Friends, firstly apologies for not keeping the updates coming. 

The last two and a bit years have been turbulent and distressing for everyone and I hope this message finds you all well. While Brexit, Covid and the war in Ukraine have surely impacted on us all, I have been keeping myself busy working on several freelance commissions and thought it was time for an update.

THE BLACK ARCHIVE: KINDA (Obverse Books - forthcoming. Due December 2022)

Just as Covid restricted us all to working from home or furlough or no job at all, I was in the middle of researching and writing for the forthcoming Obverse Books Black Archive on Kinda. It's a particular favourite of mine from Season 19 of Doctor Who. After publishing the book about Warriors' Gate in 2019, I fancied the challenge of writing about what has come to be regarded, despite its flaws, as one of the most intriguing stories in the canon. At this stage, I don't want to say much about the book. The research at BBC Written Archives, after much delay because of Covid, was completed in August last year but that was the icing on a particular cake in terms of where this book led me and the new insights I've been provided with. 

With Obverse switching back to a bi-monthly publication schedule after the book was commissioned, I had a generous amount of time to write and I hope the results will have been worth it. The current manuscript is now with my editor at Obverse and I have no doubt we'll be going through that in due course as we hit the run-up to publication this year. I'm quietly excited for this one.

ROBIN HOOD AT HAMMER: Two Tales From Sherwood Forest (Due for release in August 2022)

I'm currently putting the final touches to an essay for the book that will accompany Indicator's forthcoming Blu-ray release of Hammer's Sword of Sherwood Forest and A Challenge for Robin Hood, the two films featuring the quintessentially British character that the studio made in the 1960s.

From Indicator's site:

"For 1960’s Sword of Sherwood Forest, Richard Greene (The Blood of Fu Manchu, The Castle of Fu Manchu) reprises the role he made famous in the classic television series The Adventures of Robin Hood. Directed by Terence Fisher (The Gorgon, The Revenge of Frankenstein), and starring Peter Cushing (The Devil’s Men, Corruption) as the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham, the film sees Robin Hood thwart a plot to assassinate the Archbishop of Canterbury (Jack Gwillm, Jason and the Argonauts, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb). The film also boasts an uncredited early role for Oliver Reed (The System, The Damned).

In 1967’s A Challenge for Robin Hood, Barrie Ingham (The Day of the Jackal) dons the Lincoln green as he and his merrie men hide out in Sherwood Forest after his cousin (Peter Blythe, Frankenstein Created Woman) frames him for murder. This action-packed adventure features acting support from Gay Hamilton (Barry Lyndon, The Duellists) and Leon Greene (Adventures of a Private Eye, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate).

This 2-disc Limited Edition set contains a double-sided poster, an 80-page book, and extensive new and archival extra features, including the much-loved Children’s Film Foundation film Robin Hood Junior (1975), starring Keith Chegwin (Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Cheggers Plays Pop) as the diminutive hero."

DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

Back in September 2021 it was also a pleasure to be asked to review BBC Studios Blu-ray release of the animated The Evil of the Daleks for DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE issue 570, which hit the stands last October. 

My thanks to the team for asking me to contribute to a magazine I've been reading since it first appeared as a Marvel weekly in 1979. The Evil of the Daleks is also a firm favourite so it was serendipitous that my first contribution was an opportunity to review its animated reincarnation.

HAMMER VOLUME SIX: Night Shadows - Limited Edition (Released June 2021)

I completed a further commission for Indicator's box set release last summer and wrote the essay for the booklet accompanying the Blu-ray edition of Hammer's Captain Clegg for this release. It was a great opportunity to write about a Hammer film I had such a soft spot for and I spent some time researching the life and times of Russell Thorndyke, the author of the original books that Hammer's Captain Clegg was inspired by and to understand where the character of Clegg originated.

"Hammer Volume Six: Night Shadows revives four consummate Hammer classics from the early sixties, exemplifying some of Hammer's best work in the horror and thriller genres. Edgar Allan Poe looms large in The Shadow of the Cat, a macabre ‘old dark house’ tale of feline revenge, starring André Morell (Cash on Demand) and Barbara Shelley (The Camp on Blood Island); Peter Cushing (The Gorgon, Corruption) and Oliver Reed (The Scarlet Blade) star in Captain Clegg, which sees Hammer fuse horror and adventure in an eighteenth-century-set tale of smugglers and marsh phantoms; Herbert Lom (Mysterious Island) stars as The Phantom of the Opera in Hammer’s acclaimed production of Gaston Leroux’s Gothic classic, whilst Freddie Francis (Torture Garden) directs Nightmare, a spooky psychological thriller in the Les Diaboliques vein, which benefits from full-blooded central performances by Moira Redmond (Jigsaw) and Jennie Linden (A Severed Head). 

This collection contains a wealth of new and archival extra features, including documentaries and appreciations, interviews with actors and crew members, audio commentaries, and extensive booklets. Strictly limited to 6,000 numbered units." 

