Hammer House of Horror: The Complete Series
Dir various, UK 1980 Network, £29.99 (Blu-ray)
Did your parents let you watch ITV when you were growing up? An odd question perhaps, but I’ve met at least three people whose BBC-loving parents banned their kids from watching ‘the other side’. Supposedly, the independent channel was crass, commercial and ‘low grade’.
Programmes like this 1980 ITV production of Hammer
House of Horror wouldn’t have helped ease their fears. The British horror factory brought its trademark excess to the small screen with a full-on mix of underwear-clad stabbings, bouncing breasts, baby eating and screaming children being showered with blood at a house party. This latter scene, from the segment ‘The House That Dripped Blood’, left millions of kids scarred for life. It’s the perfect example of the series’s no-nonsense approach to the macabre.
Yet there are plenty of left-field moments too, like the totally bizarre ‘Growing Pains’. Here, a woman and her scientist husband (who’s trying to solve world hunger), adopt a creepy, well-spoken kid with a pudding-basin haircut. They want to replace the son who died after eating some pills from dad’s save-the-world lab. Soon, rabbits, and then people, start dying. It’s so strange and unpredictable that I found myself gripped. Another crazy entry is ‘Rude Awakening’, a horror precursor to
Groundhog Day. Denholm Elliot plays the wife-hating estate agent caught up in a crazy nightmare loop in which buildings collapse on him and he cops off with his naked secretary in a telephone box. One of my favourite episodes is ‘Children of the Full Moon’, where Diana Dors plays grinning housemaid to a bunch of creepy kids who “only play at night”. A young couple with car trouble find the house and are given a place to stay, only to find there’s a rapey wolf on the prowl outside...
Even more predictable episodes – like ‘The Carpathian Eagle’, whose twist you’ll see coming the day before you watch it – are thoroughly enjoyable. Here, men’s hearts are being cut out by what appears to be a 300-year-old Carpathian countess. Lol. Watch out for a young Pierce Brosnan, who chats up the killer in a Buckinghamshire park. (If you live in Bucks, this show is a fascinating time-capsule of locations, by the way.) ‘Witching Time’ has a 17th century witch terrorising a farmhouse. In ‘Charlie Boy’, a man gets hooked on an African fetish doll which seems to have the power to cause actual deaths. Again, it’s by the numbers stuff, but the period setting and commitment to mayhem is hard to resist.
The show also tried to comment on ‘issues’ too, as in ‘The Thirteenth Reunion’, where a Fleet Street journalist delves into the 1980s diet industry (which seems a bit harsher than today’s Weight Watchers). Bascially a grumpy bloke in a tracksuit shouts at women in leotards for being “fat”, “repulsive” and “turning men away in disgust”. ‘The Silent Scream’ riffs on prisons and confinement as a pet shop owner traps an ex-con in an elaborate cage. This episode even features Peter Cushing as the mad captor, and a young Brian Cox as his prey. One of the weakest entries is ‘Visitor from the Grave’, which uses that old horror chestnut of a dead fella cropping up repeatedly and moaning ‘I will be revenged’. Despite having an hysterical Katherine Leigh Scott in it (Maggie from Dark
Shadows), this is the least exciting of the bunch.
Some episodes are actually pretty scary. ‘The Two Faces of Evil’ feels like a nightmare you’d have as a kid, and ‘The Mark of Satan’ is one of the darkest of the series, following a mortician who starts to believe in a satanic conspiracy revolving around the number nine. Hammer House of Horror will delight both those who were terrified by it the first time around and others only catching up with it now after a ban by parents who thought ITV depraved. Judging by this, ITV was a bit depraved – all the more reason to high-five the channel’s horror chops. Oh, and on Blu-ray, the picture quality is outstanding. Buy it direct from Network and you’ll get a hardcopy facsimile of an original episode script thrown in too! his strongest film since Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water has more in common with that film than just stunning visuals and excellent special effects, as he once again uses the tensions of the film’s historical setting to realise the story’s full emotional depth: in Pan’s Labyrinth it was post-Civil War Spain, here it is Cold War America. This adds an additional sense of gravitas to the characters’ motivations and feelings, one that brings home the fact that sometimes the strange and unusual is, in fact, deeply human, while humans are often the real monsters.
Screaming children are showered with blood at a party