Hammer and beyond: The British horror film

By Peter Hutchings

Peter Hutchings’s Hammer and beyond remains a landmark work in British film criticism. This new, illustrated edition brings the book back into print for the first time in two decades. Featuring Hutchings’s socially charged analyses of genre classics from Dead of Night (1945) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) to The Sorcerers (1967) and beyond, it also includes several of Hutchings’s later essays on British horror, as well as a new critical introduction penned by film historian Johnny Walker and an afterword by Russ Hunter. Hammer and beyond deserves a spot on the bookshelf of anyone with a serious interest in the development of Britain’s contribution to the horror genre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526151179

Book preview

A return to Hammer and Beyond: introduction to the new edition

Johnny Walker

‘Hutch has gone!’

–Luke, The Ritual (David Bruckner, 2017)

In 1989 Peter Ward Hutchings, a doctoral candidate at the University of East Anglia in the UK, earned his PhD for a thesis entitled ‘The British Horror Film: An Investigation of British Horror Production in its National Context’. Four years later, Manchester University Press published a revised version of the dissertation as Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Figure 0.1).¹ Both the original thesis and the subsequent book emerged at a time when popular British cinema was receiving scholarly reappraisal, challenging what some perceived as an over-emphasis placed by critics on films of the social realist tradition, in addition to the long-standing – and, looking back, frankly astonishing – belief that British filmmakers lacked ‘a specifically cinematic eye’ or any ‘awareness of form and style’.² In years to come things would change. The field of British Film Studies became broader and more inclusive, with scholars less willing to concede flippant and derisory remarks about British cinema’s alleged inferiority to US modes, being instead determined to pull away the ‘stifling blanket’ of social realism and examine the national cinema’s ‘popular’ forms.³ Julian Petley’s influential essay on this issue – in which he explored what he terms the ‘lost continent’ of British cinema – served as a rallying cry to scholars of popular cinema looking to kick back against the notion of ‘realism’ as the only mode worth discussing, and to show that genres such as horror were ripe for reconsideration. Hutchings, with Hammer and Beyond, was well positioned to ride this wave of revisionism.⁴

Figure 0.1 Cover of the first edition of Hammer and Beyond, originally published in 1993

Having worked for thirty years at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, Hutchings died in February 2018, much to the sadness of his colleagues and many working across Screen Studies. Hammer and Beyond remains his defining work, representing the first of several significant contributions that he made to the study of horror cinema over his career, including the revered textbook The Horror Film, the Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema, and monographs on Hammer’s most famous film, Dracula (1958), and its director Terence Fisher.⁵ This new edition seeks to commemorate Hutchings’ key interventions in the field by reprinting the original text in full, alongside a number of later articles by Hutchings that develop some of the book’s key themes. The present introductory chapter has been written to help position the reader in relation to the academic climate that saw the first edition materialise, to consider some of the book’s omissions, and to assess the state of British horror in the years immediately leading up to, and since, its publication.

Hutchings rides out

The first edition of Hammer and Beyond was, when first published, the second of two scholarly studies on British horror cinema. The first, David Pirie’s illustrious A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, 1946–72, was written in the early 1970s, presenting a neat – and for subsequent scholars, hugely attractive – argument that ‘the horror genre, as it has been developed in this country by Hammer and its rivals, remains the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own, and which relates to it in the same way as the western relates to America’.⁶ There is no question that Hutchings’ book owed an awful lot to Pirie’s, from the period under scrutiny to many of the main case studies. Both books begin in the mid-1940s and end in the early 1970s, both give detailed consideration to Hammer’s characterisations of Dracula and Frankenstein (a chapter each in A Heritage of Horror, one chapter of two halves in Hammer and Beyond), and both champion British horror – with a strong emphasis on the output of Hammer – as stylistically innovative and distinctive. There are, however, differences of note.