To celebrate the centenary of legendary British actor Peter Cushing's birth, Signum Books will be publishing Peter Cushing - The Complete Memoirs in May. This compiles the previously published memoirs An Autobiography from 1986 and Past Forgetting: Memoirs of the Hammer Years, which followed in 1988, with The Peter Cushing Story - a 1955 memoir, originally serialised in the press, that has not been seen in nearly 60 years. Signum has also worked with the Cushing estate to include 100 rare and previously unseen stills from Cushing’s personal collection, including pictures and illustrations from his scrapbooks. Finally, there is also an 'as complete as possible' chronology of his stage, screen and radio appearances which includes some images of Cushing's endorsements in print advertising.

The book features a new foreword from Cushing's loyal secretary Joyce Broughton who was featured in the moving tribute to the actor on the recent Blu-ray release of The Curse of Frankenstein. She initially touches upon an element of Cushing's personality - 'his child-like nature' - which emerges, with increasing regularity, throughout the memoirs and is perhaps symbolised in his love of toys, games and making models. Affectionately known to her as 'Sir', she remained loyal during the devastating emotional after effects of the death of Cushing's wife Helen and looked after him when he was diagnosed with cancer. Actor, critic and film historian Jonathan Rigby also provides an effective, personal account of his admiration for Cushing in his own new introduction.

Like many of us who came to adore this quintessentially English of actors, Rigby was, and remains, a great fan and he vividly recollects his first post-graduate encounter with Cushing in Canterbury. He also regards those twin bastions of British horror, Cushing and his friend Christopher Lee, as 'without doubt the right men in the right place at the right time' while he sketches out a career in theatre and television that eventually brought 'Sir' through the front door of the Hammer house of horror in 1956. Rigby also traces Cushing's later progress through newspaper and magazine reviews and interviews and the great changes in his demeanour after the death of Helen, revealing a genuinely flawed human being we perhaps too readily obscure with his saintly reputation as the ‘the gentleman of horror’.

An Autobiography is certainly the book that offers the greater insight into Cushing's childhood and youthful struggle to become an actor, his subsequent marriage to Helen and his meteoric television career. There is a paucity of material about his film career from the mid 1950s onwards that he later attempted to make amends for in Past Forgetting which simultaneously creates a coda to the sad events of the first volume and dips back into his television and film experiences.

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.

Twins of Evil was the third of the 'Karnstein trilogy' made by Hammer, following in the wake of The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Lust for a Vampire (1971) and was again produced by Harry Fine and Michael Style of Fantale Films. As with the two previous Karnstein films, Twins of Evil (1971) was scripted by Fantale's partner Tudor Gates, taking further inspiration from J. Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla, originally serialised in 1872. Le Fanu's tale of Carmilla Karnstein is regarded as a major influence on the vampire genre, particularly the depiction of the female and/or lesbian vampire, and predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by 25 years. 

Dublin born Harry Fine, a former actor and stage manager, originally worked in television, mainly on ITC's adventure series of the 1950s and 1960s, and moved into film production in 1964 with The Pleasure Girls (1965), dipping back into television to work on an episode of Hammer's anthology series Journey into the Unknown (1968). Michael Style was originally employed as a carpenter at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and made his way up the ranks to become a drama producer. In England, he produced sports and variety shows for ATV. Both met through Nat Cohen at EMI and became involved in Hammer through Style's facilities company Intertel. Tudor Gates, a former theatre manager, had been working in Italy, writing a number of Mario Bava's films, including a contribution to Danger:Diabolik (1968) and completing the final draft screenplay of Vadim's Barbarella (1968). In 1969, Gates joined Fantale Films and in October of that year they pitched the idea of a film based on Fanu's Carmilla to James Carreras at Hammer.

Hammer's four films shot back-to-back production experiment came to a conclusion with John Gilling's The Reptile in September 1965. Virtually a week after completing principal photography on The Plague of the Zombies, Gilling was already shooting the film on the same back lot and with two of the same cast, Jacqueline Pearce and Michael Ripper.

Originally titled The Reptiles and announced in 1963, it was intended for production partners Universal. It resurfaced on Hammer's schedule in 1964, as The Curse of the Reptiles before finally going into production at Bray in 1965. Gilling directed from a John Elder script (that's Anthony "Mr Elder" Hinds as he was known to the director) that was completed in August of that year and submitted to the BBFC for their approval.

Like its bedfellow, The Reptile was set in Cornwall and follows the arrival, in a small, isolated village, of Captain Harry Spalding and his wife Valerie after the mysterious death of his brother Charles. The villagers reject the new arrivals and Harry has to rely on the help of local landlord Tom Bailey to discover the real reasons behind the series of mysterious deaths that occur in the village and understand the involvement of theologist Dr Franklyn and his daughter Anna. It is eventually revealed that they harbour a terrible secret - a Malay curse that transforms Anna into a human reptile.

