W
hen Simon oakeS decided to revive Britain’S moSt famouS genre Studio, he aSked himSelf a particularly important queStion: “What Would hammer Be like today?”
Speaking to Rue Morgue from his home in London, the enthusiastic
businessman says it was his lifelong “love affair” with Hammer that drove his desire to revive the company when the rights came up. He rec- ognized the ongoing value of the company’s legacy, as “the brand that never dies,” yet he also understood the importance of letting go of some of the more quaint notions of the Hammer legacy, such as the sort-of cottage industry style of filmmaking that defined its heyday, in order to remain current. “I guess that the world doesn’t work like that anymore,” says Oakes.
“That goes back to what I call the repertory family nature of Hammer. ... I think to be able to replicate that nowadays is very, very difficult, and I think the genre has moved on.” The iconic British studio produced some of the most memorable hor-
ror films of the ’50s and ’60s, making stars of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the process. But by the early 1970s, Hammer’s brand of Eng- lish gothic romanticism, born out of 1950s censorship restrictions, had fallen out of favour. Its productions, aided by changes to Britain’s film ratings system, became increasingly explicit in order to compete with their bigger-budgeted Hollywood cousins. This resulted in the exploita- tive likes of 1971’s Twins of Evil (starring Playboy mod- els and real-life twins Mary and Madeleine Collinson) and 1971’s Lust for a Vampire (starring the frequently nude Yutte Stensgaard). Ham- mer’s last horror film – and, some would argue, its moral nadir – was 1976’s ill-received To the Devil a Daughter, which featured a nude fif- teen-year-old Nastassja Kinski. The financially strapped company made a
few more films in the ’70s and a couple of television anthologies in the 1980s before en- tering a period of dormancy. Various attempts through the ’90s and the early part of the new century to resurrect Hammer stumbled until Oakes, an experienced film executive, and his
partner Marc Schipper acquired the Hammer name in 2007. They then asked Nigel Sinclair
and Guy East, co-founders of the successful indie film producer/distributor Intermedia, to join their board and create the Exclusive Media Group, Ham- mer’s new holding company. Now, beams Oakes, “Hammer is my day job!” His company’s first production was Beyond the Rave (2008), an “inter-
active web serial” that premiered on MySpace in a bid to spread the Ham- mer name to a younger generation. Hammer’s first two theatrical productions are scheduled for release later this year. Psychological thriller The Resident, co-starring Oscar-winner Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby) and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen) is out August 27 in the UK, and Let Me In, the English-language remake of the Swedish vampire novel and film Let the Right One In (RM#84) is scheduled for October 1 in North America. “We have not in any way Hollywood-ized it, as people have talked about,”
Oakes insists of the remake, which features a bloodsucker vastly different from the satin cape-wearing archetype of classic Hammer productions. “It is not rammed full of CGI and special effects. It is, as you know, at its heart a love story, and I think that’s what appealed to people. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.” To appeal to long-time Hammer fans, the company has included some of
its classic players in the new productions. Beyond the Rave features a cameo from Ingrid Pitt, while The Resident has Christopher Lee in it. “To my mind, it was a lovely way of connecting the heyday of Hammer
with what I’m trying to do, which is to rebuild the brand,” explains Oakes. And that brand remains valuable. While the company is dedicated to pro-
ducing original works (other planned projects include a film version of Susan Hill’s best-selling horror novel The Woman in Black), Oakes also wishes to revisit some of Hammer’s most popular characters – including potentially Captain Kronos, from 1974’s Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, and Professor Bernard Quatermass, of the 1967 sci-fi/horror hybrid Quater- mass and the Pit. He feels they can speak to contemporary audiences. “You could just leave a great brand like Hammer in aspic and say, ‘Well,
that was then and this is now,’” he reasons. “Or what you can do is you can bring it back to life again, you can pay homage to the past. You actually make the older films more accessible and available to younger people who haven’t seen
them...and I think that we should celebrate that.”
New Blood: Hammer President/CEO Simon Oakes, and (above) Emma Woollard as Anais in Beyond the Rave. 23RM
Beyond the Rave photo by James Nicholas Fuller. Copyright Exclusive Productions Ltd.
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