Hammer without the horror

MENTION Hammer films and chances are you think of horror.

Names like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing come to mind, accompanied by images of vampires, mummies and werewolves.

But Wayne Kinsey, a doctor by day and Hammer historian away from the hospital, hopes his new book will go some way to alter the popular perception of the British film company.

A gallery of rare images rescued from the vaults of the British Film Institute (BFI) offer evidence of this with photographs of the likes of Hollywood great Bette Davis, actress Joan Fontaine and award-winning director Joseph Losey – who all made Hammer movies.

“People forget Hammer made a lot of good films that lie in the shadow of the horror films,” he says.

He mentions 1959 as a case in point, when they made three nonhorror films – Never Take Sweets From A Stranger, about child molestation; Hell Is A City, a gritty crime thriller with Stanley Baker; and Yesterday’s Enemy, a war film that was nominated for Baftas as best film and best actor.

“In the book, there’s horror to keep the horror fans happy, but I want to show people it wasn’t just a horror factory and remind them of the kind of talent working at Hammer that people don’t associate with them.

“You remember Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. But Oliver Reed was discovered by Hammer, a nightclub bouncer who had a few days work as an extra and then they used him as a werewolf.”

The origins of the book go back to Kinsey being asked to help the BFI catalogue Hammer images for their online files. He was shown a lot of contact sheets, showing dozens of small pictures taken during shooting.

These would be inspected by the press officer and the best chosen as stills to be released to the press on the film’s release.

“A lot of the real photos never saw the light of day. They’re interesting for me as a film historian because they may show scenes that were filmed but not included in the film,”

he says.

He was going through the contact sheets identifying faces and picking out the best for online use when someone said to him: “Don’t you know we have some of the negatives?”.

Hammer donated them in the 1970s and they stored away in 38 boxes at the Berkhamsted film library.

Kinsey discovered around 7,000 original negatives sitting there gathering dust.

“The contact sheets were the tip of the iceberg. A load of stuff had never been printed up,” he says. “If you go back to the 70s and speak to the producers, they’d say they never thought the films had any longevity.

There was no idea of videos or DVDs.

A lot of the reference stills, magazines, contact sheets and blueprints of set designs got chucked away and thrown in the skip. A few survived and you should see how much they go for.

“Only a few things survived, including some costumes. A Peter Cushing jacket from Frankenstein went for something like £12,000.”

Kinsey knows how lucky they were to find these “lost” Hammer pictures, some 7,000 negatives covering mainly the period between 1961 and 1966. “The BFI stills department is an Aladdin’s cave for a film historian, but they just don’t have the staffing or funding to log them all,”

says Kinsey.

He scanned the negatives onto a PC to preserve them for the BFI files. As he was going through the images, he was able to connect them with some of the legendary stories that have arisen around Hammer movies.

Pick of the bunch concerned the 1963 Hammer swashbuckler Devil Ship Pirates for which the producers built a full-size replica Spanish galleon, the Diablo, with the idea of renting it out for future productions afterwards.

“But it was a complete disaster, it wasn’t stable,” explains Kinsey.

“They were filming a scene on deck with stunt men, actors and crew. The tea boat comes along, everyone goes to one side of the ship and it capsizes.”

Despite eyewitness accounts, there were no photos of the incident until Kinsey found one among the negatives. It shows the frantic rescue efforts to free people from the rigging, while cast and crew struggle to the shore.

The picture, and many more from the making of Devil Ship Pirates, is in the book whose publication follows a photographic exhibition on London’s South Bank last year.

“I want to remind people Hammer didn’t just do horror films, which is what people remember them for.

Their two most successful films were One Million Years BC, with Raquel Welch, and On The Buses, which was the number one film of the year in 1971, beating Diamonds Are Forever.”

The collection of stills from Hammer movies is remarkable, featuring expected faces like Lee and unexpected ones like Bette Davis, who starred in the black comedy The Anniversary.

Kinsey’s love affair with Hammer began as an impressionable ten-yearold allowed to stay up to watch horror films after the News at Ten on Friday nights in the 1970s.

“The most up-to-date were Hammer, they had a better bite than the Universal series of the Thirties and Fourties. I just loved them. I collected magazines and books, then found they held conventions to which they invited actors and technicians. For the first time I saw a different side of Hammer by meeting people behind the scenes.”

He attended his first convention in 1985. His only regret is that he started too late to meet some of the key players, like Peter Cushing and director Terence Fisher, in the Hammer story.

What’s kept the Hammer brand alive, he says, is the arrival of DVD.

He admits that today’s cinemagoers insist on comparing them with modern movies. They watch a Hammer horror and complain it’s boring because there’s not enough blood and guts. What they don’t realise, he says, is that in their day audiences thought the films were too bloody.

‘YOU have to look at these films in the time they were made,” says Kinsey. “Some of the other horror pictures were awful – cheap, in black and white and the make-up was awful.

“Then you see Hammer films. The Hammer secret was they had a great team, a mixture of newcomers who’d go on to great things and become veterans of the British film industry.

They had great art directors who could make sets for peanuts. And great make-up artists.

“When they first came out, the films were in colour and showed more blood and gore for their time than was usual. When the film censors looked at them, they thought it was over the top and asked for cuts to get an 18 or X certificate.

“Now they’re shown with 12 or 15 certificates. When Dracula was re-released for its 50th anniversary last year, a new print was struck and the cuts put back in. It went out with a 12A certificate, but when it came out in 1958 it could only be shown to adult audiences.”

When he’s not looking at Hammer’s bloody brand of cinema, Kinsey is a doctor working as a consultant histopathologist in Norwich.

His main work is looking at tissue from biopsies to determine cancer type and its extent.

It’s not the gruesome job that many people imagine. “Most people think it has to do with post-mortems because of what they see on television.

But most of my work is with the living, making sure patients get the right diagnosis and that it’s treated properly,” he explains.

This is the third Hammer book from Kinsey, who has published a fanzine, The House That Hammer Built, for the past ten years.

His next is Hammer Films – The Real Story, featuring the stories of the people who made Hammer such a success.

“Then I think I’ll have done it to death,” he says in a Hammer-ish turn of phrase.

■ Hammer Films: A Life In Pictures is published by Tomahawk Press

tomahawkpress.com