For a start, Hutchings adopts a different tone to Pirie, one indicative of the era in which he was writing and the broad shifts in attitudes towards the horror film post A Heritage of Horror. While Pirie is at pains to stress the cultural worthiness of British horror cinema (‘No matter how painful and even humiliating the process may turn out to be …’), Hutchings refrains from doing so; from the outset of Hammer and Beyond it is taken as a given that British horror films are worthy objects of study.⁷ By the time Hammer and Beyond was published in 1993, horror was very much part of mainstream academic criticism, thanks to landmark writing on American horror cinema by Robin Wood, Carol J. Clover and others, in addition to a special issue on ‘body horror’ of the leading journal Screen, featuring key interventions by the likes of Philip Brophy and Barbara Creed.⁸ Hammer and Beyond entered British horror into international discussions that were heavily weighted towards North American film production, combining of-the-moment psychoanalytic approaches (à la Wood, Creed and Clover) with nuanced sociohistorical readings.

Secondly, while acknowledging his indebtedness to Pirie’s book, Hutchings nevertheless frames Pirie’s argument as limiting. Pirie’s approach, Hutchings suggests, precludes detailed consideration of ‘aesthetic and ideological properties’ of the British horror film.⁹ Hammer and Beyond, as a cultural history, foregrounds sociopolitical and sociocultural factors (with an emphasis on gendered power relations), the historical contexts that birthed British horror, and how such issues played out on screen. It is true that Pirie on occasion offers socially charged analysis, remarking for instance that ‘X The Unknown was the first proper example’ of a British film that engages with Cold War anxieties, but such observations are fleeting.¹⁰ Pirie is more concerned with providing examples to support the notion that British horror films are part of a deep-rooted literary tradition. Hammer and Beyond, thus, in moving beyond Pirie’s ‘heritage’ argument, featured analysis anchored not to long-standing attitudes or literary tropes, but rather to ever-changing shifts in the sociopolitical and economic contexts within which such films were made.

In showing horror as a central part of British film culture that presents a ‘rich, fascinating and multifaceted response to life in Britain’,¹¹ Hutchings was able to make his case for ‘the Britishness of British horror’: the genre as British national cinema. He therefore finds value in films such as The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) and The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970), akin to, for example, films of the British New Wave.¹² British horror films are said to ‘draw upon, represent and are always locatable in relation to much broader shifts and tendencies in British social history’,¹³ and, in the process, they address ‘specifically national issues and concerns’.¹⁴ Films as disparate as Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti et al., 1945), The Hound of the Baskervilles (Terence Fisher, 1959), The Mummy (Terence Fisher, 1959) and Countess Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1971) are therefore read alongside shifts in British culture around issues such as gender, sexuality, the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour Party in 1964, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and changes in the image of the family unit. Indeed, for Hutchings, the tendency in film criticism to prioritise analysis of social realism over more popular film types was problematic, given that, in terms of box office figures at least, popular vehicles in the Carry On and Hammer traditions were more visible to audiences and therefore spoke more to the notion of a national cinema than ‘kitchen sink’ dramas did. It was for this reason that Hutchings also took issue with the notion that horror constituted the national cinema’s ‘dark side’ (in terms of its critical disreputability and absence from academic film criticism): a viewpoint, which, for Hutchings, worked to further understate the genre’s global popularity. Such positions, Hutchings argues in the first chapter, fail

to take into account of the fact that these ‘subterranean’ films in themselves comprise an immensely popular cinema. When dealing with critical discourses that are primarily evaluative, it is often easy to lose sight of some of the commercial realities of British cinema. By any account, Hammer was a far more profitable enterprise (especially in the long term) than, say, the 1960s ‘kitchen sink’ productions […] simply because more people saw its product […] In this sense, it is the dark side of British cinema rather than its realistic component that can be viewed, in the 1950s and 1960s at least, as dominant.¹⁵

Hammer and Beyond recognised the ‘commercial reality’ of British film production, treating horror films first and foremost as cash-generators for the industry, but arguing that such films spoke to the nation precisely through their popularity with Britons.

