By Les Phipps – Business Development Manager
Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve or All Saints Eve, conjures images of demons, ghosts and evil-beings but is actually dedicated to remembering the dead including saints and martyrs and is a recognised Western Christian festival. Church services and lighting candles on the graves of the dead still take place in some parts of the world but in more modern times it has become a more commercialised event involving trick or treating, dressing up in costumes, telling scary stories and watching horror movies.
Watching Horror movies is something I love; I can do without the commercial activities which seem to dominate Halloween these days but I love horror movies and in particular Hammer movies. I grew up on these and have never lost my love for them, I never tire of watching Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing doing battle in the original Dracula made in 1958. To me Christopher Lee is Dracula, menacing, dark, brooding without ever saying much, hardly uttering a word in the whole film, much scarier than the gore filled films of the modern vintage.
There are some great horror films being made these days but Hammer films will always be my first love, I remember as a young boy watching them with my dad after pestering him to let me watch them, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolfman, Zombies, they tackled them all to varying degrees of success but nothing beats Dracula.
Films and movies about vampires will always be my favourite. There have been some really great portrayals of Dracula and vampires; from Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski in different versions of Nosferatu, to Bela Lugosi as the infamous Count. For me, Christopher Lee stands head and shoulders above them all.
More recently there have been some new Hammer movies made with a strong British slant and more in Keeping with Hammer traditions than the more modern trend of blood and gore and general unpleasantness!
This revival has extended to publishing where there is now a Hammer books imprint. They have published some fantastic original books by some really great contemporary authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Helen Dunmore, Sophie Hannah and Melvin Burgess. They have also published books of the film by some really classic modern horror authors, with Shaun Hutson tackling Twins of Evil and Guy N. Smith taking on Kronos. As a fan of the films, it’s great to relive the stories as a book.
Horror fiction is a genre that is always of great interest to us here at World of Rare Books, we get many titles into the warehouse including the work of Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley and Peter Saxon.
I can now also proudly say, I have stopped at Dracula’s castle, not the one in the Carpathians in Old Romania but the one used for filming Dracula and many other famous Hammer films over the years. Tucked away in Berkshire near the village of Bray, home to Heston Blumenstal’s restaurant, there is a manor house which was quite conveniently next door to the hammer studio’s, this became one of the main areas for filming many scenes from Hammer movies, not least Dracula. It is now a hotel and to my eternal gratitude, I have to give thanks to my girlfriend who took me there as a surprise for my birthday a few years ago. What a treat for a lover of Hammer films as you can still recognise parts of it from the films, which has led to many hours poring over my box sets looking out for scenes set there in the films.
This Halloween, I think you can guess what I will be doing, ignoring the chimes of the doorbell from those Trick or Treaters, feet up with a few chilled beers and my beloved Hammer films, horror heaven!