very much confidence.
Martine Beswick, Ingrid Pitt.
My favourite was Ingrid Pitt.
Of course, she was lovely on The Vampire Lovers.
I gave her a piggy back at one time to get her up to the set.
And that was lovely. (SCOFFS)
They were like, 'Well, if we need more nudity,
at least let's give those actresses something to do.'
And that was entirely motivated by the fact they were trying to shock.
I did three films with Hammer.
First one was One Million Years BC.
You know, that was impressive.
I definitely remember in Burbank going to the theatre,
you know, to see One Million Years BC.
There was a big line around the block. (CHUCKLES)
We went down the line - you see all the kids talking about the dinosaurs
and all the teenagers talking about her. You know?
The conversation would go up and down
compared to what the age group of the person in line was.
And the second was the brilliant film...
Why did you come? I can only believe...
the Fates brought me here. And they brought you to me.
(CHUCKLES) One of the greats.
And the third was Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde.
Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde is,
in large part, perhaps, because it was scripted by Brian Clemens,
Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde is an enormously witty film.
I think the responsibility for expressing bolder genre ideas
and bolder carnality in the Hammer movies
can almost entirely be...
put at the door of Brian Clemens.
Brian Clemens was a visionary. He was cheeky. He was saucy.
And he said, 'Well, in my script, Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde,
Yeah, I'll give you some exploitation,
but damn, is it gonna have meaning. Damn, is it gonna be cool.
It's gonna be as cool as goddamn Emma Peel.'
He happened to be, I think,
in the restaurant in the studios.
Jimmy Carreras was at the next table.
Brian suddenly writes down on a scrap of paper
at the table... Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde.
Jimmy said, 'Come see me in my office tomorrow.'
By the time Brian gets back to his office,
they've already commissioned a poster.
He hadn't put one word on paper at that point.
One of the classic stories about Hammer,
you know, is Jimmy Carreras' fondness for commissioning posters.
He would go over to New York. He would meet...
all the bosses of all the majors -
20th Century Fox, Columbia, Warner.
And he would ask them for ideas,
and they would feed him with ideas.
He would then come back to England with those ideas,
and he would cherry-pick which ones he thought were good.
And then he would get his poster artist to make a teaser poster.
And took it to America and said, 'That's our next movie.'
And everybody fell over themselves to...
put money into it.
I said, 'You wanna see a script or know who's in it?
'Don't bother about that. This is a Hammer film.
And we know it will be alright.'
And he came back to me and said,
'That's our next movie. You've gotta go away and write it now.'
I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'We start shooting in six weeks.'
And that's really how they operated.
He would sell an idea based on a teaser poster
before a word of script had been written.
There's a wonderful treasure trove of...
..wildly lurid posters...
for films that very often turned out to be...
much more sedate than those initial posters.
But Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde is an example of a movie
examining gender within genre.
VOICEOVER: Dr Jekyll, Sister Hyde.
Man or woman.
Or both?
When I read the script, I thought, 'This could be really interesting.'
I am one who believes that all of us have male and female in us.
And I would like to have explored it more, actually.
But at that point, they were so busy trying to get me to be...
..um...full nudity, which was not in the script.
I was quite happy to show my breasts,
because the point is that if he turns into her,
she's gonna have to figure out...
what is the power?
And that was very interesting to do.
That was really interesting to do.
And I wish we had gone deeper into it and kind of done...
because we would have... should have had more confusion...
from both sides.
It is I who exists, Dr Jekyll. Not you.
LOGAN: Brian Clemens was able to bring a sort of...
different kind of sexuality to that.
And Martine Beswick was so commanding and so powerful,
that even though she is exposed,
it is fitting for the script as the character learns about
what her new identity, her new gender identity is.
Clemens was on the cusp of taking Hammer
in a bold and exciting new direction,
but the company was about to be dealt yet another devastating blow.
In 1969, the American studios begin to withdraw,
because they're suffering bruising losses at home,
and it's no longer financially viable...
to be quite so heavily invested in the British film industry.
James Carreras runs to his friends at the Variety Club,
principally Bernard Delfonte at EMI,
and he agrees to finance Hammer's films in the '70s.
But now the budgets are tiny.
The budgets are £100,000 for a film.
To put it in context, 12 years before,
The Curse Of Frankenstein was £80,000.
In 1957, Dracula was £90,000.
12 years on, with inflation, they've now gotta make a film for £100,000.
And the budget doesn't stretch as far at Elstree,
where they were making these films now,
than they did it at Bray Studios.
In autumn 1970,
James Carreras invited his son Michael back into the company
in his old role as executive producer.
