When Martin Scorsese was 11 or 12 years old, he'd visit his local picture house with his mates. “If we saw the logo of the Hammer films, we knew it was a very special picture, and we knew it was a certain type of film,” he said.
He's referring, of course, to the gothic movies shot in lurid Eastmancolor that made Hammer Productions Ltd, a small, family-run studio based in a converted country house on the bank of the River Thames, an international player. With splashy genre pictures like The Curse Of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958) and The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll (1959), Hammer took the monsters of 18th-century British literature – already screen icons thanks to the black-andwhite Universal movies of the 1930s – and resurrected them with the lightningrod force of sex and violence. Never before had there been so much blood, in such vivid colour, on cinema screens, or such heaving cleavages and sensual neck-sucking.
But it wasn't always that way. Founded in 1934 by (1935), starred Universal's iconic Count Dracula, Bela Lugosi.
