From the opening credits, an indecipherable mass of occult symbols appearing out of a red mist punctuated with James Bernard’s ominous orchestral score, screenwriter Richard Matheson ( I Am Legend author and scriptwriter of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe series) sharpens Wheatley’s prose to create a frighteningly real world of dark forces at work beneath the genteel surface of the English aristocracy.

Over 20 years after his death, Fisher is still regarded as Britain’s greatest ever horror director.įisher began work on The Devil Rides Out, the first of three Dennis Wheatley adaptations, in the summer of 1967. Fisher’s final film, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973) is British horror at its bleakest – a deeply disturbing and amoral portrait of Fisher’s greatest creation, Baron Frankenstein, as essayed by Hammer icon Peter Cushing. While half of Hammer’s output was dedicated to rather silly adventure yarns ( The Viking Queen, The Vengeance of She) and lazy exercises in generic conventions ( Curse of The Mummy’s Tomb, The Old Dark House) throughout the ’60s, Fisher created more adult-oriented horror – psychological, almost Freudian ( The Gorgon, Frankenstein Created Woman), drawing on the sexual conflicts of the repressive English social climate then starting to fray at the seams. Heading the great Hammer Horror Revival was Terence Fisher, the director whose adaptations of the Universal horror classics, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959), sealed the studio’s fate as the leading producer of British gothic horror for almost 20 years. I tend to side with the Hammer purists when the name of a British production company becomes synonymous with a whole generation of horror films from the late ’50s to the early ’70s, you know there’s a defining ‘something’ about its work.

Horror aficionados regard the term ‘Hammer’ with a warm fuzzy feeling of generic familiarity or dismiss it as being ‘too British’ (by which I can only imagine they mean ‘not American enough’).

Source: ACMI/NLA Prod Co: Hammer Prod: Anthony Nelson-Keys Dir: Terence Fisher Scr: Richard Matheson, based on the novel by Dennis Wheatley Phot: Arthur Grant Ed: James Needs Art Dir: Bernard Robinson Mus: James BernardĬast: Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Nike Arrighi, Leon Greene, Patrick Mower, Paul Eddington, Sarah Lawson The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968 UK)

Book the devil rides out