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Of course, Hammer wasn't always known for horror. The company began producing films in 1935 with a comedy called The Public Life of Henry the Ninth, and it wasn't until a full two decades later that the company would first dip its toe into horror. Hammer's first horror film, The Quatermass Xperiment, offered an impressive blend of solid acting, clever storytelling, and impressive monster makeup. But the real brilliance of the Quatermass Xperiment —a brilliance that would come to define Hammer Horror—was in its marketing campaign. The unusual spelling of "Xperiment" highlighted the film's real draw: it had been given an adults-only X-rating - a classification that had been established just a few years earlier. Hammer, unlike most studios, was clever enough to wear the new rating not as a burden, but as a badge of honor. And as curious moviegoers lined up to see just how grotesque a horror film could be, box-office success followed.

With the success of The Quatermass Xperiment, Hammer had found its niche—and at just the right time. Universal Studios, which had drawn impressive grosses for its monster movies for decades, had recently compromised the integrity of its key horror franchises with corny crossovers like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. Though Universal owned the rights to its versions of the classic horror characters, it didn't own the rights to the characters in general, and Hammer responded to the dearth of true horror movies by pumping out its own. In less than two decades, from 1955 to 1974, Hammer released seven Frankenstein movies, nine Dracula movies, and dozens more horror films to an eager public.

Hammer's earliest horror films succeeded almost entirely due to the brilliance of two British actors: Christopher Lee (seen most recently in the Best Picture-nominated Hugo) and Peter Cushing (perhaps most familiar in the United States as Star Wars villain Grand Moff Tarkin). Where Cushing brought intelligence and depth to both The Curse of Frankenstein's brilliant Dr. Frankenstein and Dracula's heroic vampire hunter Van Helsing, Lee used his astonishing range to convincingly play both the grotesque Frankenstein's creature and the malevolent, sexually threatening Dracula. Hammer's horror films depicted cutting-edge graphic violence and danced their way around censorship, offering the gut-level thrills of transgressive horror for an eager audience.

Like most cinematic golden gooses, Hammer's successful horror franchises were eventually killed by greed. The studio rushed out an ever-increasing slew of low-quality films, banking on more violence, more nudity, a series of exclamation-point-laden posters, and lurid titles like Lust for a Vampire and Vampire Circus to draw in an increasingly underwhelmed audience. Even by the lower standards of the era, Hammer was insanely prolific, saving money and shooting time by concurrently filming different movies using the same casts and sets. With the brand flagging, it wasn't long before a new wave of American horror films—which included both highbrow fare like 1968's Rosemary's Baby and still-controversial titles like 1972's The Last House on the Left and 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—made Hammer's monster movies look old-fashioned and corny. Though the 1980s saw two Twilight Zone-style attempts at a Hammer television series, both failed; for all intents and purposes, the brand was dead.