Trivia / Hammer Horror

• Career Resurrection: After a long period of dormancy, the Hammer film company (and Exclusive Film Distribution) was revived in 2007, with Dutch media tycoon John de Mol helping form it and Simon Oakes serving as its CEO and owner. This new Hammer would go on to produce several newer horror hits like Let Me In and The Woman in Black, even outlasting its former subsidiary.^note Exclusive Media was sold and folded into AMBI Distribution in 2016, but Hammer is still active in the hands of Oakes.
• Divorced Installment:
  • The Kiss of the Vampire was meant to be the third Dracula film in an attempt to make a film without Christopher Lee.
  • X the Unknown was supposed to part of the Quatermass series but, like The Kiss of the Vampire, ended up being a standalone.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Christopher Lee had an extreme phobia about spiders, so in The Hound of the Baskervilles, when the tarantula is crawling up his arm, he's not really "acting" terrified.
  • Nastassja Kinski was having trouble coming up with tears for a scene in To the Devil... A Daughter (she was very young and inexperienced at the time), so costar Richard Widmark straight-up slapped her in the face to get her crying. (Kinski, for her part, never bore him any ill will and said later she knew he was just trying to get a good performance out of her, and that he taught her a lot.)
• Fake Nationality: About one million times. Basically, this would show up in any movie set outside England, and even some set inside it.
• Missing Episode: Hazel Court allowed a topless scene to be filmed for 1959's The Man Who Could Cheat Death. It was only included in prints distributed outside the U.S. and England. It appears this footage has been lost forever, although Court did put a still from it in her autobiography. (Let it never be said that she didn't appreciate her fans).
• The Other Darrin:
  • Christopher Lee declined to play Dracula in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, partially due to fears of typecasting and partially because he thought the script was dreadful. John Forbes-Robinson replaced him.
  • Neither Ingrid Pitt nor Peter Cushing returned for The Vampire Lovers' sequel Lust for a Vampire. Their roles were played by Yutte Stensgaard and Ralph Bates.
• Stillborn Franchise:
  • The film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles was meant to be the first in a series of films starring Peter Cushing as The Great Detective. Alas, the British public weren't interested in a Hammer film with no monster and the idea was dropped.
  • Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter was meant from the start to be the first film of a franchise which would feature Kronos fighting a different species of vampires in each installment, but distribution issues resulted in a Stillborn Franchise that wasn't resurrected until decades later when a comic book continuation was published.
• Troubled Production: Verging on The Production Curse. Blood From The Mummys Tomb, adapted from Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of Seven Stars; Peter Cushing was cast as the lead but had to drop out after a single day's filming due to the hospitalization of his wife. Then five weeks into production (with only one week to go), director Seth Holt had a heart attack and died (some reports saying this was on set) and was replaced by Michael Carreras. On top of all that, star Valerie Leon was devastated when she was told she couldn't attend Holt's funeral. reporting on this, Fortean Times noted all the above and added that one scene in the film involved filming the aftermath of a motorcyle accident and the retrieval of a corpse from the scene. A member of the production crew died in a motorcycle accident just as filming got to this point.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the mid-70s, Hammer was in talks of collaborating with Toho on producing a film about the Loch Ness Monster.
  • They were interested in remaking King Kong (1933) in the 60s but were denied by the studio that held the rights having a then "no remake" policy.
  • Screenwriter Anthony Hinds was pushing for a film called The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula as early as 1972 and as late as 1977 but it was ultimately never made. Hinds's script saw Dracula relocating to India during the 1930s and teaming up with a murderous cult, an idea which may have inspired his trip to China in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. Interestingly this film would have featured an Action Girl as the main protagonist, a Downer Ending, and a complete lack of an experienced Van Helsing type of character to explain things, all major departures from the norm for Hammer. The script was eventually adapted as BBC Radio drama in 2017.
  • Hammer was in negotiations with Warren Publishing and American Pictures International to produce a film version of Vampirella starring Barbara Leigh but it ultimately fell through. Depending on who you ask either Hammer wasn't able to put up their share of the budget or AIP was making demands they couldn't agree to.
  • A mysterious unmade project called Zeppelin v. Pterodactyls appears to have been a World War II-era dinosaur film. It never got beyond an early piece of poster art. Its believed to have been stop motion, or at least use the method for the titular dinosaurs; considering the film was to be an homage to the works of Willis O'Brien this seems likely.
  • They contemplated a film adaptation of I Am Legend under the title of The Night Creatures, written by Richard Matheson himself. The project was ultimately deemed too graphic, foundered and eventually died.
  • Julie Christie was contracted to star in the thriller Nightmare, but she begged Hammer to let her go so she could make Billy Liar. They relented and cast Jennie Linden instead.
  • At one time they planned on creating a television series based on Frankenstein (with a new actor replacing Cushing) to be called Tales of Frankenstein. It was to be a co-production with Columbia Pictures (which, as a subsidiary of Universal, meant they were granted permission to use the iconic Karloff makeup). A pilot, titled "The Face in the Tombstone Mirror" was filmed and screened for the executives of the ABC network, who like what they saw. More scripts were ordered, but Columbia rejected them all. This, combined with conflict between Hammer and Columbia executives over creative control, caused the project to fizzle out, although the pilot is available online and on DVD by Scream Factory.

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