Hammer Horror rises from the dead

Like most horror movies, it is a story we have heard many times before. Since its demise in the early Eighties when it fell into receiver-ship, Hammer has been threatening to clamber from its financial grave on several occasions.

First on the scene was Roy Skeggs, a former production accountant with Hammer, who acquired the company in 1983, together with the rights to much of the back catalogue of 180 films. In spite of many grandiose schemes, Skeggs failed to realise his ambitions, and five years

ago a business consortium headed by Charles Saatchi bought Hammer from him for £2.25 million.

Eventually, amid much fuss at Cannes last year, it was announced that, after a 20-year lull, Hammer was to make seven new horror movies - four remakes and three originals. So where are they and will this latest effort to revive Britain's only film trademark be just one more vain attempt to resurrect a putrefying corpse? Hammer's chief executive, Terry Illott, thinks not. "Progress is painfully slow," he admitted. "But by the end of the year I hope we'll go into production with a £10 million remake of The Devil Rides Out, one of Hammer's most respected movies. It's taken a long time to sort out, but we are aiming relatively high in terms of quality."

How far Illott and his shareholders manage to realise their aspirations remains a matter of conjecture. But if ever there was a time for British horror to be revived, it is now. Genres come in cycles and following the final death throes of the gangster film, which threw up a handful of good movies and a truckload of bad ones, horror is back on the agenda for young film-makers.

The reasons are simple: horror is a good bet for the first-time auteur. In America in the Seventies and Eighties, new directors came pouring out of the woodwork with a new kind of horror film.

Thus, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter and George A Romero made their names with raw and bloody tranches of rural mythology in which hillbilly slash-ers and mutant rednecks chased (and often caught) innocent teenagers.

There was an underlying morality at work here: if you strayed too far from the all-American values of hearth, home, apple pie and the security of Mom and Pop, then someone, somewhere was going to come out of the dark with a cleaver.

THE British horror movie had far more literary precedents. UK films in the genre have always been inspired by the psychology of myth and fantasy. Many of Brit horrors' finest works have emerged from the tradition of genre literature - RL Stevenson, MR James, Ann Radcliffe, Hugh Walpole, Monk Lewis, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley. In its way, Hammer was the Merchant-Ivory of horror.

Hammer Films began in 1948 as the production unit of Exclusive Films. After some years churning out cheap location-based thrillers in black and white, director Val Guest made The Quatermass Experiment in 1955. But the advent of Technicolor and the discovery of the old Universal back catalogue of Thirties monster movies - The Mummy, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, and so on - gave Hammer the fresh blood it needed. In 1957, The Curse of Frankenstein was unleashed and was quickly followed up by Dracula, which was a huge hit in Europe and the USA. Hammer had arrived. With a vengeance.

The success of Hammer Films was a result of luck, timing and judgment. A repertory of actors (Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Ralph Bates, Barbara Shelley), an unusual attention to production design and a fine balance of sex and gore ensured that Hammer became a household name that lives today. It won the Queen's Award for Industry in 1968 for its export record.

Compared with the special-effects gore of today's horror films, the Hammer pictures may look tame but they are still handsome. Some aspire to classic status. The Plague of the Zombies (1965) remains the godfather of the modern zombie movie, reworking the plot of Bela Lugosi's White Zombie by replacing a sugar mill in Haiti with a Cornish tin mine; and The Devil Rides Out (1967), featuring Lee in a heroic role for once, turned Dennis Wheatley's novel into a cinematic tour de force of Satanic horror.

I view the prospect of a revived Hammer with mixed feelings. Now that much of the back catalogue is available on DVD and video, those who wish can see them at any time. They were also embedded in the era in which they were made - the 1960s belong to Hammer Films as much as The Avengers. To revive them - indeed, to remake them - means having to re-dress them for today.

Anything is possible. Inspired by the success of The Sixth Sense and The Others, we might find a generation of film-makers committed enough to the fantasy genre to come up with their own classics. Today's Seth Holt, Val Guest or Terence Fisher may be lurking even now in the wings, waiting to take his flight into darkness.