The secret to the success of the influential Hammer Studios, which revitalized the horror film in the late 1950s and '60s, was no secret at all. "It's really very simple," said studio head James Carreras in a 1959 interview, "We make exploitable pictures. What we have done, others can do. There's no magic involved."

Indeed, Carreras was a master of finance, sales and showmanship, who perfected the art of pre-selling movies with sensational titles and ad campaigns well before the film itself had even been produced. He inherited the "studio" -- which was a studio in name only, having no soundstages of its own -- from his father Enrique, a Spanish immigrant who owned a chain of movie theatres and gradually became involved in distribution as a means of obtaining a greater share of the profits. Along with former vaudevillian Will Hinds, Enrique formed Exclusive Films in 1932 to buy up the rights of independent films and license older films for re-release. Quickly realizing that they could prosper by producing their own films, Enrique and Hinds mounted their first production (The Public Life of Henry the Ninth) in 1935 under the banner of Hammer Films. The name Hammer was an homage to Hinds's music hall days, when he was part of a comedy duo known as Hammer and Smith.

It was James Carreras who transformed a mom-and-pop filmmaking cooperative into one of England's most famous studios -- such an impressive model of ambitious enterprise that it won the Queen's Award for Industry in 1968. He found that the shortest path to box-office success was to make films based on properties already popular with audiences. For this reason, Hammer's earliest successes were adaptations of successful radio series: Dick Barton: Special Agent (1948), The Adventures of P.C. 49 (1949) and the family-oriented The Man in Black (1949).

Because they did not own a physical studio, the company operated by renting stately manors in the English countryside and using the cavernous stone chambers as settings for their adventure films -- often filming scenes for several different productions in the same room, with minimal alteration of decor. While shooting The Lady Craved Excitement (1950) in one such locale on the banks of the Thames, someone noticed a castle-like property next door, which had fallen into disrepair. Hammer decided it was wiser to buy than rent, and purchased the crumbling estate, christening it Bray Studios (after a nearby village).

"At first it was an empty house," remembered screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, "We furnished the rooms, shot some film, refurnished them, shot some more. Next we started to actually build sets in a couple of the larger downstairs rooms. Then -- the big move -- Hammer decided to build a soundstage. One became two which became three."

If Hammer's frugal economic legacy is attributable to James Carreras, then the studio's artistic reputation surely belongs to his son Michael, the third generation of Carreras to drive the studio forward. After working briefly at Hammer in the early '40s, Michael returned from WWII to become a production executive in 1950. His father may have understood the business of film production, but Michael had a better idea of the kinds of films audiences were eager to see, and quickly began nudging the studio in the direction of mystery and suspense.

Hammer was a very informal work environment, which causes it to be fondly recalled by virtually everyone associated with the studio. "It was very much a friendly, family affair," said makeup artist Phil Leakey, "Everyone was ready to lend a hand to anyone who needed one, regardless of union lines of demarcation...It was so unlike the big studios where egos and unions get in the way." Even in the most prosperous years, Hammer maintained its aura of camaraderie and collaboration. Cameraman Len Harris said, "Working for Hammer was like being part of a family -- it really was! We ate lunch at a huge round table. Michael Carreras would carve the meat and serve. Peter Cushing would queue for a place behind an electrician -- there were no prima donnas at Hammer."

"There were no 'auteurs' at Bray Studios," wrote film historians Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio (in their book - Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Biography, McFarland), "Actors Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, directors Terence Fisher and Val Guest, writer Jimmy Sangster, composer James Bernard, and designer Bernard Robinson gave the company's films their unmistakable atmosphere, sharing in Hammer's success." In the mid '50s, Hammer continued to make "recycled" films, such as Men of Sherwood Forest (1954), (exemplifying the genre known as "tits and swords," quipped Sangster) and Life With the Lyons (1956, inspired by the radio series of the same name). In 1955, Hammer finally struck upon their first major success: The Quatermass Xperiment, based on the popular BBC-TV sci-fi serial. Quatermass spawned a string of sequels, and confirmed that Hammer's strength might lie in more mysterious realms.

Then came The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the film that transformed Hammer into an internationally renowned film studio. Again, they started with a well-known story. Because the original novel was in the public domain, Hammer was free to make their own Frankenstein film -- as long as they didn't plagiarize Jack Pierce's squarish, bolt-headed design for the monster (which was copyrighted by Universal Studios). To avoid legal squabbles with Universal, they drew some material from the original text and improvised just as much of their own. The results were a revelation to moviegoers. What had gradually been watered down into self-parody over the course of too many ill-conceived sequels at Universal (including The Ghost of Frankenstein [1942] and the franchise's absolute nadir: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, [1948]) suddenly enjoyed a creative revival. The Curse of Frankenstein proved that the classics were still ripe for reinterpretation.

True to their economic philosophy, Hammer quickly launched Frankenstein sequels, and began tapping into other long-neglected horror/suspense legends: Horror of Dracula (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960) and The Phantom of the Opera (1962).

These films were, as James Carreras said, "exploitable," but they were more than sensational potboilers. The Hammer horror films were revisionist treatments of horror legends that managed to remain true to the essential spirit and tone of the original. Audiences' tastes had grown more sophisticated since the Universal horrors of the 1930s and Hammer responded by injecting fresh doses of sex and graphic violence that (although modest by today's standards) were shocking to viewers in their time. Meanwhile in Hollywood, the studios were clinging to the assembly-line method of filmmaking and were still caught in the clutches of the various censor boards across the nation. This allowed Hammer a distinct advantage over the competition.

So successful was Hammer at re-envisioning the films and novels of yesteryear that they were courted by the major studios of the U.S. Warner Bros. snapped up distribution rights to the horror films, while Columbia Pictures tried (unsuccessfully) to produce a TV series using Hammer talent. In the greatest demonstration of Hammer's influence upon the majors, Universal Studios actually made a deal in which the British studio produced authorized remakes of the American studio's popular horror films, including The Mummy (1932 and 1959), The Phantom of the Opera (1925 and 1962) and The Old Dark House (1932 and 1963).

At the same time it was reviving the classics, Hammer widened its scope to new horrors, such as The Reptile (1966), Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966) and a series of erotic vampire tales inspired by the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, such as The Vampire Lovers (1970).

In time, the Hammer formula began to wear thin. Like the corpses reanimated by Baron Frankenstein, gothic horror films proved to be a temporary craze that soon began to grow stale. In the late '60s and early '70s, independent American cinema was unleashing its horrors upon contemporary society in films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Last House on the Left (1972). Such films made Hammer's gothic horrors almost quaint by comparison.

During the 1960s, Hammer had been drawn to large-scale productions which in the '70s became more expensive to produce and less profitable to release. They abandoned their mega-production Nessie: The Loch Ness Monster in 1977 before the cameras could begin to turn. Michael Carreras left Hammer after the 1979 film The Lady Vanishes (true to form, a remake of a 1938 Hitchcock film). The Hammer name endured, mostly on a succession of TV movies and series. More importantly, the studio's films had a profound impact upon other filmmakers, from Roger Corman to Andy Warhol to Martin Scorsese. Today, Hammer is a byword for bosomy vampirellas, oversaturated color and gruesome lab experiments, and will always evoke images of erotic horror to those who were captivated by its distinctive charms.

by Bret Wood