What usually inspires me to research and write a series of blogs is a filmmaker's birthday or the anniversary of someone's death but this time it is my Birthday so I am just going to write about a topic I love.
I make no secret of being a total fanboy of old British films, especially old British Genre films so it should come as no surprise I’m a bit obsessed with the work of a certain English film company… Hammer Film Productions Ltd.
I had grand plans for this series, I wanted to tell the story of Hammer Films and write about EVERY Hammer Horror Film (50 movies) plus 9 of their thrillers that I think are worth elevating to being listed among their top-tier output and write individual blog posts with bios of the great filmmakers and acting talent at Hammer!
BUT it would be such a vast and unwieldy task covering what would add up to 59 films and 9 people! I needed to rethink my approach.
So, what I have cooked up is a series of blogs starting with how Hammer started, biographies of the key personnel and instead of Looking at all the films I have picked out my favourite 20 Hammer Horror films which I cover in chronological order. (I wouldn't want to rank them) and I cover some other stuff.
If you are new to this whole Hammer thing, I feel it’s important to tell you “Hammer” was a film production company that had their own movie studio and operated between,
1935 and 1979.
Throughout their 44-year run, they made 166 movies that covered a variety of film genres; Comedies, Dramas, Crime films, Psychological thrillers, adventure films, science fiction and Horror.
Hammer does not automatically mean “Horror” and if you have heard the name
“Hammer House of Horror” that was the name of an anthology TV series from 1980 not the name of the studio.
But there is no denying that Horror looms very large in the Hammer legend.
Let’s get started!