Looking elsewhere

However, for all that the first edition of Hammer and Beyond is bold in its assertions, there are omissions that may surprise readers coming to the book for the first time. Cornerstone works of the 1970s, often written about in the burgeoning horror fan press of the 1980s and since celebrated for engaging with issues as broad as feminism, the family, authority figures and class – precisely those of interest to Hutchings – are mentioned briefly or not at all. Gary Sherman’s Death Line (1972) and Pete Walker’s Frightmare (1974), for instance, appear together across a couple of sentences in the book’s conclusion, while the work of Norman J. Warren (such as the films Prey [1977] and Terror [1979]) is discussed only briefly in Hutchings’ PhD dissertation, and does not feature at all in the published version. Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) are also conspicuous by their absence. As for horror production in the 1980s, The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) and Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) are the only British horror films made during the decade to be acknowledged, again briefly in a single paragraph. Writing in his dissertation, Hutchings offers something in the way of justification for side-stepping such films, arguing that the work of Walker, Sherman and Warren constitutes ‘fleeting glimpses of potentially new British generic models that, because of unfavourable economic circumstances, were not allowed to come to fruition’,¹⁶ while The Company of Wolves and Hellraiser are said in Hammer and Beyond to not ‘engage in any meaningful sense with a specifically British reality’, but instead ‘look elsewhere for their effects and meanings’.¹⁷

For all that one might perceive the aforementioned omissions as shortcomings of the book, it would not be long before other scholarly works emerged to flesh out the important historical sketch that Hutchings had made with Hammer and Beyond. Within two years of the book’s publication, De Montfort University hosted ‘A Naughty Business’, a festival of ‘the British cinema of Exploitation’ at Phoenix Arts, an independent cinema in Leicester, showcasing a number of horror films, including Walker’s The Flesh and Blood Show (1972) and House of Whipcord (1974), and Warren’s Inseminoid (1980). Shortly after, Harbour Lights Cinema in Southampton hosted a study day on exploitation films, with considerable emphasis on British production.¹⁸ Such events helped to carve a niche within academia for those academics studying the less reputable end of British horror, enabling further exploration of British cinema’s lost continent. As the festival booklet for ‘A Naughty Business’ declared: ‘Beyond Ealing, beyond Merchant Ivory, beyond even Hammer and the Carry On’s [sic] lies the forgotten world of the British exploitation film – the nudie flicks, sex comedies and tacky horror movies of the 60s and 70s.’¹⁹

Extended studies that addressed such films, which were ‘overlooked by film historians’, but which nevertheless – and contra what Hutchings suggested in his thesis – ‘sustained the British industry’ through their ‘unabashed populism’, emerged from this context.²⁰ Thus Steve Chibnall’s Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker and Leon Hunt’s British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation addressed for the first time independent British genre production of the 1970s, of which horror films – which Hunt characterises as ‘grim flarey tales’ – played a key role; and the first edition of Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema offered a rigorous yet accessible overview of British horror production from cinema’s beginnings up to the 1990s, including consideration of 1980s offerings such as The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984), Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) and more.²¹ Beyond this, Chibnall and Petley’s British Horror Cinema emerged in 2002, positioning itself as an outlet for work on ‘more neglected areas’, including films by Hammer’s competitors and (briefly) genre production during the 1980s and 1990s. Other works focused on overlooked curios such as Hammer’s The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Roy Ward Baker and Chang Cheh, 1974), neglected decades such as the 1930s, and Britain’s contribution to science fiction film.²²

Numerous other works followed over the next decade and a half, including further work on Hammer, work on British horror television, a revised and updated edition of Pirie’s A Heritage of Horror, new histories of British ‘trash’ cinema, research into British horror stardom, work seeking to move beyond ‘British’ and ‘English’ horror to consider Welsh, Scottish and Irish iterations, and work focused squarely on British horror film production in the new millennium.²³ While divergent from Hammer and Beyond in terms of methodology, scope and focus, the aforementioned works nevertheless speak to the legacy of Hutchings’ first book as a significant intervention into the study of popular visual British culture. Hammer and Beyond, amid a flurry of work on international horror films, put British horror on the academic map, laying the foundations upon which other scholars would build.

British horror film beyond Hammer and Beyond

What of the British horror film in the lead-up to, and since, the first edition? The late 1980s and early 1990s tend to be regarded as somewhat of a wasteland. Tellingly, the genre is virtually absent from the defining academic works on British film production during these decades.²⁴ One might assume, from these accounts, that there were no horror films – or at least no films of significance (however defined) – produced during this time. While this was certainly not the case, there was definitely a slump in production for which a number of reasons are typically given. These broadly relate to shifts in industry policy and a lack of proper industrial resourcing for horror filmmakers. Despite these factors, British companies continued to produce horror films. By the 2000s horror was very much a go-to genre which, on account of its ability to sell well domestically and overseas, benefited from cash injections from public subsidy.

