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Hammer Horror and British Cinema. Film production in Britain has had a very difficult history. Some of the difficulties were due to the strict censorship code that operated in Britain up until the outbreak of the Second World War. The British Board of Film Censors- BBFC (now known as the British Board of Film Classification) measured films against a list of 43 rules. The rules prohibited the representation of all kinds of experiences on film. Social issues like marital breakdown or extra-marital affairs were off limits. An effect of this constraint was that to make British production fall into very particular genres: heritage (drawn from literary texts), comedy and social realism (primarily documentary). British film lacked the thrills that Hollywood films offered in spite of their own censorship (the 1930 Hays Code). Between the First and Second World Wars the majority of films seen in Britain came from the United States and had already been censored according to the Hays Code. Gangster and horror films caused some concerns so a new category of classification "H" (indicating horror) was introduced in 1932. Films that caused the greatest concern in period were those that appeared to raise questions about the structure of British politics or the class system. Censorship was therefore mainly 'political' rather than 'aesthetic' (visual). The BBFC was primarily concerned about representations of sex. It was thought that _the moral standards of the public needed to be protected through the control of onscreen nuditY and sexual display. The Board was keen to discourage the normalisation of pre-marital or extra-marital sex and therefore cuts were made to .. ' offensive or explicitly sexual language. In the inter-war period, there had only been two classifications for films: 'u' which meant Universal exhibition and 'A' which loosely required adult accompaniment. 'A' classification did not disbar children and without a doubt cinema patterns were about family viewing. In 1951 the 'X' certificate was established and this encouraged filmmakers to explore more adventurous treatments of horror, sex and violence. The new certificate actually brought about longer cuts than beforehand. The filmmakers and changes in social values in the wider society were challenging the BBFC. The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 helped to support the film-maker's argument in that the Act stated that nudity was acceptable where it could be argued it advance the knowledge of science, literature, art or wider learning. Into these changes came Hammer and a study of it as a particularly British production house. Hammer set about making popular, spectacular cinema, which had little precedence (priority/superiority) in British cinema. Hammer was established in 1947 as a small independent production company. It became a brand name for British horror when it brought a country house to act as its studios.
Hammer Productions began making films for radio plays but it was their successful science-fiction productions the Qutrtermoss Experiment (1955) and The curse of Frtmkenstein (1957) that first brought the production nouse profits and increased confidence. It was the success of The curse of Frtmkenstein that lead to Hammer buying up the rights to Universal Studio's gothic canon and /)rocu/owas Hammer's next horror film starring Christopher Lee. Six further Frankenstein films were produced by Hammer along with six Dracula and nine other vampire films, three mummy films, and one Jekyll and Hyde fi Im. Students are often quite amazed at how plentiful & striking, how steeped in red, a Hammer film looks. To a contemporary audience they may look camp and overproduced. In each version of Dracula, Hammer used creative licence to doctor the story; the vampire was always killed only to return in another episode. The Mis-en-scene was elaborate (complex) and the iconography became a crucial part of the pleasure of the films. A lot of attention was given to the site of a vampire attack, and blood flowed freely. References to garlic, crucifixes, coffins and stakes became part of the expected conventions. Critics criticized how much Hammer resorted to the CU to provide a repulsive and blood-filled view of the Counfs attacks. Hammer introduced to British horror, a wider range of camera angles intended to draw the audience closer rather than further away from the events. Hammer was not strong on suggestion, but strong on impact. "_ ' The sexual undercurrents evident in the,original novel- Dracula and Nosferatu became much more prominent in Hammer versions of the story. The pl,unging necklines of the female characters became a shorthand to interpret that they are vampires or soon-to-be vampires.
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