Michael doesn't want to do that again.
He's done it, so he says no.
And this causes another major rift between father and son.
Of course, Jimmy Carreras was well aware of the straits
Hammer was heading into by 1970.
I mean, he was there doing the deals, and by 1970,
they tended to be non-existent deals with American studios.
And now James actually says,
'Why don't you come back? But you can be managing director.'
And Michael starts on 4th January 1971
as the Managing Director of Hammer.
As soon as Michael Carreras takes over, things look up.
They decide to completely abandon... the sexier films they'd been making,
with Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell.
They bring Terence Fisher back to make his last film.
Peter Cushing's last go as the Baron.
It's a kind of callback to the older Hammer Gothic mode.
And then they started trying to mix the Gothic horror
with the Satanic panic elements.
Hammer had to hustle to try to stay relevant,
and they become kind of 'throw it at the wall' kind of movies.
One that stands out to me is Dracula AD 1972.
I'm one of those many people who have a lot of patience for that one.
It's something that I've just always been interested about,
cos there was something very transitional about it.
But you can tell that they're starting to lose their way
and moving into something that...
is quite different from what they used to be really good at.
They're no longer based on classic stories.
Once they didn't know where they were going any more,
the spirit of adventure that had marked the early '60s
was nowhere to be found,
because a lot of the personnel were nowhere to be found.
The celebrated creatives that had crafted Hammer's success
through the 1950s and early 1960s
had all but disappeared.
Only Michael Carreras and his father, James, remained...for now.
James was on, I think, a sea cruise or a vacation,
and Michael learnt his father was trying to sell the family company.
APPLETON: James Carreras was in discussion with this company
called Studio Film Labs for a while about a merger.
At the same time, James was talking to Tony Tenser from Tigon Films
about Tony potentially taking over Hammer
and engulfing it into Tigon.
Michael knew about the first discussion,
but he didn't know about the discussion with Tony.
Michael, obviously, was very annoyed that this decision
was taken out of his hands, especially at the point...
that he was the Managing Director, and he wasn't even consulted.
So he launched his own bid to buy the company.
They went to the PFS, which is the Pensions Funds Subsidiary,
and asked for a £400,000 loan,
which they granted,
on top of £200,000 extra to make two films...
to set them going.
So he was able to hustle enough money to make a counteroffer...
..waited for the boat to dock.
His father walked off the boat, and he handed him the contract.
So it was a fait accompli...
with no communication between them.
It's almost like the cold war had just calcified
everything in that relationship.
James took the bid. And Michael became the Director.
The irony is Michael Carreras thinks he's buying a solvent company.
He thinks he's buying Hammer Films backed by EMI,
you know, so the bank account's gonna be full.
And he finds out that that bank account went with James Carreras.
When Michael took over the company in 1972,
the one thing that happened straight away was all the...
the American studios pulled their financing.
This is potentially due to...
James's advice.
Or, I mean, I think it's also to do with the fact
they were really good friends with James,
and they just didn't really have a...
relationship with Michael in the same way.
RIGBY: I have the impression that Michael had no idea...
just how...of the paucity of Hammer's resources at that point,
whereas his father was well aware,
and nevertheless, still handed the company over to him.
I need some money, Father. You can't have any.
I think James had a real disdain for his son.
I think he was ferocious, and tough, in a way he didn't need to be.
He basically...
left him on a sinking ship.
Seemingly deceived by his own father,
Michael was determined to keep the family business alive.
Following his deal to take over Hammer,
he put the business ahead of any personal vendettas,
hoping to recapture the Hammer magic.
He immediately went into production on a vampire film,
a feature that had been commissioned by the very man he felt betrayed him.
Captain Kronos is a really interesting watershed moment,
I think, in Hammer, and what could have been
and what might have been,
because Brian Clemens wrote and directed a very sort of...
quirky, cheeky, interesting...
vampire movie unlike any vampire movie that had ever been made.
Brian was very much in charge of that because it was his baby.
He'd written it. He was gonna direct it.
To be honest, he was thrilled to bits.
I mean, he desperately always wanted to direct.
LOGAN: It was a little folk horror.
It was a little, like, 'I don't get what's going on in this, exactly.'
It had sword fights. It was genre blending...
in a way that's very popular now.
So it was a really exciting piece of work.
I enjoyed that film very much,
partly because it was all shot outside.
And my passion is to be outside. Got to be outside.
And it was great, because I'd turn up in the morning,
and I remember the hairdresser saying,
'You haven't washed your hair, have you?' 'No, you told me not to.'
