The company that we have chosen to both produce and distribute our film is a production company called ‘Hammer Film Productions’.
Hammer Film Productions is a film production company based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1934, the company is best known for a series of Gothic "Hammer Horror" films made from the mid-1950s until the 1970s. Hammer also produced science fiction, thrillers, film noir and comedies – and in later years, television series. During its most successful years, Hammer dominated the horror film market, enjoying worldwide distribution and considerable financial success. This success was due, in part, to distribution partnerships with major United States studios, such as Warner Bros.
During the late 1960s and 1970s the saturation of the horror film market by competitors and the loss of American funding forced changes to the previously lucrative Hammer-formula, with varying degrees of success. The company eventually ceased production in the mid-1980s and has since then been, in effect, in hibernation. In 2000, the studio was bought by a consortium including advertising executive and art collector Charles Saatchi The company announced plans to begin making films again after this, but none were produced. In May 2007, the company behind the movies was sold again, this time to a group headed by Big Brother backers, the Dutch consortium Cyrte Investments, who have announced plans to spend some $50m (£25m) on new horror films. The new owners have also acquired the Hammer group's film library.
The reason why we have chosen to use Hammer film as our production and distributing company is because we feel that as they are specializing in horror films in particular, it enable us to get the best outcome from our film as they would know how to produce and distribute our film to its full advantage to make it as successful as we hope it can be. Also, they have produced extremely popular horror films and have gone on to extend these film and make many sequels from them.
For example, the ever so popular film ‘Frankenstein’ was created, and Hammer film productions went on to produce a further six sequels in which were all fairly successful and after each one, left the audience wanting more. Six sequels to The Curse of Frankenstein were produced between 1959 and 1974. These sequels included:
· The Revenge of Frankenstein (1959)
- The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
- Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
- Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)
- The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)
- Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)
Hammer also produced a half-hour pilot titled Tales of Frankenstein (1958) that was intended to premiere on American television; it was never picked up but is now available on DVD. Anton Diffring played Baron Frankenstein. Hammer also produced eight other Dracula films between 1960 and 1974:
· The Brides of Dracula (1960)
· Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
· Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
· Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969)
· Scars of Dracula (1970)
· Dracula AD 1972 (1972)
· The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
· The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
The first five were direct sequels to the original film. Brides of Dracula did not include Dracula himself, but Peter Cushing repeated his role as Van Helsing to battle vampire Baron Meinster (David Peel). The Kiss of the Vampire did not include Van Helsing or Dracula, but continued the theme of Brides of Dracula, showing vampirism as a plague infecting other pockets of unfortunates. Christopher Lee as Dracula returned in the following six films, which employed much ingenuity in finding ways to resurrect the Count. Hammer upped the graphic violence and gore with Scars of Dracula in an attempt to re-imagine the character to appeal to a younger audience. The commercial failure of this film led to another change of style with the following films, which were not period pieces like their predecessors, but had a then-contemporary 1970s London setting. Peter Cushing appeared in both films playing a descendant of Van Helsing.It is worth noting that while the contemporary films featuring Dracula star both Lee and Cushing, they are not the same series due to the lack of correspondence to the Victorian-Edwardian era films. The first film is set in 1885, whereas the flashback sequence in Dracula AD 1972 is set in 1872 – long before the first meeting of Van Helsing and Dracula in the original film.
Christopher Lee grew increasingly disillusioned with the way the character was being taken, and with the poor quality of the later scripts – although he did improve these slightly himself by adding lines of dialogue from the original novel. (Lee speaks at least one line taken from Bram Stoker in every Dracula film he has appeared in, except for Prince of Darkness – in which the Count does not speak at all (Lee had been appalled by his dialogue in that film). He was also concerned about typecasting. After Satanic Rites, he quit the series.
As well as horror films, Hammer film productions also produced psychological thrillers. Hammer also made a series of what were known as "mini-Hitchcocks" mostly scripted by Jimmy Sangster, and directed by Freddie Francis and Seth Holt. These very low-budget suspense thrillers, often in black-and-white, were made in the mould of Les Diaboliques, although more often compared to the later Psycho. This series of mystery thrillers, which all had twist endings, started with Taste of Fear (1961) and continued with Maniac (1963), Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964), Hysteria (1965), Fanatic (1965), The Nanny (1965), Crescendo (1970), Straight on Till Morning (1972) and Fear in the Night (1972).
Therefore, after a lot of research into white prodcuction company would be best to produce and distribute our film, we came to the conclusion that Hammer Film Productions would be our best option as it had a lot of success behind it and we felt that this was exactly what our film needed to be able to move on and do as well as we feel it should.
No comments:
Post a Comment