Page 6 - Hammer Shock - Picture Palace Movie Posters

UPDATING THE NIGHTMARE
by Jonathan Rigby

My, what a fantastic array of advertising art is gathered here…

And what a superb chronicle of a thrillingly creative era in British filmmaking. Starting in the mid-1950s - initially
with The Quatermass Xperiment and progressing through such imperishable titles as The Curse of
Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy - Hammer Film Productions triggered an astonishing, and entirely
unexpected, boom in British horror. Yes, there had been a few isolated titles before, stretching right back to the
beginning of cinema. The lonely landmarks prior to Hammer's explosive arrival included Alfred Hitchcock's silent
serial-killer thriller The Lodger, Boris Karloff rising from his tomb in The Ghoul and the classic Ealing
portmanteau picture Dead of Night. But nothing quite prepared cinemagoers - and film critics - for the erotic
abandon and visceral assault of Hammer's early horrors.

As the takings rolled in, critics wrung their hands in dismay, descending into a bona-fide moral panic as they
decried all the salacious shockers being pumped out of (Heaven forfend!) British studios - for, of course,
inspired by Hammer's success, other producers leapt aboard the bandwagon with exploitative zeal. Amid all the
agonising, the lurid posters used to advertise these 'irresponsible' films didn't escape censure, either. Derek Hill
- in an infamous Sight and Sound broadside entitled 'The Face of Horror' - didn't content himself with such
apocalyptic statements as "The past months have seen the most relentless corruption of public taste the
cinema has ever known." Oh no. He also took a moment to point out that "Only a sick society could bear the
hoardings, let alone the films."

Like the 1945 film it advertised, the genteel horror of Ealing's Dead of Night poster (featuring a giant bat created
by artist Leslie Hurry) was by no means indicative of the way British horror would go in the subsequent decade.
Clawing hands reaching out at the viewer…quailing ingenues… leering, blood-bolted monsters - these were
much more the thing. And then there were the tag-lines: 'No-one who saw it lived to describe it!' (The Curse of
Frankenstein), 'The TERRIFYING Lover - who died - yet lived!' (Dracula), 'Torn from the Tomb to Terrify the
World!' (The Mummy). The exclamation marks shrieked every bit as lustily as the imperilled heroines. And
Hammer were well aware that eye-catching 'come-hither' advertising was a key factor in luring thrill-hungry
punters into their local Odeons and ABCs. Indeed, Hammer's managing director, James Carreras, made no

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