This is the first of two books, looking at the history of Hammer movies by concentrating on the two studios most of the movies were produced in. "The Bray Years" covers the years 1953 to 1966.
Reynolds&Hearn, 2002
Writer Kinsey has written and edited for the magazine
The House That Hammer built. Here now is an overview of the movies, tons of facts and a lot of interviews from various sources to tell the story of Hammer.
For a novice like me on the history of Hammer this was quite a fascinating book. I am normally not very interested in "The Making of" part of things; this is the material on the DVD I mostly skip. But even if Kinsey is sometimes a bit long-winded, he manages to convey the atmosphere on the set. You could debate if you really need to know who did the catering at Bray studios or how the crew got to work because there was no bus-line at the time, but it kind of humanizes the whole thing.
Particularly interesting here are unpublished never before censor reports. Hammer used to send the scripts voluntary to the British Board of Film Censors before filming. The board then made detailed suggestions for what they thought unacceptable to be shown on the screen. Of course Hammer didn´t have to follow those "suggestions", but it often saved money if they did. Why produce elaborate scenes which later have to be cut when the movie needed the certificate?
Not all of the correspondence has survived, but a lot did. Now horror always had and has its run-ins with the censors, for which every country has its own standards, but the efforts Hammer had to spend to even get the then needed "X" certificate are both hilarious (from today´s point of view) and depressing.
"… the introductory story of the bestial beggar and the dumb serving wench is intolerable", wrote examiner Audrey Fields on the first version of
Curse of the Werewolf. " … this is not the legitimate thrill of horror, but caters for very debased and perverted sexual tastes. Tinkering with details will not do: the concept of a man being chained up and deliberately turned into a beast not likely to prove acceptable." Another wrote: "… here man becomes dog and rapes dumb girl watched by poor man´s Marquis de Sade. The first 18 pages come to a climax not horror but of sheer bestiality. I know Carreras says that when he makes an honorable film he loses money, but he should feel a bit ashamed of this obscene muck."
They surely didn´t like the project at all. "Page 63 [of the script]. .. the shot of Vera with blood on her neck sounds as though it might be really nasty. There is no reason to convey the impression 'that she may be naked'. We might accept blood sucking, but we would be unhappy about it if it were combined with the suggestion that it followed sexual relations." I wonder what they would have said about about any ep of HBOs True Blood.
And all this before even a minute of film was shot. After the movie was submitted, the Board wanted to reject it. There followed a lengthy battle of what cuts to do, even imbecile demands like "Remove shot of boy´s arm which has werewolf hair on it." And so on. At the end they reached a compromise as they always did, still it must have been mind-numbingly difficult work to get this movie on the screen.
And this was 1961, before Hammer even did nudity. The book illustrates a lot of these difficulties, the coming and going of creative personal and the changing of the times inn terms of what was acceptable and what not. Which makes for interesting reading. Also there are a lot of (mostly) little pictures, snapshots of the sets and stills.
I can´t compare this to other movie books on the subject, but for me it was a very good entry in this field. Some goes for the second part, which I read first a year ago. It is exactley done as the first one and discusses in detail movies like
The Vampire Lovers or
Taste the Blood of Dracula, not only the censorship problems, but the demands of Hammer´s financiers and the according script changes. Here is just a scan instead of a write-up, as in this case I don´t think it merits its own thread.
Tomahawk Press, 2007
