The Glass Art of Hammer Films

I’ve been a long time enthusiast for Britain’s Hammer Films, having pretty much grown up on these shows. There’s always been a great sense of consistency within the Hammer production catalogue, where meager budgets and unbelievably compressed shooting schedules somehow always seemed to result in a solid, highly professional and polished finished release. The amazingly ingenious art direction of Bernard Robinson which somehow opened up imaginatively scripted scenarios to a far broader canvas than the extremely confined Bray Studios (really a converted old house) soundstage crew would ever have thought possible. The same could be said of the consistently high standard of scoring by composers such as James Bernard who managed to lend an air of elegance to the proceedings

The common misnomer was that the little studio just produced horror pictures, whereas the truth of the matter was that many genres were tackled – mystery, film noir, desert adventure, dinosaur epics, comedies, war films and science fiction. Among the many films made by the studio quite a number still stand the test of time and are excellent cinematic entertainments. Some of my favourites are THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, CAPTAIN CLEGG (aka NIGHT CREATURES), THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, TWINS OF EVIL, THE DEVIL SHIP PIRATES, the very under rated VAMPIRE CIRCUS and the deliriously wacky LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (a particularly guilty pleasure) to name but a few…

…Read the Full Article @ Matte Shot

This blog is intended as a tribute to the ingenuity of the traditional matte painter where movie magic was created entirely by hand. Some of the shots will amaze in their grandeur and epic quality while others will surprise in their ‘invisibility’ to even the sophisticated viewer. I hope this collection will serve as an appreciation of the artform and both casual visitors and those with a specialist interest may benefit, enjoy and be amazed at skills largely unknown today

NZPete

I have gone further back into the archives of Matte Shot – A Tribute to Golden Era Special FX to feature even more articles from this great site, so  I hope you enjoy this wonderful journey we’re on together.

PJ Max