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 I have
been reading a lot of Hammer books lately, and 2007
looks set to have a bumper crop for the lowly
aficionado. With the second volume of Wayne Kinsey’s
book in January, and the new edition of in October, and at least one other in
development, the arrival of Sinclair McKay’s
Thing of
Unspeakable Horror is both a blessing and a curse.
With this
year being touted as the 50th anniversary of
Hammer horror, there is already more than enough
merchandising on the market and planned for this year to
make the average punter balk. But Thing is a book
which is not being aimed just at the fan; published by
Arum (who produced those lovely books on Ray Harryhausen
not so long ago), it should see its way into many
bookshops up and down the country. Around the time of
publication in May 2007, several articles in national
broadsheet newspapers by McKay about Hammer turned up,
which no doubt helped to bolster its chances.
McKay is not known to the wider Hammer
community, which is not to say that we should not trust
him to write about the beloved institution. A fresh
voice and some new opinions would be more than welcome,
and for the most McKay’s frank and often irreverent tone
is a delight. His writing has an infectious quality and
his obvious enthusiasm would warm even the coldest of
hearts. hearts. hearts.
It is unfortunate then that despite this
initial promise, the book itself fails to deliver on
many points, and the hardened Hammer fan would be well
advised to stay clear. As this is a site for the Hammer
community I feel it would be remiss of me not to advise
my readers accordingly.
For many
months Aurum’s website and advance publicity for the
book (including the listing on amazon.co.uk) suggested
that the book itself was in some way an authorised text.
It was written with the “full co-operation of Hammer’s
current owners” (the press release that came with the
book states "written with the full encouragement of
Hammer's current owners"). However, sources revealed that beyond
some brief meetings with one member of the (then)
executive team, the book had not received any sort of
endorsement and was in every way an unauthorised text.
This was not remedied until the actual publication,
leading I would think, many pre-orders to suppose this
was in the same bracket as The Hammer Story. [In
fact as of 17 October 2007 the Aurum catalogue on their
website still contains this spurious lie
http://www.aurumpress.co.uk/catalogue.pdf].
Whilst Dennis Meikle’s
A History of Horrors
focuses largely on the canon of Hammer horror pictures,
he does at least give a thorough overview of the entire
company’s history and development. He adeptly combines
historical overview with critical analysis, something
which this new book also seems to be aiming at. However
this is not a complete history of the company at all.
McKay skims over everything before The Quatermass
Xperiment, (over 20 years of Hammer history written
off) and is selective in the narrative from there on.
Attention is focussed on the horror films, which is
something that can be just about forgiven bearing in
mind the target audience of most books on Hammer. The
storyline itself darts back and forwards in the
chronology making any straight comprehension difficult
at times. By shifting and juxtaposing events from years
apart to serve the author’s viewpoint, the true account
and any valid criticism is washed away. In support of
McKay there are a couple of interesting chapters
expressing the author’s own theories on the films, but
they are marred by the general poor quality of the
research. In fact, McKay seems largely to have seen only
a few films on dvd at all.
The text
itself is sloppy and lazy for the most, and is littered
with dozens of errors which betray McKay's laid-back
attitude to research. He kills off Tony Hinds (who as of
time of publishing in late May 2007 was still very much
alive, albeit living in privacy); he suggests that we
all remember Ingrid Pitt in Hammer House of Horror
(she wasn't in it), and Dean Stockwell was the star of X
The Unknown (Dean Jagger was the star of that picture in
1957). And that's just for starters. I have dozens of
notes on the errors that I spotted on a first read, and
after a while I gave up jotting them down.
In fact
part of the opening chapter I suspect was written whilst
viewing a story published on this very website on 19th
October 2006. McKay suggests
that Hammer is currently back in vogue with Dracula
available on dvd from the BFI ("Why has the normall
snooty British Film Institute painstakingly restored and
reissued the first three Hammer Horrors for the
art-house DVD market?" p5). It was only after the
book went to press that the new BFI restoration of
Dracula even premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in
2007. The nationwide release didn’t come until October
2007, and whilst a special edition dvd is rumoured to be
in the pipeline (something I reported after the Cornwall
Film Festival screening of Plague of the Zombies in
October last year), nothing has yet been confirmed, and
the film has been unavailable for several years.
In fact it
doesn’t help that within two weeks of my review copy
arriving, the announcement that Hammer had been sold to
a new consortium headed by John De Mol hit the press.
The brag about the co-operation of the current Hammer
was instantly invalid as the new management had
absolutely no connection with the book.
The book jacket and publicity states McKay “has
interviewed many of the surviving actors and employees”
of Hammer, but the acknowledgments reveal this to be a
rather exaggerated claim, crediting a mere handful
(Bryan Forbes, Martin Jarvis, Francis Matthews, Kate
O'Mara), and much of the remaining material is culled
from other sources. With no disrespect meant to those
acknowledged, with the exception perhaps of Bryan
Forbes, these are not big names. Based on the attendance
at the launch of Wayne Kinsey’s book in January of at
least two dozen Hammer employees we can see that McKay
hardly pushed himself. This interview material is
scarcely new material, or even exhaustive.
I don’t want readers to think I am bitter or spiteful
simply for the sake of it. I really wanted to like
McKay’s book, but it is so littered with errors and
inaccuracies that to endorse it would be doing a
discourtesy to other writers who have done the same
thing better. McKay may well have been a Hammer fan
since watching a BBC2 double bill in the 1970s, but
being a fan and writing a book which makes spurious
unsupported claims are two different things entirely.
Employing a proof-reader or editor who knew the subject
to clean up the mistakes would have gone a long way to
disguising the failings of this evidently
speedily-written, casually researched and crucially
flawed text.
Almost any
other Hammer text would be better investing in than this
one. So don’t waste your money, and if you must – get it
cheap!
© RJE Simpson 2007
review posted 19.10.2007 |
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