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Bray Studios will be forever associated with Hammer. Not simply because of the iconic movies, such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), and The Mummy (1959) that were shot within its walls over half a century ago. It’s more than that. Bray has come to represent the eccentricity, Britishness and a kind of familial identity that helped make Hammer so special.
Tom Conway does almost nothing in Blood Orange (1953). He simply arrives in the third minute, asks ‘Are the police still here?’ and then quietly steals every scene he’s in. He gives this noirish crime thriller something that transforms it from a cynical story of greed and murder into a strangely moving fable about fakery, thwarted love and a fool’s ambition.
It’s been a heck of a half-year. Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974) led the charge in terms of Hammer’s Limited Collector’s Edition range: a series of 4K restorations presented with specially created programmes, expert commentaries, new artwork and exclusive archive material. The Captain was swiftly followed by Four Sided Triangle (1953), Shatter (1974) and, of course, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957). We recently confirmed that Blood Orange (1953) would join the range imminently, but what next?
The next film to be inducted into the hall of fame that is Hammer’s Limited Collector’s Edition range, will be Blood Orange (1953), a murder-mystery thriller directed by fan-favourite Terence Fisher and starring Tom Conway.
Camp classic? A trailblazer for queer horror? An exploitative money grab? Or, in the words of its star, Ingrid Pitt, just your everyday story ‘about a couple of nubile girls in a grand house in a hot Styrian summer with nothing to do but play with each other’? 55 years after it first played in ABC cinemas across the UK, we sink our teeth into The Vampire Lovers and examine how it beat the censors, wowed the critics and became… well, whatever it became.