Ah, it is finally October and at my house that means two things: college football (ROLL TIDE!) and horror movies. I’ve had a fondness for horror movies for as long as I can remember; I recall Dad waking me up at around six a.m. one Saturday morning when I was about nine to watch Boris Karloff in the original The Mummy on TV. We used to stay up late on Friday nights watching Doctor Shock and Dingbat present B-movie horror on Channel 9’s Shock Theater –in the days long before Elvira was Mistress of the Dark. I’m not sure, but I may have seen my first Hammer film on that show.
Hammer Horror Remembered
In a previous post I’ve mentioned how much I loved the old Warren publications Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella. Well, to my preteen mind, the Hammer movies were the stories from those magazines come to life in full gruesome color. As much as I’ve always loved the classic Universal Monster films, I think the Hammer versions were the ones that cemented my fascination with horror. Especially the ones with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Long before they were Star Wars villains, the dynamic duo of horror cinema were the embodiment of Count Dracula and Baron Frankenstein, respectively.

And then I started to grow up. In the ‘80s, everything changed from vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein’s Monster terrorizing small communities to masked men with chainsaws, butcher knives, and machetes hacking up limber teenagers. I began to lose interest in horror at that point; yes, Jason Vorhees, Michael Meyers, and Freddy Krueger were affected with varying degrees of the supernatural, but in essence they were just homicidal maniacs that did what any “normal” human being with a severe psychosis could do. There was no magic, no tradition, and certainly no great English actors. In my tastes, horror was being edged out by sci-fi and action movies.

Of course, the ‘80s brought something else: the technological and commercial miracles of the VCR and the video store. In high school, I rediscovered Hammer Horror, and not just those traditional tales from the 1950s and ‘60s, but the films from the 1970s that had not been featured on Shock Theater, or anywhere else on network television, as far as I know. Thanks to seeing these “new” Hammer films, I was in love with horror movies again.

So, in the next few weeks I plan on binging on all the great horror movies that I can. If you are of a similar mindset, then I invite you to try and locate some Hammer Horror films from their golden age. I’d start with these three: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Horror of Dracula (1958), and The Mummy (1959).

This October it is time to drop the Hammer.