THE HAMMER STUDIO (Modern Horror Lab?)

Twenty years after the golden age of horror cinema in Hollywood, the British studio Hammer revives mythical figures inspired by British literature and European folklore (Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, the Werewolf, etc. .) and offers them new incarnations anchored in a Victorian context. Between 1955 and 1979, the studio produced nearly 150 films: gothic horror, science fiction, exotic adventures, detective stories or psychological thrillers distilling a climate of anguish and terror bordering on fantasy. This book offers new insights and highlights less familiar productions. It raises the question of the paradoxical modernity of films which deal with transgressive subjects, summon violence and eroticism and whose aesthetic biases are surprising and provocative, but which attempt to perpetuate a Gothic tradition and offer a rather conformist discourse, also striving to meet the expectations of the public in an England undergoing societal and cultural change. The studio has left its unique mark on genre cinema, shaped the imagination and marked the memory of generations of spectators. Now legendary, the Hammer is not just a gothic monster factory, but a modern horror laboratory that exerts a powerful fascination and continues to inspire many pop culture icons and contemporary filmmakers like Tim Burton, Dario Argento, John Carpenter or Mike Flanagan ( The Haunting , Netflix, 2018).