M
arcus Hearn Has tHougHt long and Hard about wHat
constituted a Hammer girl back in the studio’s heyday, half a century ago, and the author of Hammer Glamour, a history of the starlets who helped sell Hammer’s particular brand of English gothic romanticism, sees little connection to the waifish actresses who populate modern film. “There was a particular look to a Hammer girl,” he says by phone from England, “and
it’s not really the way that many contemporary actresses are encouraged to look. A Ham- mer girl was voluptuous. She was very curvy, very busty, very tall and very statuesque. A lot of the girls are actually quite chunky. In fact, when Madeline Smith first auditioned for The Vampire Lovers, she was asked to come back when she had put some weight on. It’s hard to imagine a producer telling an actress something like that nowadays. Our perceptions of what consti- tuted sexy ladies in those days were rather different.” Regardless, the women of Hammer are more popular in 2010
than they were 40 years ago. Ingrid Pitt, who starred in two of Hammer’s infamous “lesbian vampire” films, 1970’s The Vam- pire Lovers and 1971’s Countess Dracula, believes that Hammer’s female stars are remembered “fantastically well.” She explains, via an email interview, “Hammer has- n’t made a real film for about 35 years, but most of the gals who did one and want to [do public appearances] can turn up at a convention and be assured of a warm wel-
come.” Hearn agrees: “Some of these girls feel they have a higher profile now than they had when they were actually working.” And he would know, seeing as he’s worked with the studio
since 1994, edited a Hammer magazine and published three books about the company and its legacy. The idea for Hammer Glamour (Titan Books, released last fall), came about when Hearn discovered hundreds of publicity photos of the starlets and decided that a tome about them was in order. “Hammer reserved most of its colour publicity photography
for what we would call ‘glamour shots’ because, for Hammer, sex was a very important marketing tool,” he says. “Sex was just as important to many of the films as horror.” Indeed. And as Hammer, which was founded in 1934, found
itself being reinvented in the public imagination as a purveyor of horror with the release of 1955’s The Quatermass Xperi- ment (the first X-certificate horror film in England) and 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein (Hammer’s first colour film), the stu- dio began to put more time and money into finding and publi- cizing its female stars.
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