The industrial landscape changed for British cinema in the 1980s. Hammer, due to the dwindling popularity of its output and the withdrawal of American subsidy, was dissolved in 1979 and sold on to its former accounts manager, Roy Skeggs, who turned the company over to television production with the series House of Horror and House of Mystery and Suspense in the 1980s.²⁵ While there was a handful of attempts by filmmakers to affectionately hark back to Hammer’s glory days, including Pete Walker’s The House of the Long Shadows (a gothic parody from 1983 which brought together Hammer icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee with horror stars Vincent Price and John Carradine), the style of horror that had made the company so famous was by this point outmoded, as audiences looked towards modern, visceral films from the US, Italy and Spain: fare that was proving especially popular with owners of the new video cassette recorders.²⁶

British horror was not dead, however. Films were being made, albeit not in numbers comparable to those of Hammer’s golden age, and they were less frequently conceived as products that would perform well with domestic cinemagoers. As John Hill notes, changes in film policy in the 1980s, including the demise of the screen quota and the Eady Levy, meant that the domestic market within which commercial British production – such as horror and bawdy comedies of the Carry On and Confessions of traditions – could fairly compete with Hollywood product disappeared under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.²⁷ As a result, and with the exception of a number of films that benefited from national government subsidy – such as Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), The Godsend (Gabrielle Beaumont, 1980) and The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) – British horror films made in the first half of the 1980s tended to be low-budget, independently produced movies made in response to international trends, which in most cases found their natural home in the burgeoning video market.

Consider, for example, Blood Tide (Richard Jefferies, 1982), a film shot in Greece for the short-lived British-based production company Connaught International in 1981. Co-produced by exploitation tycoon Nico Mastorakis, the film is typical of much contemporaneous exploitation fare, in that it was low-budget, shot on location, had a voguish electronic soundtrack and substandard post-production dubbing. Tellingly, following Connaught’s winding-up in the same year, the film was acquired, and subsequently represented worldwide, by the American exploitation film distributor 21st Century, whose credits at this point included the violent horror film Nightmare (Romano Scavolini, 1981) among others. A far cry from the production and distribution agreements that Hammer had had with the Hollywood majors Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox, the fate of Blood Tide was sealed.²⁸ Within weeks of the film’s appearance at the international film market, MIFED, it was released on to video in Britain in October 1982.²⁹ The film’s lack of a theatrical release, yet its quick acquisition by the new British video distributor Skyline Video as part of its ‘premier releases’ package (Figure 0.2), indicates that low-budget exploitation/horror films of this sort, at the dawn of the video age, were not destined for high box office returns per se. Indeed, the booming video market created huge demand for new films in all genres, but horror films – caught up in the widely documented ‘video nasties’ panic in Britain, and the growing readership of genre magazines such as Fangoria in the US – were proving top earners for distributors and video shops. The story was almost identical for the low-budget British slasher film Don’t Open Till Christmas (Edward Purdom, 1984). Handled by 21st Century, and having made a brief appearance at Cannes and MIFED, the film found its home on video in 1985 in the US, where horror remained a ‘year round traffic builder’ for video stores.³⁰

Figure 0.2 A video trade press advertisement for Blood Tide: a British horror film from the early 1980s

In the early 1980s the British home media distributor Palace was among many such companies experiencing the successes of horror video: the firm’s release of the micro-budget independent film The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) topped the video sales and rental charts in 1983.³¹ However, when the company moved into film production some months later, it was telling that it did so with a horror film, albeit of a sort with broader appeal than the high-profile video nasties of which The Evil Dead was among the most notorious.³² The film in question, The Company of Wolves, was an attempt by Palace to break into the commercial mainstream by straddling demographics. As Ian Conrich identifies, Palace looked to target, on the one hand, an assumed hard core of horror fans but also, on the other, ‘middle-class’ connoisseurs of Angela Carter, on whose work the film is based. For The Company of Wolves, this dual address worked, with the marketing successfully foregrounding the film’s ‘surrealist elements’ and its combination of ‘horror, mythology and fairytale’, resulting in commendable (and frankly, for British horror in the 1980s, unanticipated) box office takings.³³ As a hybrid piece the film was able to attain levels of credibility when other forms of visceral exploitation films, such as those framed as video nasties, were being denigrated in the mainstream press.