'Don't wash it for a week. We need it kind of yucky.'
I said, 'OK, alright, then. I won't. Great.'
And Michael Carreras should have been smart enough
to realise that was an exciting way to keep building his brand,
to keep the Hammer brand going.
Maybe he felt threatened. Maybe it just wasn't his sensibility.
It was a bit too esoteric. It was basically ahead of its time, really.
He was very sniffy about Brian Clemens, you know, in terms of...
'He's not quite understanding our style or what we do here,'
you know, as if he's his father,
you know, putting his old school tie up.
And I'm like, 'Michael, no. Don't do this.'
There was a great opportunity there...
for Brian Clemens to become the new Jimmy Sangster,
the new Terence Fisher, the new...
idea man behind Hammer.
Michael Carreras should have gotten so behind that movie
and said, 'Look what Hammer can do now. This is different.
Here's the man who made it, Brian Clemens.
He's an artist.' But he didn't do that.
It just sort of...crept out.
And it wasn't given a proper release.
It came out, apparently, about a year or so later.
Brian's directorial debut, in essence,
was sort of...shoved at the back of a cupboard, basically.
How stultifying that must have been,
how debilitating it must have been to an artist.
If I could go back into Hammer history and arrange a meeting,
I would sit down Michael Carreras...
and Brian Clemens and say, 'Boys, work it out.'
Company politics, and the absence of any new creative vision,
were beginning to suffocate Hammer.
Meanwhile, other filmmakers around the world
were breathing new life into the horror genre.
Problems for Hammer...
probably started with The Exorcist.
(SCREAMING, CLATTERING)
Suddenly no-one's interested in what's going on in Transylvanian castles.
People want to see what's going on next door,
down the street, inside your house.
That's where horror moved,
and that's where horror still is to this day, whether it's The Exorcist,
or another big hit that they're trying to emulate, it's too late.
Michael, even as much as he was being creative
and trying to diversify the Hammer output,
I'm not sure even he knew
the direction it was going to go in in the '70s.
I think what we were seeing then in the '70s
was the decline of the British film industry.
Within a few years,
British commercial filmmaking,
at the end of the 20th century, would be more or less wiped out.
It's always the challenge with art...
to make money, to stay solvent.
And Hammer, like every other British studio,
was at the mercy of the marketplace.
To Michael Carreras's credit, he kept the thing going...
when, obviously, they were not on the same track as the audience.
And so...
even the movies that were supposed to be good, like...
..which on paper, looks like it would be a pretty good movie.
It was trying so desperately to be The Exorcist...
that it lost its own individuality.
And not only don't they work, they don't make any money.
It's like any studio, whether Disney or any of them,
they try to move with the times.
It's easier said than done.
Despite this significant downturn in creative output
during the mid-1970s,
which led to disappointing financial outcomes,
Hammer's legacy has remarkably endured.
The magic forged over the prior two decades managed to persist.
Lesser studios would have faltered sooner,
and lesser leaders might have let the company fade away.
But Michael Carreras' unwavering never-say-die attitude...
kept the Hammer flames burning.
Michael Carreras's tenacity during the '70s in keeping Hammer alive,
I think, is key to the fact that it's still alive now.
And he made movies, which is, let me tell you,
it's no mean feat to get movies made and released - it's a big deal.
The fact the last Hammer film was a remake of a Hitchcock picture...
VOICEOVER: Now you see her...
(TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS)
..now you don't.
Never a good idea, by the way.
And it's not such a bad movie, but nobody wanted to see it.
And it doesn't have anything Hammer-esque about it.
APPLETON: And Michael really thought that Hammer would come back to life.
I'll give you life again.
He literally thought that he would be able
to save Hammer right up to the very end.
That's what I admired most about Michael Carreras,
that with everything falling apart, without the support of his father,
he hustled like crazy.
He won't give up.
Can't you see?
Michael didn't want to give up because apart from anything else,
it was his family business.
And I think nobody wants to admit defeat, ultimately.
Maybe he wanted to prove something to his dad,
who never really believed in him, particularly.
In the '70s, Hammer is surviving on British finance.
Almost exclusively.
My name is Mitch Wicking.
And I'm the son of Christopher Wicking.
I wrote screenplays for Hammer in the mid-'70s.
So it seems to be, from Dad's diaries, a long catalogue of...
..Michael spending money to raise money.
There was tales of waiting for...
the fat man, as he calls him. I think it's Michael Klinger.
It was a German who was ready to fund projects,
but they wait and wait, and there'd be a telex.
'He's on his way. He's on the plane.
