Hammer Film Productions - Market Changes (early 1970s)

Market Changes (early 1970s)

As audiences became more sophisticated in the late 1960s, with the release of artfully directed, subtly horrific films like Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), the studio struggled to maintain its place in the market. It responded by bringing in new writers and directors, testing new characters, and attempting to rejuvenate their vampire and Frankenstein films with new approaches to familiar material.

While the studio remained true to previous period settings in their 1972 release Vampire Circus, their Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, for example, abandon period settings in pursuit of a modern-day setting and "swinging London" feel. These films were not successful, and drew fire not only from critics, but from Christopher Lee himself, who refused to appear in more Dracula films after these. Speaking at a press conference in 1973 to announce The Satanic Rites of Dracula, then called Dracula is Dead... and Well and Living in London, Lee said:

"I'm doing it under protest... I think it is fatuous. I can think of twenty adjectives - fatuous, pointless, absurd. It's not a comedy, but it's got a comic title. I don't see the point."

The film itself also indulges the turn toward self-parody suggested by the title, with more humour appearing in the script, undercutting any real sense of horror.

Hammer films had always sold themselves, in part, on their violent and sexual content. After the release of films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969), audiences were increasingly able to see more explicit gore, more expertly staged, in relatively mainstream films. Night of the Living Dead (1968) had also set a new standard for graphic violence in horror films. Hammer tried to compete as far as possible - Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), for example, features a scene where the Baron kicks a discarded human brain - but realised quickly that, if they couldn't be as gory as new American productions, they could follow a trend prevalent in European films of the time, and play up the sexual content of their films.

Hammer Films also had commercial success with some atypical output during this period: the film version of the ITV situation comedy series On the Buses (1971). This was popular enough to produce two sequels, Mutiny on the Buses (1972) and Holiday on the Buses (1973) where Hammer returned to making film spinoffs as they had with PC 49 and Dick Barton.