The Claws of Axos was certainly a long time gestating under the auspices of 'the Bristol Boys', Bob Baker and Dave Martin and they came to write for Doctor Who by a slightly unusual route.

Bob, a monumental mason, film maker and an animator had been making short films for Vision On (1964-76), created by Ursula Eason and Patrick Dowling and presented by Tony Hart and Pat Keysall. While refurbishing a shop and considering how to write the script to an animated film of the Peter Grimes section of George Crabbe's poem The Borough, Baker met Dave Martin, an advertising copywriter, after Martin came into the shop as it was closing.

'It was lucky for me that Dave could type and that he owned a typewriter!' recalled Baker about collaborating and writing their script for Peter Grimes. They both tried to get director Clive Donner, whom Baker had been working with as a location scout, interested in the project. Although the film never got off the ground, they were encouraged to keep writing and 'we just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote – piles and piles and piles of scripts'. (1)

Both were close friends of the late Keith Floyd, who would eventually become a television chef of some repute, and their comedy play about Floyd's life in the Army, A Man's Life, had found its way to Terrance Dicks via the BBC's Script Pool. Dicks was then working as script editor with Peter Bryant, Derrick Sherwin and Trevor Ray on the transformation of Doctor Who from its black and white origins to the colour series that would launch the seventh season in 1970.

The Mummy's Shroud was the last film Hammer made at Bray Studios and it therefore marked the end of a particular era for the company. Producers Anthony Hinds and Anthony Nelson Keys had attempted to maintain the lot at Bray with back-to-back productions but this merely offered a temporary solution to the problems facing Hammer. Bray Studios were now too expensive for Hammer to run during an increasingly desperate period for the British film industry.

The use of Bray had declined since 1964 after the deal with ABPC, Fox and Seven-Arts had required them to shoot their ABPC roster of films at Elstree rather than their home at Bray. In the summer of 1964, the back lot had been cleared and the sets for the four back-to-back productions of Dracula Prince of Darkness, Rasputin the Mad Monk, The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies, which couldn't be accommodated at Elstree, would be erected. Those exteriors would eventually be revamped for Frankenstein Created Woman and The Mummy's Shroud in 1966.

After the shooting of The Mummy's Shroud, between 10 September and 21 October, Hammer left Bray for the last time in November 1966. As Michael Carreras noted, 'I look back with tremendous nostalgia on what I call our "Bray period". There is no question that having a permanent unit in a permanent house gave the films a uniquely personal quality which we never recaptured once we were out in the bigger world of commercial studios.' (1)

It was apparently actor George Woodbridge who suggested the idea of filming Prince Felix Yusupov's memoir Lost Splendour to Hammer producer Anthony Hinds in 1961. However, it wasn't until Christopher Lee returned to Britain from his Swiss tax exile in the summer of 1965, and back to making films with Hammer on a regular basis, that the project was scheduled to be made. Rasputin the Mad Monk was essentially the carrot dangled to Lee to persuade him to sign a contract to play Dracula in the film that would be made back-to-back with Rasputin at Bray Studios, Terence Fisher's Dracula Prince of Darkness.

For Hammer, the development of the script was of immense concern. They were probably aware of the law suit brought against MGM in 1933 by Princess Irina Romanoff Yusupov who claimed the film Rasputin and the Empress had invaded her privacy and had erroneously portrayed her as Rasputin's mistress. She won a settlement in an English court in 1934 and received an out-of-court settlement from MGM the same year. Felix Yusupov also sued CBS for $1,500,000 in a New York court in 1965 for broadcasting a play about Rasputin's assassination in 1963. His claim was that some events were fictionalized and that, under a New York statute, Yusupov's commercial rights in his story had been misappropriated. CBS eventually won the case.

Hammer's eventual involvement in The Devil Rides Out was the outcome of two serendipitous attempts to gain the rights to Dennis Wheatley's original novel, written in 1934. Michael Stainer-Hutchins and Peter Daw, who had set up a company to develop optical and special effects, saw an opportunity to develop films from Wheatley's occult thrillers and had approached him directly for the rights, having already tussled unsuccessfully with his agents. They eventually secured the rights to The Devil Rides Out, The Satanist and To the Devil a Daughter in 1963.

Similarly, Hammer were pursuing new properties and Wheatley's novels were of interest to them despite their fears about the problems they could face with the BBFC and various religious representatives about the black magic subject matter. As Christopher Lee noted in his autobiography: 'After years of urging black-magic themes on Hammer, I had a breakthrough with The Devil Rides Out. Conservative, Hammer had always worried about the Church's reaction to the screening of the Black Mass. But we thought the charge of blasphemy would not stick if we did the thing with due attention to scholarship.' (1)

Lee also knew Wheatley, had first met him in the book department of Harrods in 1964 and was his neighbour. He also approached the 'Prince of Thriller Writers', as he had been described, to get his support. Lee then informed Hammer that Wheatley had given his permission for them to adapt The Devil Rides Out and recommended they negotiate with Stainer-Hutchins and Daw.

A revised version of this review, discussing the 2020 Warner Archive Collection 2-disc Blu-ray,  is now available at Cathode Ray Tube's home on Medium.

'I should rank The Curse of Frankenstein among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have encountered in the course of some 10,000 miles of film reviewing.' That was C.J. Lajeune's humble, if not hyperbolic, opinion, in The Observer of 5 May 1957, of Hammer's first horror film made in colour which established the signature of their Gothic horror cycle revival and the credentials of the team that formed to produce them.

For Hammer, this was an extraordinary convocation of the talents they had been nurturing through the 1940s and 1950s, particularly director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, producers Anthony Hinds and Anthony Nelson Keys, cinematographer Jack Asher, production designer Bernard Robinson, composer James Bernard and make-up designer Phil Leakey.

Nelson Keys was actually instrumental in bringing the talents of Robinson and Asher to the company. Keys, Fisher, Asher and Len Harris, the camera operator, had worked together at Gainsborough Studios in the late 1940s. These individuals would create in The Curse of Frankenstein a template for Hammer horror that continues to be admired to this day and it remains a key film in the evolution of British cinema per se.