Having been successful in catering to the demand for X certificate fayre,
With "The Quatermass Xperiment" & "X the Unknown"
In 1956 American movie producer Max Rosenberg approached the bosses at Hammer Films with a deal to produce a film entitled “Frankenstein and the Monster” (Rosenberg claims to have come up with that deeply original title all by himself). Rosenberg had a script written by Milton Subotsky.
Hammer was keen on the project because they could sense an X certificate coming on!
During pre-production, Rosenberg & Subotsky were let go from the project and Rosenberg was paid a one-off $5000 “Finders Fee” for bringing them the project but I also think it was also for them to just “Go Away!”
Rosenberg & Subotsky went on to establish “Amicus Films” which became one of Hammer's main rivals in the production of horror films during the 1960s & 70s.
Max Rosenberg
The script was completely rewritten by one of Hammer’s in-house screenwriters Jimmy Sangster.
Sangster, loosely based his script on the 1818 novel “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” by Mary Shelley.
What is important is to realise this was not a remake of the Universal Monster 1931 film. Sangnster’s top priority was for it not to be like the James Whale classic and when production began director Terence Fisher, Bernard Robinson and his production design team, Molly Arbuthnot with the costume and Roy Ashton with the make-up all had to be mindful to make the whole thing look as unique as possible so Universals lawyers did not come knocking.
What they ended up making was,
“The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957)
Hammer followed the mainstream technicolor success of "The Curse of Frankenstein" (1957) with...
Dracula (1958) aka “Horror of Dracula”
Since the bosses at Hammer closed down their distribution company "Exclusive Films" who had handled their UK distribution in 1957 they had sought out global distribution for their productions on a film to film basis,
"The Curse of Frankenstein" (1957) was distributed globally by Warner Bros.
"The Abominable Snowman" (1957) Warner Bros. handled the UK where 20th Century Fox distributed the film in the U.S.
"Dracula" (1958) Rank Film Distributors handled the UK & Universal Pictures distributed the film in the rest of the world.
After the phenomenal success of Dracula at home in Britain and in America Hammer felt they were positioned to seek out an exclusive distribution deal.
They now had a provable track record making “X certificate” romps that young people in America, Canada and the UK were obviously enjoying.
Enrique and James Carreras & Tony Hinds managed to land a deal with Colombia Pictures.
Colombia bought into Hammer buying 49% of Hammer's Bray Studio business and taking over the global distribution of 5 Hammer films a year.
Now that the Colombia deal was in full effect the team at “Hammer House” on Wardour Street, London and out at Bray Studios, Winsor were all working at full tilt.
A golden rule in budget filmmaking is “If it's not broke don’t fix it” and why spend more money when you can recycle costumes and sets.
So they set about making a sequel to the 1957 film “The Curse of Frankenstein”
The story goes James Carreras had pre-sold the idea of a sequel to Colombia in America off the back of showing them a mock-up poster, When Carreras returned he approached Sangster about the project asking him to write the sequel. Sangster responded,
"I killed Baron Frankenstein in the first film."
Carreras responded by telling him to get writing because shooting starts in six weeks and...
"you'll think of something".
The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
After the success of the Frankenstein sequel , Hammer went on to produce a further 43 Horror films between 1958-1979.
Instead of me listing every one I'm just going to cover my personal top 20 Hammer Horror films over the next few days on here.
I obviously also recommend you seek out and watch all 20 ASAP!
