Why Are Hammer Films Not More Popular?

Christopher Lee will always be THE Dracula for me. Not Bela Lugosi or Gary Oleman.

I would venture to say more people could name who played Dr. Frankenstein in the Hammer films than in the Universal original.

In both cases, Lee and Cushing reprised their characters many times, so of course theyhave the market cornered on owning those characters. When you think about it, no actors have competetively played those characters as many times as those guys, and I think that's pretty cool in and of itself.
 
"Dracula has Risen From the Grave" is one of my all time favorites! LOVE Hammer! and I will be searching out those BR's ;)
 
Ingrid Pitt! I'm in for all three busts!

Pun intended? ;)


I haven't seen many Hammer films that I can remember. I seem to recall being freaked out by Brides of Dracula or something like that when I was a little kid and caught part of it on TV. I watched Hammer's Quatermass and the Pit a few years ago, and found it to be pretty cool.

I'm not sure if I'd find the films truly "scary" as much as "creepy." I dunno. British horror seems less about shock value and simulating fear, and far more about "thinking" horror. Not in the sense that one's more or less intelligent than the other. Both can be very well done.

But, for me, based on my very limited exposure to British horror, I don't get that fight-or-flight response that I do with American horror movies (if I get it at all). American horror movies seem to be more about building up intense tension, and then releasing that either via something like a cat scare, or some slasher dispatching a co-ed with whatever gardening implement is handy.

By contrast, when I watched, for example, The Wicker Man, the horror came more from the creepy factor of the village and the pagan rituals and such, and then the final horrific ending. The ending was less "AAAAAAHHH!!! OMIGOD!!!! AAAAAHHH!!" (well, for the audience...) and more sort of "Whoa...what a way to go...God, that's horrific..."

I guess whereas I find American horror to be all about simulated fear, I find British horror to be about making you feel extremely unsettled and creeped out.
 
I admit I too am more of a B&W horror kind of guy, although many of those films I think ended too quickly and without much plot development. I'd love to see a return to the style but with more development.

Hammer is cool, but I think it'd be really cool if someone would dumb some old school hardcore punk or something over the films as the soundtrack.
 
One of the better Chris Lee likenesses I've seen, and affordable: Black Heart 360° Series Dracula

I can't see Lee in that at all. It doesn't even have brown eyes. Lee has a long face shape too and that sculpt is looking very broad.

DraculaLee.png


IMO its been deliberately made to NOT resemble Lee very much so he doesn't have to be paid!
 
All that could be the angles. If there was a shot of the bust in the exact angle of the screen capture it may look closer. The jaw and cheeks just look abnormally wide and squarish in that picture of the bust.
 
All that could be the angles. If there was a shot of the bust in the exact angle of the screen capture it may look closer. The jaw and cheeks just look abnormally wide and squarish in that picture of the bust.

Yes the photo may be unflattering and making the shape look wrong. The eyes should still be the same though. Christopher Lee has big intense dark eyes which are a very very characteristic feature. That bust has small blue eyes. Getting such an important part wrong would be one hell of a mistake which is why it looked made deliberately wrong to me.
 
Yes, do go to their site and look at their customer gallery. There is one there that looks far better than the sample product pic they use.

Their Curse of the Werewolf really takes the cake, though.
 
Anyone excited for this?

'Woman in Black' Producer Targets Scary Script 'Gaslight' (Exclusive) - Hollywood Reporter

Coming off the surprise success of its horror movie The Woman in Black, Exclusive Media’s genre arm Hammer has picked up the rights to Gaslight, a spooky thriller written by Ian Fried.

The screenplay, which landed on Hollywood’s Black List of the best unproduced scripts in 2011, is described as in the vein of From Hell, the Alan Moore Victorian-age Jack the Ripper tale, and The Silence of the Lambs, which famously introduced serial killer Hannibal Lecter to the world.

In Gaslight, Jack the Ripper, secretly imprisoned in a London insane asylum, is called upon to help Scotland yard solve a series if murders that share the iconic death brand: dual puncture wounds to the neck.

Exclusive’s president of worldwide production and acquisitions Tobin Armbrust will oversee the project for Hammer. The company’s creative exec Jennifer Ruper brought the project in.
Exclusive's co-chairmen Guy East and Nigel Sinclair, as well as Hammer CEO Simon Oakes, are attached to produce.

Gaslight is Fried’s second script to get on the Black List. His dark fantasy The Ever After Murders, featuring fairy tale characters embroiled in a series of murders, landed on the list in 2010. The writer, repped by WME, Prolific Entertainment and attorney Eric Suddleson, is currently working on Spectral, an original supernatural action project set up at Legendary.

Hammer’s Woman in Black, the adaptation of a classic British novel written by Susan Hill that stars Daniel Radcliffe, wowed the industry when it grossed over $21 million last weekend. It was released in the U.S. by CBS Films.

Exclusive, run by Guy East and Nigel Sinclair, is selling at EFM the newly unveiled Can a Song Save Your Life? to star Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson.
 
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Been a fan since I was a kid,watched pretty much all of them always loved how they used blood that looked...I dunno,just weird.
 
Yeah, it looked like bright red tempra paint or something.

A lot of vibrant colors in their films too.
 
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