Something Weird on TV: Hammer House of Horror Part One – The Last Gasp

By 1980, Hammer Film Productions was essentially already dead and buried. Their heyday more than a decade behind them, the studio that was once synonymous with gothic horror had produced their last film in 1979, itself a reportedly lackluster remake of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes – the Encyclopedia of British Film called it “about as witless and charmless as could be conceived.”

After the 1980s, the legendary studio would sink into silence and hibernation, not to be revived until 2008, when the brand (under new ownership) began churning out new horror films beginning with Beyond the Rave and continuing with titles such as Wake Wood, The Resident, The Woman in Black, and The Lodge, among others.

Between the end of Hammer’s boom years and the beginning of its resurrection, however, the studio’s name appeared on a couple of TV series. Hammer House of Horror ran as thirteen episodes on ITV, each just shy of an hour long, throughout the fall and winter of 1980.

This was followed a few years later by Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense, which repositioned its episodes as “feature length,” ranging from 69 to 73 minutes, in order to be shown as “movie of the week” programs in the States. Made in collaboration with 20th Century Fox, the episodes of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense were shown in the US as Fox Mystery Theater. They were also the last things that Hammer would produce in the 20th century.

The two series can be seen as the last gasp of Hammer’s original gothic cycle but, at the same time, they reflect the reduced circumstances and changing media landscape that were the studio’s reality by the ‘80s. This is probably most obvious in the settings of the episodes, which all take place in modern-day England, in opposition to most of the studio’s gothic classics, which were virtually all period pieces. In this regard, the episodes of Hammer House of Horror feel, even at their best, more of a piece with Amicus anthology films like Tales from the Crypt, Torture Garden, or The House That Dripped Blood than with earlier Hammer outings.

“Witching Time,” which first aired on September 13 in 1980, plays with this expectation in its opening minutes, as we see a stalking POV shot approaching an undressing woman in a manor house. This brief intro is a period sequence, but it is also quickly revealed to be a “movie within a movie,” as we pull out to our protagonist, a composer of film music who is scoring the scene. And even as it is subverting the expectation of a period-set story, it is also operating in the register of something Hammer pretty much never made – the slashers that were already well on their way to becoming de rigueur by the end of 1980.

At the same time that it toys with our ideas of what a Hammer horror product will be, it also gives us something audiences were, by then, used to expecting from Hammer – and something that makes Hammer House of Horror an anomaly when compared to American TV shows of the time: nudity. There are several sequences of nudity in “Witching Time,” and others will be waiting for us in subsequent episodes.

Peter Sasdy, who helms “The Thirteenth Reunion,” is the most frequently-repeated name among the roster of directors for Hammer House of Horror, having steered the ship on a total of three episodes. He also has a relatively impressive pedigree, coming to House of Horror on the heels of plenty of other TV work, sure, but also having directed the TV movie version of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape in 1972, as well as a handful of late-era Hammer gothics including Taste the Blood of Dracula, Hands of the Ripper, and Countess Dracula.

The episode itself stars Julia Foster and concerns sinister goings-on at (and adjacent to) a weight-loss clinic, demonstrating one of several times that the series would position itself as concerned with more modern topics. “The Thirteenth Reunion” probably would have been a pretty good installment in one of those aforementioned Amicus anthologies, but feels a bit dragged out at 52 minutes, taking too long to get to a twist that most modern audiences are going to see coming – and many in 1980 probably did, too.

Once again directed by Peter Sasdy, “Rude Awakening” comes from the pen of playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Gerald Savory, whose horror credits include the 1977 BBC version of Count Dracula starring Louis Jourdan and Frank Finlay. It also brings along some star power in the form of Denholm Elliott, who may be best known to modern movie fans for playing Marcus Brody in the Indiana Jones films.

This time around, Elliott plays a horned-up estate agent who has a recurring dream about having killed his wife, never mind that she is alive and well and interfering in his affair with his attractive young assistant. The dream stuff is predictable and Elliott – who was once described by Roger Ebert as “the most dependable of all British character actors” – is indeed quite dependable here, but the person who gets to have the most fun is probably Lucy Gutteridge (Top Secret!) as the object of his affections, who appears in an entirely different getup in every iteration of the dream.

We wrap up tonight’s coverage of Hammer House of Horror with an episode called “Growing Pains” which starts out looking like it’s going to be a sci-fi installment, with a kid wandering around in a lab filled with beakers and vials, but quickly turns into a ghost story. It was written by Nicholas Palmer, who also worked as a producer on Nigel Kneale’s Beasts, and directed by Francis Megahy. The stars include Gary Bond, who played the lead in Wake in Fright, and Barbara Kellerman, who was the White Witch in the 1988 BBC version of The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe.

There are some eerie moments here but overall, the first few episodes of Hammer House of Horror don’t offer a whole lot of promise for the series and certainly never hold a candle to the high points of Hammer’s filmography. Will the rest of the seriesfollow suit? There’s only one way to find out…