He'll be coming with a suitcase of money,'
as Dad puts it in the diary.
And then right at the last minute - it's always the last second...
(EXHALES) ..doesn't turn up.
So he ploughed a lot of money, including some of his own,
into building up a number of...
big budget films, such as Nessie, Vampirella, Vlad The Impaler,
which, of course, didn't see the light of day,
and all that money was lost.
Apart from Nessie and Vampirella,
there were three or four, five, six, seven different smaller movie ideas.
And there was the big one.
They approached Stan Lee at Marvel Comics
with the idea of doing a franchise.
You've got Iron Man in there, and Doctor Strange,
and quite a few others.
Stan's reply is, 'Oh, yeah. Great.
Lovely. Let's take the next step.'
And then there's some reason why they couldn't do it.
So you can imagine...
what kudos that would have been if that had have come off.
Michael can't carry on any longer,
and the Official Receiver takes charge.
So the fact that Hammer goes under definitively in 1979...
for a time, is not entirely surprising, because...
most other sectors of the British film industry are doing so as well.
He kept the company alive and enabled all this stuff,
decades later, merely by...
by that dog-with-a-bone quality that he had.
And it was a dog-with-a-bone quality that was largely based on,
you know, a sentimental reaction to the fact
that his whole life had been Hammer, and he didn't want to see it die.
When you make something that's so specific and so idiosyncratic,
it's not gonna work for 40 years.
I suppose I wasn't in tune. I have to take the blame for this.
I was in charge. We should have had new thinking.
We should have had completely new writers.
We should have had new directors. We should have had all sorts of things.
Michael Carreras passed away in 1994 from cancer,
just four years after the death of his father.
All of the men who'd steered Hammer through its golden years were gone.
For many, it marked the final curtain for a company
that had brought so much fear, wonder and excitement to the screen.
As we look back, decades after his death,
Michael Carreras stands tall against the Hammer backdrop.
A man whose fingerprints were across nearly all of the Hammer films,
having worked in so many departments
and taking on so many different responsibilities.
In a world of heroes, legends and monsters,
Michael Carreras was a very human being.
At the end of this chapter of the Hammer story,
one man's struggle kept the Hammer name alive.
Michael Carreras succeeded.
The fact that Michael Carreras was able
to keep the company through that period...
I'm sure is why we're able to still talk about it today.
In the years since Hammer's near-death experience
at the end of the 1970s,
it has been kept alive in various iterations,
producing films and television series...
from the Hammer House Of Horror
to blockbuster films like The Woman In Black.
Despite all of the trials and tribulations the company has faced,
Hammer has risen to legendary status in the world of film.
Those films were made by people who cared. They loved them.
They made them with great care and attention.
Those films will last forever.
I get asked time and time again,
in letters and interviews and things,
'When is Hammer gonna return or will Hammer return?'
and certainly the answer doesn't lie with me.
But I would be very happy to see it return.
Definitely.
It is the desperate irony that Hammer, as a company,
now reflects its most famous character, Count Dracula.
You can never kill it. It just has a way of reviving again and again.
And, boy, have we seen some convincing deaths in the films.
And yet, somehow,
it always comes back.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Life after death. Indestructible.
(MUSIC SWELLS)
MAN: Cameras rolling. WOMAN: All good.
Yeah.Hammer, Hammer. (LAUGHTER)
So we'll do... We'll do an easy one to start with.(LAUGHS)
Just try.We'll start and work it out.We'll see how easy it is.
And all we ever did was dissect bunnies.
A little higher.Happy there? A bit higher.
Cool. Mark it. Yeah. Joe Dante, take 1.
It says John Carpenter.
(LAUGHS) You can pretend.
You know, it's like Howard The Duck.
Didn't anyone see that little duck suit, you know?
What a great question.
I'd like it noted that was two great questions.Yeah. Within one.
In forty-five minutes, that makes two great questions.Yeah.
It's like an Old Spice commercial. You know, it really changes.
So, yes, my mum gave me this pamphlet with penguins in it.
(LAUGHTER)Oh, no, stop it! I'm gonna have to get up.
(LAUGHTER)
WOMAN: It's got worse!
It's like The Godfather.
Just when you're out, they drag you back in.
So you and Edna read the book. Read the pamphlet.Pamphlet.
Well, week after week, she'd always come over on a Sunday morning.
She lived at the bottom of my garden, as did Nigel and Jeremy.
Just stop it! (GIGGLES)
You had somebody living in your garden? (LAUGHS)
But I did!
(LAUGHS)
Right. Can we cut? Cos I can't chat to her any more.
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