Palace had less theatrical success with Dream Demon (Harley Cokliss, 1988), the company’s most overt attempt to make an all-out horror picture. Borrowing its premise from the successful A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984–2010) series – the film’s protagonists are pursued by demonic figures in their dreams – it was, as Conrich explains, promoted not to capitalise on this element, but rather in a manner similar to The Company of Wolves: as an arty, ethereal picture, capable of straddling audience demographics. The film’s main promotional poster strays from the vibrant colour palettes and bold imagery of most contemporaneous horror film advertising, instead offering a monochrome illustration of an angel towering over a sleeping figure. The film’s press advertisements are awash with semi-intellectualised observations by middlebrow critics, such as ‘Expertly harnesses everyone’s night-time fears and lingers bewitchingly in the mind’, ‘Surreal, comic, horrific, satirical’ and ‘horror of the highest degree’.³⁴ Such design choices are at odds with the exploitation ballyhoo that graced the video box art of The Evil Dead (e.g. ‘THE ULTIMATE EXPERIENCE IN GRUELLING TERROR’), and do not chime with the character-centred horror formulae characteristic of the era, as in the promotional material for the recently released US production A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988) or the British Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Pete Atkins, 1988), both of which feature their monstrous antagonists (Freddy Krueger and Pinhead respectively) front and centre in their print advertising. Tellingly, come the film’s video release – and indicative of the environment in which Blood Tide and Don’t Open Till Christmas had found themselves earlier in the decade – Palace did away with the original illustration and the middlebrow quotes, together with the avant-garde artwork that in all likelihood had alienated its core audience in the first place. Instead, ‘body horror’ elements are foregrounded: a twisted image of a demon’s face is presented front and centre in echo of the aforementioned, monster-centred hits. To the top left of the image sits a quote from the populist, tabloid newspaper The Sun, declaring ‘A GRUESOME SHOCKER … DON’T HAVE DINNER BEFORE SEEING IT’. In so doing, Palace more accurately embodied the core market for horror at this time, by promoting Dream Demon in a manner that remained true to its commercial impetus: a gory horror film of the direct-to-video era.³⁵

By the 1990s a new era of British cinema was dawning. Much writing on the period celebrates the decade’s theatrical successes both at home and abroad, including comedies such as The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) and Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1998), and heritage films such as Howards End (James Ivory, 1992) and Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995).³⁶ Genres that did less well theatrically tend be framed as commercial failures or, rather more sympathetically, as parochial dramas with something to say, which, on account of their socially informed foci, were always destined to play only in art cinemas.³⁷ While horror, as mentioned above, is at best peripheral to these discussions (beyond Richard Stanley’s ambitious dystopian fantasy Hardware [1990] and the supernatural horror Dust Devil [1992]), it is worth stressing that, while British horror films of the 1990s did not tend to do well in cinemas, numerous films made during the era were not cultivated with such success in mind. As in the 1980s, the genre was known to do best on video and, additionally, cable television. Indicative of this situation, some of the first horror films of the 1990s were – like Dream Demon – low-budget, unabashedly derivative, with commercial aspirations in keeping with the genre’s contemporaneous success rate beyond the movie theatre.

A case in point is the formative output of Metrodome Films, a new producer and distributor established to produce commercial features, which emerged at a time when British cinema, in the opinion of some at least, amounted to little more than ‘costume dramas and depressing BFI social documents’.³⁸ Metrodome’s first venture, the horror film Beyond Bedlam (Vadim Jean, 1994), sought to challenge this viewpoint, being conceived from the outset as ‘out-and-out pure entertainment’.³⁹ The film, which sees an inmate of a mental institution haunt the dreams of the lead protagonist, is largely remembered as a derivative mash-up of popular horrors of the period, including The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and it failed to resonate with critics and cinemagoers. A review published in Variety captures the film’s lukewarm reception but also, in its dismissiveness, identifies the industry shifts from which horror films such as this were benefiting: ‘Genre nuts may want to check out this curio, but [the] pic’s longest lockup will be in the vid bin.’⁴⁰ Pejorative language aside, the review resonates with Metrodome’s broader commercial strategising during this period: to produce films in popular generic forms, for sectionalised audiences, across a host of media platforms, of which video was an especially lucrative stream.⁴¹

