Rise of the House of Hammer

In the high-rolling film business, seven of every ten releases are box office flops. Financing is drying up, and most studios have cut back to a handful of new productions a year. What would Hollywood make, then, of a brash little outfit called Hammer Films on a second floor in London's Soho district? Hammer is riding a streak of nearly 100 straight moneymaking movies. Last month it began shooting its tenth new production of 1971. So successful has it become at exporting its wares that it is a winner of the Queen's Award for Industry--a grateful tribute for its contribution to Britain's balance of payments.

The films that have made Hammer, in its words, "accepted as a branded product all over the world" are largely girl-and-ghoul flicks and caveman epics, with titles like Countess Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, One Million Years B.C. and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb. Each is turned out on a near-strangulation budget and schedule ($500,000 and 25 shooting days). The plots, usually lifted from some Victorian romancer like Bram Stoker or Sheridan Le Fanu, are as creaky as the doors of Castle Dracula. The starlets who flit through prehistoric landscapes or quaint Transylvanian villages, bosoms heaving with fright, seem as interchangeable as the sets.

Reddest Gore. Only when it comes to promotion is Hammer truly lavish (the usual budget: $50,000 per picture). One of its first gimmicks after getting into the horror business in 1956 was to station ambulances outside theaters where its features were playing, supposedly to cart off fainting fans. For The Curse of Frankenstein, it claimed 3,000 victims in the U.S. alone. Often its advertising billboards seem more carefully prepared than its scripts. "There are more nudes in our posters than in our pictures," admits Founder and Chairman Sir James Carreras, who was knighted last year for his philanthropies but is still better known in the film trade as "the High Priest of Horror." It was the One Million Years B.C. poster of a barely wolf-skinned Raquel Welch, not her grunting rendition of the femme sauvage part, that led to her wider exposure.

What is Hammer really promoting: Sado-sexuality? Occultism? "Pure entertainment," insists Sir James. "I see the rushes every Monday to make sure there are no sick-making scenes and no explicit sex or violence." Still, there is plenty of implicit sex and violence, and the simulated gore is the reddest to be seen anywhere (at $70 a gallon). Sir James views it all with the sanguine air of a man who started as the operator of a chain of movie theaters in London's Hammersmith area (the source of the name Hammer). His Spanish-born father established the chain in the 1920s; today his son Michael, 44, carries on the family tradition by serving as Hammer's executive producer. "Frankenstein never gave anyone bad ideas," says Sir James. "Dracula could never be held responsible for a crime wave."

No Camping. Unlike its prime competitor, American International Pictures, Hammer refuses to pander to the younger drive-in crowd (the bulk of the horror market in the U.S.) with more fad-conscious pictures like Was a Teenage Werewolf. Out of respect for the Karloff-Chaney-Lugosi classics of the 1930s, Sir James would never permit a Vincent Price to camp up the Gothic genre. While piling up its $100 million-plus grosses over the years, Hammer has been able to attract--if not get the best out of--such expert directors as Joseph Losey, Guy Green and Ken

Hughes, and such solid character actors as Peter Gushing (the house Doctor Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes) and Christopher Lee (Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, Fu Manchu).

Now, after all those profits without honor in the serious film world, Hammer is attracting a cineaste cult following. This fall the prestigious British Film Institute showed a retrospective "Tribute to Hammer Films" at London's National Film Theater. The month-long festival came complete with solemn program notes (the portrayal of a Cornish voodoo cult in The Plague of the Zombies is seen as symbolic protest against oppressive modern mineowners). The changing critical climate seems to make Sir James uneasy. "I hope our public realizes that we're not going to change in the same way," he says. "We're in the business to make money, not to win Oscars. If the public decided tomorrow that it wanted Strauss waltzes, we'd be in the Strauss waltz business."

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