Hammer House of Horror | Ghosts | Ghostwatch
Hammer House of Horrors
In Britain Christmas is the traditional time for the telling of spooky ghosts stories and terrifying tales of the supernatural. There's nothing quite like curling up with a good ghost story on a cold winters night. Here in the states, however, we prefer to concentrate our paranormal pleasures around Halloween which has left me in the mood for some creepy telly viewing.
Throughout the sixties and seventies there were a number of terrific fright tales on British television including a set of marvelous adaptations of the works of M R James, The Quatermass trilogy and The Stone Diaries. Much as the classic output of American shows such as The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits have never been satisfactorily duplicated in the last decade or so (no matter what fans of The X Files, Friday The Thirteenth and Poltergeist The Legacy think) British horror programming has had trouble keeping up with its storied past. Two series (and one special) have, luckily, been able to transcend the mediocrity of their brethren - In the eighties ITV's Hammers House of Horrors and in the nineties the BBC's Ghosts anthology and one-off Halloween special Ghostwatch.
In the fifties Hammer Studios reinvigorated the horror genre with their lurid color remakes of many of Universal's classic monster franchises. The Hammer version became franchises of their own with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee becoming horror icons every bit as popular as Lugosi and Karloff had been in their prime. By the seventies the horror genre had outpaced the Hammer style. Where a little bit of gore and an ample helping of cleavage had been enough to satisfy audiences in the past theatergoers now demanded gorier and more intense thrills. Films such as The Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre made Hammer obsolete. Not content to go the way of the dinosaurs without a fight Hammer returned to horror in 1980 with it's anthology series Hammer's House of Horrors.
Fans may have hoped that Hammer's TV series would feature old friends Lee and Cushing as Count Dracula and Prof. Van Helsing but, by the eighties, both men had had their fill of their classic, but oft-repeated, roles so Hammer instead produced a dozen or so top flight chillers, a handful of which are modern classic. Among the best of the bunch, in my humble opinion:
The House That Bled to Death: Eerie, sometimes disturbing tale of a house that not only bleeds from the walls, but causes its inhabitants to commit unspeakable acts of violence. Sounds like an episode of Changing Rooms gone horribly wrong but it's an effective thriller.
Carpathian Eagle:: Suzanne Danielle portrays a novelist who becomes obsessed
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