Richard J. Schellbach’s In My Write Mind Hooked on Hammer
As readers of my column know, I grew up in the small town of
Hamden, CT. And back when I was a kid there were certain geek truths. My parents, both sets of grandparents, and all of my friends’ parents owned black and white televisions—only one per household—which they prominently displayed opposite the couch in their living rooms. And even though by the time I was eight or nine there were tons of series and movies on TV in color, everything was black and white to us. That’s just the way it was. Hell, I was in my mid-teens before I realized that DR. CYCLOPS—one of my favorite films—was shot in color! I spent Saturday afternoons at
The Strand Theatre, soaking up everything they could throw at me, four hours at a time—two features, a bunch of cartoons, and a short. And there were geek truths in the movie theater, too. Musicals were in color. So were Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. Big broad comedies were in color. Horror movies, on the other hand, were black and white. Ever see JESSIE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN’S DAUGHTER? I saw it at The Strand in 1966 on a double bill with BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA, and they were both as washed- out then, when they were brand spankin’ new, as they are now. In fact, thinking back, they were the most uncolored color movies I’ve seen to this day.
So throughout most of the sixties, my geek truths were: - Horror on TV = black and white. - Horror at the movie theater = black and white. - FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND and CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN = black and white. Then, one glorious Saturday afternoon in 1968, color came into
my life. Not the color of horror movies I’d seen in the theater up until then. These colors were vibrant, bold… a stunning treat for the eyes. The film was DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE —my first Hammer movie—and I was instantly hooked. The music was big and lush, the castles looked real instead of like miniatures, and there were beautiful wide shots of the colorful European countryside instead of medium shots of a studio with trees stuck to the floor. There was also another dynamic that came into play that day.
I was twelve, and at twelve years old, a guy starts feeling… decidedly not of this earth. At the beginning of DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, a beautiful, scantily clad blonde is found hanging upside down in a church bell tower with bite marks on her neck. And let me tell you, this girl wasn’t “yucky” like the girls I went to school with. No, this girl had curves in places that I’d never noticed curves before. As I watched the girl in the low cut corset hanging upside down from that bell, besides
16 FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • MAR/APR 2012 “Oh, come on! Just a sip.”
being instantly smitten, I got my first lesson on gravity and immediately realized that gravity was going to be my lifelong friend. (Go gravity!) A few minutes later, when I saw Veronica Carlson for the first time, it was all over. Much like the colors in DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, the ladies of Hammer were vibrant, bold, and a stunning treat for the eyes. DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM
THE GRAVE started it all. I have always revered the black and white horror movies from Universal, MGM, 20th
Century Fox, and so
on for the classics they are. But Hammer Studios made the movies from my time. After all, THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN is
only a year younger than I am, and I have only two years on THE HORROR OF DRACULA. And from that first day in 1968 until Hammer stopped producing movies about a decade later, I tried to see everything that Hammer made. Good or bad, they always had something that rocked my world. In 1975, I was fortunate enough to attend the Famous Monsters Convention in New York City. Before I go any further, I’d like to bring something up: The ’75 FM Con is a lot like Woodstock, in that it was such an important event in horror that everyone likes to say they were there. Of course, when you dig deeper, many people amend their stories to say that they were “thinking” about going or were on the way but the minivan broke down. In fact, anyone who was really there will most assuredly never forget it. I know the memory of that weekend will stay with me forever. At the convention I had the good fortune to meet Michael Carreras, Ingrid Pitt, Barbara Leigh (in her Vampirella costume *sigh*), and the legendary Peter Cushing. All of them, especially Peter, were flabbergasted by the response they got from all of their U.S. fans. Peter joked that if he’d known he was so well liked in the States, he would have moved to the sunshine some while back. I honestly think that meeting the fans and feeling the love picked him up. He had never quite gotten over the death of his wife in 1971, and he appeared more frail than I had expected him to look. But as the weekend progressed, he looked better and better. He only expected to sign autographs for a short while, but when he saw the massive line that had formed, he smiled, sat down at the signing table and made sure everyone who wanted one got one. And he didn’t just sign. He had a smile for everyone and made each fan feel like they had shared a few personal moments. When I told him that my mom—a huge horror and mystery fan—would stay up to all hours of the night to watch one of his films on TV, he signed an autograph for her, too. She even got to speak to him on the phone once. Through his remaining years, he and I had two short phone conversations, and we mailed letters back and forth to
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