Many of these involve classic horror characters such as Baron Victor Frankenstein, Count Dracula, and the Mummy, which Hammer reintroduced to audiences by filming them in vivid colour for the first time.

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.

In 2000, the studio was bought by a consortium including advertising executive and art collector Charles Saatchi and publishing millionaires Neil Mendoza and William Sieghart.

In May 2007, the company name was sold to a consortium headed by Dutch media tycoon John de Mol, who announced plans to spend some $50 million (£25m) on new horror films.

At the outbreak of World War II, James Carreras and Anthony Hinds left to join the armed forces and Exclusive continued to operate in a limited capacity.

[10] He convinced Anthony Hinds to rejoin the company, and a revived Hammer Film Productions set to work on Death in High Heels, The Dark Road, and Crime Reporter.

For the next production, Dr Morelle – The Case of the Missing Heiress (another radio adaptation), Hammer rented Dial Close,[12][13] a 23 bedroom mansion on Winter Hill,[14] beside the River Thames, at Cookham Dean, Maidenhead.

[16] In August 1949, complaints from locals about noise during night filming forced Hammer to leave Dial Close and move into another mansion, Oakley Court, also on the banks of the Thames between Windsor and Maidenhead.

In 1950, Hammer moved again to Gilston Park, a country club in Harlow, Essex, which hosted The Black Widow, The Rossiter Case, To Have and to Hold and The Dark Light (all 1950).

The contract meant that Lippert Pictures and Exclusive effectively exchanged products for distribution on their respective sides of the Atlantic – beginning in 1951 with The Last Page and ending with 1955's Women Without Men (a.k.a.

It was for The Last Page that Hammer made a significant appointment when they hired film director Terence Fisher, who played a critical role in the forthcoming horror cycle.

As a consequence of the contract with Robert Lippert, American actor Brian Donlevy was imported for the lead role and the title was changed to The Quatermass Xperiment to cash in on the new X certificate for horror films.

Production designer Bernard Robinson and cinematographer Jack Asher were instrumental in creating the lavish look of the early Hammer films, usually on a very restricted budget.

British TV star Peter Cushing portrayed Baron Victor Frankenstein, and supporting actor Christopher Lee was cast as the imposingly tall, brutish Creature.

Audrey Field commented on 8 October 1957: "The uncouth, uneducated, disgusting and vulgar style of Mr Jimmy Sangster cannot quite obscure the remnants of a good horror story, though they do give one the gravest misgivings about treatment.

Although an agreement was drawn up, it is alleged that the deal was never realised and funding for Dracula eventually came from the National Film Finance Council (£33,000) and the rest from Universal in return for worldwide distribution rights.

On 20 August 1958, the Daily Cinema reported: "Because of the fantastic business done world-wide by Hammer's Technicolor version of Dracula, Universal-International, its distributors, have made over to Jimmy Carreras' organisation, the remake rights to their entire library of classic films.

[34] The academic Christopher Frayling writes, “Dracula introduced fangs, red contact lenses, décolletage, ready-prepared wooden stakes and – in the celebrated credits sequence – blood being spattered from off-screen over the Count's coffin".

With the agreement in place, Hammer's executives had their pick of Universal International's horror icons and chose to remake The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Mummy's Hand.

Once again it starred both Peter Cushing (as John Banning) and Christopher Lee (as Kharis the Mummy), and was directed by Terence Fisher from a screenplay from Jimmy Sangster.

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, but the movie performed poorly at the box-office which led to a further change of style with the remaining three films.

Christopher Lee grew increasingly disillusioned with the direction the character was being taken and with the poor quality of later scripts, although he did improve these slightly himself by adding lines of dialogue from the original novel.

Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby was a successful example of psychological horror, while Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch exposed mainstream audiences to more explicit gore, and were more expertly staged than Hammer films.

[42] Hammer was not the same without him; it responded to the new reality 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.

The Resident, a thriller directed and co-written by Finnish filmmaker Antti Jokinen and starring Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Christopher Lee.

[50] The Quiet Ones tells the story of an unorthodox professor (Jared Harris) who uses controversial methods and leads his best students off the grid to take part in a dangerous experiment: to create a poltergeist.

[57] Critics who specialise in cult films, like Kim Newman, have praised Hammer Horror more fully, enjoying their atmosphere, craftsmanship and occasional camp appeal.

In a 2013 retrospective for The Guardian, Michael Newton wrote:Shot in Eastmancolor, the first batch of Hammer Horror movies – Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959) – are among the loveliest-looking British films of the decade...

The leaves fall, and the light shines golden and clear; compared with the well-lit contemporary look of the "angry young men" films, Hammer's mournful sumptuousness must have been even more striking.

Questions of guilt circulate in these films, where the virtuous can be transformed into vampires through one moment of sexual weakness...[58]This was a fantasy, science fiction and supernatural anthology series which dealt with normal people in everyday situations that found themselves having to experience something out of the ordinary.