If the 1980s and 1990s were decades during which there were no break-out theatrical successes for British horror, the 2000s witnessed a fully fledged new wave, thanks to numerous factors ranging from shifts in national film policy to the boom in accessible prosumer technology and the rise of DVD and online streaming platforms. The new slasher boom of the mid-1990s and a spike in East Asian and European horror production led to a swelling in popularity for the genre in cinemas and on video. As far as theatrically released films are concerned, Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) showed that there was international demand for youth-oriented genre pictures, while The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999) and Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1999) showed that there was global commercial potential for horror films made on a shoestring.⁴² Within this context, Danny Boyle’s digitally shot 28 Days Later (2002), in which a virus transforms the majority of the UK’s population into fast-moving zombie-like creatures, and independent sleeper hits such as Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2001), in which an army platoon comes under siege from a family of werewolves in the Scottish highlands, proved popular with audiences in cinemas (and on video) at home and abroad.⁴³ It appeared that the commercial cinema typically associated with romantic comedies and heritage dramas was bleeding over into horror and, for the first time in decades, the genre was met with a degree of critical respectability.⁴⁴ Perhaps most famously, Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) managed to fuse the rom-com and the zombie movie to great critical (and box office) success, while ‘hoodie horror’ films such as Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008) and Cherry Tree Lane (Paul Andrew Williams, 2010) were seen as infusing the genre with aesthetic and thematic qualities typically associated with critic-pleasing social realism.⁴⁵

With that said, positive critical reportage on British horror has, as one would expect, ebbed and flowed across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. At one end of the scale are those championing the genre for harbouring fresh talent. Ben Wheatley is one example: his films Kill List (2011), Sightseers (2012) and A Field in England (2013) are widely celebrated for their ambivalence and visual artistry. Similarly, Alice Lowe, who made a splash with critics on the release of her debut feature, the ‘brilliantly conceived’ Prevenge (2016),⁴⁶ is one of several female directors welcomed for ‘bringing new blood’ to the genre across the world.⁴⁷ At the other end of the scale are the creatives behind the likes of Lesbian Vampire Killers (Phil Claydon, 2009) and Zombie Undead (Rhys Davies, 2011), who have collectively been called out by the middlebrow for making films regarded unanimously as terrible.⁴⁸

What has remained consistent during this period is the volume of production. Between 2000 and 2010, over 400 British horror films were made.⁴⁹ Since then it is estimated that a further 600 have been produced.⁵⁰ In 2006 the trade press heralded the British ‘horror boom’, recognising the global popularity of films such as Neil Marshall’s 2005 production The Descent (which did well in the US), and the boom in (mostly European) co-productions such as Creep (Christopher Smith, 2004) and Severance (Christopher Smith, 2006).⁵¹ One of the key developments in this context, and a factor that has played a role in aiding the steady production of horror films, is the availability of government subsidies to support independent film. The establishment of the UK Film Council in 2000 enabled the development of many such films, including low-budget indies such as Triangle (Christopher Smith, 2009) and the ‘highest grossing British horror film ever’, The Woman in Black (James Watkins, 2012); others have benefited from subsidies granted by the Regional Development Agencies established between 1998 and 2000, as well as other organisations.⁵² Numerous British horror films since 2000 have benefited from these agreements, in many cases obtaining tax relief by shooting overseas in Canada, the US and, especially, Continental Europe.⁵³ More locally, regional funding initiatives such as, for example, Screen Yorkshire have aided the production of such films as Kill List, Ghost Stories (Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, 2017) and The Ritual (David Bruckner, 2017), while the likes of Creative Scotland and Ffilm Cymru Wales have distributed National Lottery funding to, for example, Calibre (Matt Palmer, 2018) and Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021).

