Broadcast on Sky Arts, 31 October 2024 and available to
stream on NOW.
By Adrian Smith
Like
many of my generation, Hammer is in my DNA. Hammer films were regularly
screened in the Eighties on the BBC, and my parents would tape them for me so I
could spend my Saturdays watching the likes of Dracula: Prince of Darkness
and Plague of the Zombies (both 1966). In the last twenty years I’ve
been fortunate enough to attend many Hammer-themed events (I’ve lost count of
the number of times I’ve met Caroline Munro), made friends with other Hammer
fans, written essays and articles about the company, collected dozens of
videos, DVDs and Blu-rays (with 4K UHD on the horizon), contributed bonus
features to a couple of upcoming Hammer Blu-ray releases, expanded my Hammer
library with publications from the likes of Wayne Kinsey, Marcus Hearn and the Little
Shoppe of Horrors magazine, and I even appeared as an extra in Hammer’s 2008
comeback vampire horror Beyond the Rave. It is a cliché, yet it is true
- Hammer is much like its undead antiheroes: whenever the studio appears to be
dead, it comes back to life.
With
this new documentary Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters, first
broadcast on Sky Arts over Halloween, and available on NOW, the new incarnation
of Hammer (recently acquired by theatre impresario John Gore in an excellent
example of nominative determinism) are refreshing their brand and reminding the
world of their USP. Although many die-hard Hammer fans will tell you that
horror actually made up just a small percentage of their overall film output, it’s
horror that has made the Hammer name, and clearly what the new iteration is
trading on as the company hits its 90th anniversary. With one new
horror film under their belts already (Doctor Jekyll (2023) starring
Eddie Izzard in their third adaptation of Stephenson’s novel, following The
Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960) and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)),
Hammer Horror is back. Again.
Hammer:
Heroes, Legends and Monsters, directed by Benjamin Field
and co-produced by Jamie (son of Gerry) Anderson, is an excellent history of
the Hammer brand. The film celebrates the highs as well as the lows of Hammer
and brings in the opinions of experts and famous fans alike. It will come as no
surprise to see Tim Burton, John Landis, Joe Dante and John Carpenter in there,
alongside noted Hammer and genre historians such as Wayne Kinsey, Jonathan
Rigby, Axelle Carolyn, Toby Hadoke and Sarah Appleton. We also get to see some
of the few remaining Hammer stars, including Caroline Munro, Martine Beswick, Madeline
Smith and Valerie Leon (a pointed reminder that Hammer employed much younger
leading ladies than their leading men which is why it’s only women left) and
lots of archival interview footage with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing,
amongst others.
Narrated
by Charles Dance, this documentary is beautifully shot, with purpose-built
Hammer-style sets providing some great visual interest to what could otherwise be just similar-looking talking heads.
The fact that this is produced by Hammer has allowed for great archival access,
and one suspects that there was so much material that it could easily have been
a two or even three-part series. Hammer fans would definitely buy a box set of
those. As far as I am aware, this is the first Hammer-produced documentary
about the company since the Channel 4 Oliver Reed-narrated series The World
of Hammer in the early 1990s, and Hammer’s back-catalogue would allow for
lots more documentaries should they want to mine their history further.
Although
Hammer fans are some of the most learned, there is still new information to be
found in Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters, and this will also have
wider appeal and hopefully bring a new audience to Hammer’s dark and scary world.
