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This book is about the British film director Terence Fisher. It begins by setting the context by detailing Fisher's directorial debut to Hammer's horror production and the importance of the Hammer horror to Fisher's career. Hammer's horror production represents one of the striking developments in post-war British cinema. The book explains some professional and industrial contexts in which Fisher operated and shows how these relate both to the films he made and the way in which these films have been judged and valued. It presents a detailed account of The Astonished Heart, Fisher's sixth film as director, highlighting the benefits and some of the problems involved in thinking about Fisher's career generally in its pre-horror phase. The successful Hammer film, The Curse of Frankenstein, both inaugurated the British horror boom and established Fisher as a film-maker whose name was known to critics as someone who specialised in the despised horror genre. After The Curse of Frankenstein, Fisher became primarily a horror director. The book presents an account of the highs and lows Fisher faced in his directorial career, highlighting his significant achievements and his box-office failures. It also shows Fisher as a director dependent on and at ease with the industrial and collaborative nature of film-making. In a fundamental sense, what value there is in Terence Fisher's work exists because of the British film industry and the opportunities it afforded Fisher, not despite the industry.
With its focus on change and transformation, Darwinian theory offers a useful theoretical tool for understanding the survival and evolution – indeed, the flourishing – of the Frankenstein Network. This chapter considers Hammer Film Productions’ The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and its immediate filmic predecessor (The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957) as ‘successful’ replications of Mary Shelley’s source text, while also exploring the myriad ways in which Revenge propagates the post-Darwinian discourse of the 1950s. The Revenge of Frankenstein, as this chapter demonstrates, is unequivocally and obsessively about Dr Frankenstein, the man of science, the bold and brash technocrat, and the fierce advocate of transhumanism.
. Hammer Film Productions. British Film Institute National Archive, London. 25 July 2012. ———. Dracula Financing. 16 August 1957. Item 15 Dracula Financing. Hammer Film Productions. British Film Institute National Archive, London. 25 July 2012. ———. Letter to Eliot Hyman. 24 August 1956. Item 1 Curse of Frankenstein . Hammer Film Productions. British Film Institute National Archive, London. 25 July 2012. ———. Letter to Eliot Hyman. 7 July 1957. Item 1 Curse of Frankenstein . Hammer Film
. Craft, C. (1984), ‘“Kiss me with those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Representations 8 (1984): 107–33. Dracula (1958). [Film] Directed by Terence Fisher. UK: Hammer Film Productions. Dracula
, Katy Wild, Duncan Lamont, and Kiwi Kingston. Hammer Film Productions, 1964. Feldstein, Al (w) and Ingels, Graham (a). ‘The Monster in the Ice!’ The Vault of Horror #22 (December 1951). NY: EC Comics. ‘Frankenstein.’ DC Wikia , n.d. http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Frankenstein . Frankenstein . Dir. James Whale. Perf. Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, and John Boles. Universal Pictures, 1931. Goulart, Ron. Great American Comic Books. Lincolnwood, IL
Horror was also followed by the less successful Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (Hammer Film Productions Ltd, 1984) which, under the direction of its US co-producer, Twentieth Century Fox, watered down the fullblown horror of the former series. However, it is in Hammer House of Horror that we find the most complete anthology of the typical settings and narrative concerns of domestic
that for what was probably the first time in British cinema history there was a space – in terms of both market potential and what would be allowed by the censors – in which an indigenous horror genre could conceivably operate. 26 How it was that the Hammer company rather than any other came to fill and dominate that space, what it was about this relatively small production set-up that enabled it to exploit this situation so effectively, are questions that can now be considered. Hammer Film