Hammer Time

Organizing our October readings has turned out to be, in most ways, simpler than I anticipated. I knew there would be booksellers willing, even eager to participate. We counted on that. Not everyone who sells books is anxious to stand in front of friends and strangers and read aloud. There are perfectly wonderful coworkers that were I to suggest they should do any such thing would run the other way, or just settle me right down with a friendly slap. There are others however who I was pretty sure, would be glad of the chance to participate in something to do with books that they might never have done before or that they've actually been itching to try. Now that we're doing it, I must say, the most fun for me has been in listening to other people read. Some of these people turn out to be really, really good at this sort of thing. Hope they like it and decide to do more. The biggest surprise for me personally has been my introduction to so many stories and writers that were new to me, and so many unexpected and delightfully different interpretations of just what might qualify as one of our Creepy Tales! Turns out, there are about as many stories that fit under that rubric as there have been volunteers, more. Nearly everyone involved has had at least three or more possibilities. I had my readings from Saki already set when I proposed this month-long program. A couple of other readers had a story they very much wanted to do, but some people have spent quite a bit of their personal time reading, researching and deciding among all sorts of alternatives and that turns out to be a very exciting thing to get to watch. Everyone who is signed on to do this has, I think, found something wonderful.

The diversity of what's being read for our Halloween celebration is probably the best part of experience; for all the readers and for our audiences. Never know what you might hear. That is, I think, rather exciting. Anyone who has ever worked in retail will know just how predictable something like Halloween can look and feel, not only to the retailer but to the customer. Everyone's seen this: pumpkins in the window, vampire books on the table, and... thank you very much, see you again next year. So this year, with these readings, we're mixing things up a little: Saki and M. R. James and Lovecraft, yes, but also Aimee Bender and Bradbury and so on. You never know.

Which is not to say I have anything against the traditional horrors of the season. Far from it.I still love all the old, the tried and true of Halloween. Just about my favorite celebration of the year, Halloween. Next to Christmas, best holiday ever. After a certain age, birthdays rather faded, for me anyway. Big anniversaries otherwise can be sweet. Our 25th was special. But Halloween? What is not to love about dress up? Candy? Little kids in plastic masks? Tricks? Treats? Okay, tricks have lost most of their thrill for me as a homeowner. Still. I still love the very idea of a holiday devoted to all manner of supernatural silliness; from ghosts and goblins to goth. And did I mention candy?!

(What the grown ups never tell the kids? Anything we buy that doesn't get given away, we get to eat. That is really good.)

One of the things I love best about Halloween is that now and again, some of my favorites still turn up on the television this time of year, just like when I was a kid. Trust Turner Classic Movies to remind me just how much I still love Hammer Films.

Dear TCM has resurrected some of the best. I'm taping all of them. I've already watched the two that launched Hammer into the first rank of monster-makers, Christopher Lee's first turn as Dracula, and Peter Cushing's first go at Baron Frankenstein. With Terrence Fisher directing, and a remarkable team of designers, producers, technicians and supporting actors, and with those two remarkably well cast gents in the leads, Hammer hit. Both films are genuinely wonderful. So glad I got to see them again on a proper big color TV.

Just here, I should make a confession. I'm not quite old enough to have seen Hammer Films movies on the big screen. I might have done, at least some of their later, lesser efforts, had I grown up somewhere other than in a little Pennsylvania town with only one cinema in it, and that showing mostly G-rated Disney throughout my childhood. Not to be. Instead, I watched all my Hammer films on television, badly censored and with awful local commercials for Carvel Ice Cream cakes and the like, rather spoiling the mood. Doesn't matter. I adored these movies. That's not the confession though. What I'm still a little ashamed to admit is that I loved the not very good movies Hammer made -- and they made a lot of them -- just as much as their best, and I still do. That's the embarrassing disclosure this evening.

