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31 Days of Horror VII / Hammer Trailers

Feature by: Rumsey Taylor, Leo Goldsmith, and Thomas Scalzo

Posted on: 31 October 2010

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For the past four weeks, and intermittently in our past volumes of 31 Days of Horror, we’ve been highlighting some of our favorite Hammer horror films. This piecemeal overview has been less than adequately comprehensive, given the studio’s generous genre output. Between its first horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein, in 1957, and its last, To the Devil a Daughter, some twenty years hence, Hammer produced dozens of horror films, many of them componential to the studio’s cash cow franchises: the Frankensteins, the Draculas, the Mummys, and the Cave Girls.

We’d be remiss not to devote more attention to Hammer’s concentrated and inimitable pedigree of horror in this space at some point in the future, but for now – and to conclude volume VII of 31 Days of Horror – we present a compendium of trailers for some of our Hammer favorites. These are arranged below in the following categories:

Frankenstein
Dracula
Sci-Fi
Devils
Jekyll & Hyde
Ethnographic Exploitation
Psychological thrillers
The Karnstein Trilogy
Misc. Monsters

These categories suggest that the film studio’s success or idiosyncrasy lay in its generic consistency, its ability to sustain characters within reliable narrative frameworks, reiterated production sets, and a roster of familiar actors. But then the devil is always in the details, and each of these trailers exhibits the tireless search for nuance, variation, and moments of excess even within the streamlined production model from which they were borne.

Thanks to Mark Franks for his help in curating the below.