Citation: Freeman, Sophie (2018) Adaptation to Survive: British Horror Cinema of the 1960S and 1970S
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Northumbria Research Link Citation: Freeman, Sophie (2018) Adaptation to Survive: British Horror Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University. This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/39778/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html ADAPTATION TO SURVIVE: BRITISH HORROR CINEMA OF THE 1960S AND 1970S SOPHIE FREEMAN PhD March 2018 ADAPTATION TO SURVIVE: BRITISH HORROR CINEMA OF THE 1960S AND 1970S SOPHIE FREEMAN A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Research undertaken in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Social Sciences March 2018 Abstract The thesis focuses on British horror cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. This was a lively period in British horror history which produced over two hundred films, but it has often been taken for granted in critical work on both British horror and British national cinema, with most of the films concerned left underexplored or ignored entirely. In part, this reflects a widespread critical belief that British horror was safer, less socially questioning and generally less interesting than American horror from the same period. The thesis addresses the question of how British horror developed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It identifies key cycles and clusters of production and significant innovations within British horror as the genre sought to engage with and remain relevant in relation to changing social attitudes. In particular, it focuses on representations of gender, the family and inter-generational conflict, as well as exploring the post-colonial context of British horror in this period. It also considers the relation between British horror’s development and broader changes in international, and especially American, horror history. British horror emerges as an area of culture that connects with, and in some cases anticipates, key developments in international horror. In this manner, the importance of British horror of the 1960s and 1970s is established. This is achieved through detailed analysis of a wide range of films, coupled with a contextualisation of those films in terms of the industrial, socio-historical and generic circumstances of their production. Contents Acknowledgements Declaration Introduction 1 Chapter 1 - Critical approaches to British Horror Cinema 21 Chapter 2 - The Paranoid and the Postmodern in British Horror Cinema of the 1960s and the 1970s 46 Chapter 3 - Women and femininity in British Horror Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s 80 Chapter 4 - The Broken Male: Representations of Masculinity 114 Chapter 5 - The family and generational conflict in the 1960s and 1970s British horror cinema 150 Chapter 6 - Post-colonialism and British Horror 184 Conclusion 226 Appendix – film groupings 233 Bibliography 259 Filmography 270 Acknowledgments From my first experience of these horror films, which engendered an exceptional fondness and desire to study and understand them, to the completion of this thesis has taken several years and the support which I have received has been highly appreciated. I would like to express my gratitude to my research supervisors Professor Peter Hutchings and Dr. Russ Hunter for their constructive suggestions, guidance, and advice during the writing of this thesis, as well as to Northumbria University for the partial funding I received. I would also like to thank my family, especially my partner John Jordan, for their support and encouragement. Declaration I declare that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for any other award and that it is all my own work. I also confirm that this work fully acknowledges opinions, ideas, and contributions from the work of others. All appropriate ethical clearance has been sought. I declare that the Word Count of this Thesis is 80,497 words. Name: Sophie Freeman Signature: Date: 22/03/2018 INTRODUCTION The national cinema of a country is often viewed as a window on the society which produced it.1 This extends to specific genres, including horror. For Britain, Hammer films are synonymous with British horror output, having been a dominant force in the industry since the 1950s until their demise in the mid 1970s. The British horror cinema of the 1960s and 1970s was an active and lively area of production in the history of the genre, however it is overshadowed by the much-vaunted 1950s period of production. This thesis intends to change the perceptions of British horror cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and establish it as a period of dynamic film production in its own right, with its own traits and shifting preoccupations, and to disentangle the history of British horror from the perceived dominance of Hammer. By using an inclusive approach to the films, it will be possible to generate a new history of the British horror genre, rather than a narrow definition based on one production company. Hammer will still be included in this study, as to remove it from this thesis would add to the existing issue of there being a false sense of the period. Currently Hammer is examined by the majority of existing studies,2 but there is so much more to the production company which can be uncovered by exploring the films in tandem with non-Hammer product. British horror cinema is commonly seen as truly beginning in the 1950s3 with the emergence of Hammer and its gothic horrors as a force to be reckoned with, including The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957), Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (Terence Fisher, 1959), and The Mummy (Terence Fisher, 1959). This is noted by Peter Hutchings,4 Gary A. Smith,5 and David Pirie6 in relation to this flurry of activity from Hammer when the horror genre had been relatively inactive through the earlier part of the 1950s. Hutchings asserts that the output of Hammer was most cohesive in “the years of Hammer’s unquestioned dominance of British horror between 1956 and 1964,”7 1 furthering the perception that British horror and Hammer have become inextricably connected within academia from the 1950s onwards. These horror films of the late 1950s present active professional male authority figures who confront the threat with what Peter Hutchings calls “a robust physicality, an insistence on the solid and corporeal nature of the conflict between the forces of good and evil.”8 The authority of the male is emphasised by his dominance of the environment, the threat is destroyed, and order is restored. Hammer not only made use of similar themes and figures, but also staff and filming locations. This resulted in films which were visually connected in terms of actors, directors, camera styles, mise-en-scène, and editing. The most common combinations of personnel were the actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing with director Terence Fisher, which visually reinforced the sense of Hammer’s dominance. However, British horror of the 1960s and 1970s produced over 200 films from multiple companies. These films included a wide range of style, narrative, production company, and personnel, and included such key texts as Independent Artists’ Night of the Eagle (Sidney Hayers, 1962), Glendale’s The Asphyx (Peter Newbrook, 1972), Tigon’s The Blood Beast Terror (Vernon Sewell, 1968), and Terror (Norman J. Warren, 1978). British horror cinema did not stick to the Hammer ‘formula,’ nor did it end with Hammer’s last horror film To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes) in 1976. Problematically there remains an issue with the manner in which the British horror cinema of the 1960s and 1970s has been addressed. It is still excluded from being examined as significant within texts on British national cinema and is misunderstood due to the dominance of Hammer and its presence in the 1950s. The source of this master narrative is David Pirie, who in 1973 started the discussion of British horror cinema with A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema,9 but with a focus on 2 the gothic for which Hammer’s film productions were known, which set the trend for academic writing on British horror of the period for years to come. There is extensive existing work on the timeframe in question, but no in-depth piece which examines the horror output in the 1960s and 1970s as a period in its own right. Works on the history of British national cinema frequently address Hammer but little else,10 and works on horror cinema as a genre present the same issue.11 The majority of academic focus on the British films produced in the 1960s and 1970s focuses on specific films within articles which do not have the space to be able to perform an in-depth study.12 This has resulted in a restricted number of films being studied and a narrowing of the field. With a lack of thorough attention paid to the British horror produced in the 1960s and 1970s, there is a loss of understanding of the genre and therefore a part of British cultural history is misunderstood.