Since the far off days when Hammer was still properly in business and making movies, a certain reputation utterly unlike the one the studio, and horror films in general had at the time, has gradually accrued to these films. Dare I even say, there's now a kind of respectability to the whole business, not just nostalgia, mind, but an actual critical consensus that now suggests more than just one or two of these things were quite good, not just in their way, but as -- shiver -- art. Moreover, and this I think it would now be hard for almost anyone to dispute, sadly, Hammer is seen as rather quaint, if not downright harmless. What a world, what a world.

I've just read an excellent book about the studio, A Thing of Unspeakable Horror: The History of Hammer Films, by Sinclair McKay. The author tells a fascinating story full of all the unlikely and lucky circumstances that went into making Hammer Films into the preeminent factory of horror films for twenty years. More than just writing a chronological history of the studio though, McKay, quite rightly, takes all the craftsmanship of the thing quite seriously and gives all the players, and the films their due, without the more usual self-importance and the higher rhetoric of film theory that seems to be de rigueur nowadays no matter the celluloid under review. He's very good, for instance, in describing the economic circumstances of what always was in the end a rather fly-by-night enterprise, and a sorry post-war British industry, but he's equally good, and often quite amusing about the cultural impact of these movies, and the influences that ran either way throughout the studio's rather checkered history. McKay is clearly an unabashed fan, but there is a wonderfully English refusal of "fuss" in his telling, and nary a hint of anything being made too much of. Quite right.

As I've already confessed, loving Hammer was never a very knowing response on my part. Reading McKay's book and watching the films again, both on TCM and online, as a grown man, has offered me a fresh perspective. I can appreciate only now how brilliantly the composer James Bernard contributed to the atmosphere, just how carefully and cleverly Hammer's designers used their limited resources to produce complete and completely satisfying environments -- for the most part, at least in the early days, and how really wonderful the company of regular character actors were, and what humor and fun they brought to all those innkeepers, police inspectors and the like. But I still love even the tasteless scarlet draperies and garish gold candelabras and the inevitable day-for-night runs through the woods of the later years. I love the busty ingenues in all their big hair and diaphanous nighties, and the overacting, and the asinine plots, and the blessed rubber bats with which so many an otherwise professional actor of the old school struggled to an undignified and ridiculous end. True, I can still be surprised, and even moved by the subtle wit and real conviction that great actors like Cushing and Lee seemed to bring to even the lamest sequels, but good or bad, I confess, I love it all.

No excuse. I can't justify my affection with careful analysis of the sometimes subtle, more often not, religious metaphors of Terrence Fisher, or make much of a case for Ingrid Pitt as an actress. Honestly, none of that really much matters to me. McKay makes an interesting case for what was best, and worst, in Hammer. I agreed with most everything he wrote. But I just watched dear Peter Cushing's last turn as the Baron, in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, and I could not care less how shabby the thing was, how far by 1974 they'd fallen from their standards, I adored the last real Hammer movie.

I've railed here against nostalgia before, and I do think it a dangerous and unproductive emotion. I will have to admit, in this instance, that my pleasure in Hammer is far from untainted by anything so base as an urge to revisit the happy chills of childhood. I'm sure that that is a large part of why I can watch even the worst of these movies and just grin away all 84 minutes of each. But McKay gets it absolutely right when he defends all this bloody business as entertainment. Whatever these movies are as art, they are still vastly entertaining, just the way any great ghost story still is, even when one has long since come to disbelieve in disembodied spirits and the like. I don't much feel the need to defend Hammer Films any more than I do the stories of Oliver Onions. Those folks knew what they were about, that's all.

I could write a lot of nonsense tonight about how much I identified as a child with misunderstood monsters, how from my first encounter with the OZ books I came to empathize with and be fascinated by the grotesque, and on and on, and some of that might well be true. All I really want to do here tonight though is to suggest something of the fun that there is still to be had from discovering that that thing dropping "like a plump kitten" to the floor in a story by M. R. James might not be what it seems, and that watching Peter Cushing's mad scientist, on the run yet again, coldly kick a severed head, and the hat-box in which he'd just fetched it home, through an open trap-door might be every bit as satisfying at forty-seven as it was at seven.

It's nearly Halloween, people. Have a gorge.