Many of the horror films made in the 1950s had their roots in British gothic literature, such as the Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, which was based on the novel, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Some can be traced back to earlier period films such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1913, inspired by the book, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Even many of the Hollywood horror films had their source in British literature.
Hammer House of Horror
From the 1950s, horror films were largely associated with Hammer Films. Although they began as a small production company in the 1930s, they broke new ground when they made a series of science fiction films in the ‘50s, based on the BBC TV character, Professor Bernard Quatermass. The Quatermass Experiment, in 1955, led Hammer to produce the first of their horror films. According to David Pirie in Hammer: A Cinema Case Study, these films were now “more explicitly violent, horrifying and more fantastic than any in Britain or America.”
Hammer eventually acquired the rights to gothic horror films from Universal, and Dracula was their second horror film in 1958, although several more would follow. One important reason for the success of horror films was the changing face of the film-going audience. By the 1950s, television was beginning to take over for some previous cinema goers, and a younger age group was now visiting the cinema looking for a different type of film.
1950s Crime Films
Just as horror films had their roots in gothic literature, the crime genre of films can be traced back to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and the detective novels of Agatha Christie. There were also early Hitchcock films such as Murder, in 1930, with its gentleman sleuth. Crime films and thrillers were popular in the years before and after the war, but they were soon to undergo a radical change in direction.
By 1950, a new type of policeman was created in the top box-office film of that year, The Blue Lamp. This film was revolutionary in depicting the life and work of an average policeman, using actual British locations. It introduced the character of George Dixon as the kindly policeman, who went on to be depicted in the long-running Dixon of Dock Green on British television.
In Best of British, Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards suggest this now “presented the working-class copper as hero.” Until that time, British policemen were usually portrayed as bumbling simpletons, and the solution to the crime was normally left to the brilliant amateur like Holmes, or Lord Peter Wimsey from Dorothy L Sayers’ novels.
Other genres of film began appearing in British Cinema throughout the 1950s, although it was sometimes referred to as the ‘doldrums era’. This was largely because of a tendency to look backwards to the 1940s with new war films, such as The Dam Busters, in 1955, and The Bridge on the River Kwai, in 1957. That was soon to change, however, with the rise of a new type of British comedy film.
References:
Aldgate, Anthony and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (London: IB Taurus, 1999)
Barr, Charles, ed., All Our Yesterdays (London: British Film Institute, 1986)
Pirie, David, Hammer: A Cinema Case Study (London: British Film Institute, 1980)
Rosemary Gemmell - Professional freelance writer of published short stories and articles in the UK, US and online. Author of historical romance and ...
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