Hammer, house of a thousand films with Michael Ripper in them, was resurrected Ealing-like in 2007. The studio’s rebirth has been relatively low-key: Wake Wood and psycho-thriller The Resident have caused few ripples (although the latter features Hammer icon Christoper Lee) and the highest profile project on the slate is Matt Reeves’ Let Me In, the English-language remake of Let the Right One In.
Earlier this week though, current Hammer honcho Simon Oakes talked to Collider about the company’s plans for the future. More Resident-style “mini Hitchcocks” are planned, but while horror is still very much the order of the day, as you’d expect, Oakes is insistent that Hammer won’t be going down the slasher or Saw routes: "I just don’t think it’s what Hammer does. I don’t think it’s what Hammer ever did. I don’t think it’s within the genres that Hammer created, or was part of."
Neither does he think there’s much potential for reviving old franchises (no Dracula or Frankenstein or On the Buses then). But two names from Hammer’s history do crop up.
First is Professor Quatermass, the rocket-scientist star of the sci-fi scarefests that gave Hammer their first runaway success. And the other, from the opposite end of Hammer’s heyday, is Captain Kronos, the vampire hunter that Hammer hoped would provide a new franchise in 1974. By that point however, after twenty years of not going up to the castle, audiences had had enough. Which was a shame, because Captain Kronos is ace.
"We would never remake," says Oakes, "but there were some amazing characters that we want to reimagine, like Quatermass and Kronos. We’re going to do Kronos, as a sort of 'what would he be like today?' What would the Kronos movie of 2011 look like? Or Quatermass of 2012? What I love about Quatermass is that he was a government scientist and, science is cool! He was a classic character... always ahead of his time, and there’s a lot of rich material in there that we can rethink. But the issues that he would be dealing with in 1957 compared to what they would be today, that’s the thing. That’s where we have to use our imagination."
Oakes also gives a brief update on the new version of Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires; to whit, it’s still happening. We’d also like, in the best possible taste, to suggest that Hammer could teach James Corden and Matthew Horne a thing or two about undead lesbians.