Dead time? The future of British horror

It has become somewhat of a tradition in writing on British horror to speculate about what the future holds for the genre – though one does so at one’s peril! Pirie, in the early 1970s, was optimistic about the continued success of British horror. Rigby, a couple of years before the ‘British horror revival’ in the early 2000s, expressed pessimism. In a post-Brexit world, presently doubling as the age of Covid-19, and with the future having never been so uncertain, speculating about horror production is even more of a precarious endeavour.

While cinema owners worry about imminent closure, and film distributors delay releasing their summer blockbusters, numerous British horror films feature on pandemic-themed movie watch-lists, indicating that, while British horror films are not currently being made, they are still thought to be relevant, and are, one may conclude by extension, being watched.⁵⁴ At the time of writing, a Screen Sector Taskforce has been established by the British Film Institute to help enforce a recovery plan for the industry in the wake of Covid-19. This coincides with the publication of a report by the British Film Commission, endorsed by the government, which sets out how those in the film and television industries can ‘work safely’ in the current climate.⁵⁵ Some creatives have managed to make films beyond these initiatives, including the quarantine-set British film Host (Rob Savage, 2020), which takes place entirely during a Zoom video call, and which was released directly to Shudder, a horror-themed video-on-demand platform, in August 2020 (Figure 0.3). Additionally, numerous horror shorts have resulted from the ‘Horror Lockdown Short Film Competition’ launched in June 2020 by cult film distributor Arrow Video and the Sheffield-based horror film festival Celluloid Screams. A notable example is The Garden (Ian Cottage, 2020), in which a widow (Jane Arnfield) descends into madness as the corpse of her dead husband – presumably a victim of coronavirus – decomposes on the back lawn.⁵⁶ In this context, Covid-19, while a hindrance for many in the industry, has enabled independent horror to flourish (Host became a ‘viral sensation’ that was said to have ‘Hollywood quaking’), and has proven to be a referent in works looking to rearticulate for contemporary audiences the genre’s long obsession with viral outbreaks, technology, death and malady.⁵⁷

Figure 0.3 A séance takes place during a video call in the quarantine-set Host (2020)

Figure 0.4 ‘One, two, three … and Brexit!’: The Ritual (2017)

Elsewhere, the spectre of Brexit features as a marker of impending doom in the diegesis of recent horror films. An early scene in The Ritual, for example, sees a group of Brits on a walking holiday in rural Sweden stopping to take a group photograph; they forego the customary ‘say cheese’, going instead for ‘one, two, three … and Brexit!’ (Figure 0.4). While in this context Britain’s divorce from the EU serves as an in-joke for the horror that ensues (in which Britons are massacred in European woodland), beyond the diegesis lies the literal fear of the potentially disastrous impact that Brexit will have on the transnational initiatives that make films such as The Ritual possible. Brexit’s impact on the short-term movement of people, including the movement of film crew members into EU territory, could affect production, in addition to a decrease in opportunities for British distributors and sales agents to attend festivals to sell their wares and ‘to exchange ideas and find partners for co-production’.⁵⁸ Given the centrality of Europe to British horror production, this outcome is bleak, with some commentators concerned that ‘independent British films … have the most to fear’.⁵⁹

Of course, many filmmakers source funds independently, as in the case of Host, and shoot on location in the UK, as with the recent crowd-funded slasher film Clownface (Alex Bourne, 2020).⁶⁰ This is a context that is unlikely to change once ‘normality’ fully resumes. As in the 1980s and 1990s, independent video distributors have excelled in the independent arena, catering to the booming market for British horror with the aid of aspiring filmmakers looking for means of selling their wares. To this end, lo-fi online distributors such as Brain Damage and Chemical Burn Entertainment have given independent features such as Bane (James Eaves, 2007), DeadTime (Tony Jopia, 2012) and Wicked Witches (Martin J. Pickering, 2018) international exposure to sectionalised audiences of niche horror fans, while other filmmakers have found their core audience through VoD streaming services such as Amazon Prime, specialist sites such as Shudder or the likes of YouTube and Vimeo, which host an abundance of independently produced films. In the latter context, in practical terms, Brexit means very little.

At the end of the first edition of Hammer and Beyond, Hutchings discussed Hammer’s critical respectability in the wake