1950-1959

1951: A new cycle of horror movies begins. The Thing ‘from another world’ terrorises an arctic research base. The BBFC introduces it’s new ‘X’ certificate, now over eighteens only can watch films in this new category which replaces the old ‘H’. The dawning atomic age will now spawn a new type of horror preoccupied with space, aliens, atomic mutation and Cold War anti-communist paranoia.

1952: Amid fears that cinema is losing it’s audiences to television a new gimmick is born, it is the 3D movie. The first 3D film is a cheap spectacle which makes a fortune at the box office.

1953: The War of The Worlds is released as is Them a story set in the Arizona desert where nuclear weapons tests have resulted in giant mutated ants. This will be a recurring theme for many ‘B’ movies of the 1950’s. In one film The Beast from 20,000 fathoms stop motion animation effects genius Ray Harryhausen picks up where Willis O’Brien left off so many years before and a monster, woken by atomic explosions rises from the sea to destroy a city. The second 3D film is released and it is a horror movie House of Wax it is the first of many. Universal creates it’s newest Classic Monster and The Creature from the Black Lagoon is born complete with stunning underwater photography and again glorious 3D.

1955: Release of This Island Earth. Japanese studio Toho releases it’s response to the nuclear age, Gojira (released in the US with new scenes and american actors as Godzilla King of Monsters) is awakened by US testing of the H-Bomb on the Bikini Atoll and razes Tokyo in a manner that reflects the country’s experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ten years earlier. The studio will go on to release more and more Godzilla films following Universal’s successful model from the forties teaming the monster up with more and more fellow creatures in gradually more comedic and cataclysmic outings. British studio Hammer releases it’s first foray into sci-fi horror, a film version of Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment. Roger Corman makes The Day the World Ended for ARC later to change their name to American International Pictures. He devises a new formula that will yield a host of classic B movies: Sixty minutes running time, a ten day shoot, a minimal creww and cast and a rubber suited monster!

1956: Bela Lugosi whose career had tragically nose dived dies and is buried in his Dracula cape. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is reworked and set in space as The Forbidden Planet. Don Siegel directs The Invasion of the Body Snatchers a paranoid horror movie about aliens replacing humans with exact replicas. The film is a disturbing allegory about US fears of communist infiltatration.

1957: James Whale director of the great Universal horrors is found drowned in his own swimming pool. It is also in this year that Whale’s fellow countrymen at Hammer in the UK release their first out and out horror movie, it is a new version of Whale’s own earlier release, The Curse of Frankenstein. Universal threaten to sue Hammer if the film resembles their own, the critics call the film ’vulgar’ one even says that the film is ’…for sadists only’. Despite this the film grosses $8,000,000, almost thirty times what it cost to make and will mark the beginning of a cycle of films made by Hammer that will completely mirror Universal‘s cycle of twenty years earlier, the film also makes massive stars of it’s two main actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, they would become Hammer’s answer to Karloff and Lugosi. It is also directed By Terence Fisher who will go on to direct all of the studios classics. Hammer also releases Quatermass 2.

1958: Inspired by the success of it’s first Frankenstein movie, Hammer releases two more movies, both starring Cushing and Lee and both directed by Fisher . There is a sequel to Curse entitled The Revenge of Frankenstein, although having destroyed the monster in a acid bath at the end of the first film it is Baron Frankenstein himself that is brought back for the sequel rather than his monster. This becomes the staple formula for Hammer. The studio also releases Dracula (The Horror of Dracula in the US due to copyright reasons and disputes with Universal). Some critics suggest that the ‘X’ certificate was inadequate and that the film should be certified ‘S’ for sadistic or ‘D’ for disgusting! For Hammer the pattern is set and horror movies will never be the same again as gore and eroticism and full colour become horror movie staples.

1959: Open hostilities begin in Vietnam. Now well into it’s recycling of Universal’s Classic monsters, Hammer releases The Mummy once again teaming up Fisher with Lee and Cushing.