StudioCanal release the latest of their high definition restorations of classic Hammer horror films on June 18th. This month we are treated to not one but two Blu-ray/DVD special editions and appropriately enough they are the back-to-back productions, directed by John Gilling, from 1965, The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile.

As previously noted in my review of Dracula Prince of Darkness, The Plague of the Zombies was released with that film as a double bill in early 1966, forming one half of their Cornwall located productions that utilised the same sets on the back lot at Bray and were produced as part of their contracts with Eliot Hyman's Seven-Arts, Fox and ABPC.

The Plague of the Zombies had been knocking about as an unfilmed property at Hammer for some years, originating from a Peter Bryan synopsis, The Zombie, in 1962, with further embellishments to it from producer Tony Hinds a year later, and announced as a forthcoming production in November 1963. It later appeared as Horror of the Zombies as part of the Hammer programme for 1964. Director John Gilling's association with Hammer went back to 1949, primarily as a writer on such projects as The Man in Black (1949), Room to Let (1950) and, uncredited, on Whispering Smith Hits London (1952), and then directing and writing a gamut of variable films, including Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), the Anthony Newley vehicle Idol on Parade (1959), and a number of television dramas during the 1950s. Between 1959 and 1960, he directed two films with Peter Cushing as the lead, the cult classic about Burke and Hare, The Flesh and the Fiends (1960) and period adventure Fury at Smugglers' Bay (1961). His handling of both horror and period adventure would determine the nature of his work with Hammer when he returned to the company in 1960 to direct The Shadow of the Cat (1961).

Hammer fans are certainly in for a treat this year as StudioCanal unveil the results of their restoration project with the studio. A total of 30 films are currently being given the love and attention they have long craved for in a joint effort to restore Hammer's back catalogue being coordinated between StudioCanal and major studios such as Warner, Columbia and Fox. Dracula Prince of Darkness is the first fruit of this labour to see release on dual format Blu-ray and DVD, following on from StudioCanal's splendid high-definition release of Quatermass and the Pit last year.

Released in January 1966, on a double-bill with another highly regarded Hammer classic Plague of the Zombies, it was one of a package of films that Hammer produced in association with 20th Century Fox, Associated British and Seven-Arts and their recently signed combined contract ensured that Hammer remained in production throughout 1965 and 1966. Fox would release the films in the American market while the deal with Associated British would see Hammer product released through their ABC chain of cinemas. In the summer of 1965, four films squeezed into the modest stages of Bray Studios, keeping the facility busy at a time when it was becoming increasingly expensive to run and because, at the time, Elstree was unavailable. Producer Anthony Nelson Keys wisely saw the economic sense of making Dracula Prince of Darkness back to back with Rasputin - The Mad Monk, using the same sets and a repertory company of actors in both films.

"I don't like the term 'science fiction'. The form is appropriate, if taken seriously. And that is the way I do take it. I try to give those stories some relevance to what is round about us today." So wrote Quatermass creator Nigel 'Tom' Kneale in a 1959 edition of Sight and Sound. It holds true for a vast proportion of his work, particularly the series and plays for television which use the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres as a conduit to tackle his concerns about post-war British society, the end of colonialism, advances in science and technology and the military exploitation of space.

His original trilogy of The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit, all made for the BBC in the 1950s, and the later, final instalment Quatermass (aka The Quatermass Conclusion), written in the 1960s but belatedly produced by Euston Films in 1979, all exude a particularly British paranoia and anxiety about the Cold War, the nuclear age, the ethics of science, mankind's self-destructive urges and intolerance and the Orwellian authoritarianism of government policy. The Quatermass Experiment went out on BBC television in the summer of 1953 during a period when the Cold War super-powers, including Britain, were regularly testing nuclear devices, the US had established NATO backed early warning radar bases and establishments on British soil, biological weapons research was well under way at Porton Down and the UK's nuclear power programme was inaugurated by the Queen's opening of Calder Hall at Windscale in 1956.

Hammer Films. Oooh. They're as much a part of my youth as trying to see mucky French films on BBC2 on a dodgy black and white portable, watching Monty Python with your baffled parents or reading James Herbert's The Fog during a maths lesson.

I caught the Hammer bug in my teens, in the mid 1970s, just as Dez Skinn unleashed The House of Hammer magazine and the titular film company sputtered on through regurgitated versions of television sit-coms and Dennis Wheatley adaptations.

Thankfully, those BBC horror double bills kept me up to speed and I knew my Bernard Robinson from my Roy Ashton, my Terence Fisher from my Roy Ward Baker. And thank God for Alan Frank's Horror Films published by Octopus Books in 1974. I voraciously devoured their back catalogue at every opportunity.

And now, with Hammer Time, I will be delving into the production company's archive and regularly reviewing a wide variety of their output - not just the horror films but also the thrillers, prehistoric epics, science fiction and war dramas that are all part of the Hammer legacy.