What Jon Potts Owes to Hammer Horror

Head over to Senses of Cinema to read Australian horrorkid Jon Potts's What I Owe to Hammer Horror. It's not often you get to read a personal account of how cinematic horror has touched the soul, but Potts's essay (he's Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Media at Macquarie University in Sydney), describes how watching Christopher Lee as Dracula--when Potts was ten years old--clung to him like a leech to bare skin (sorry, I couldn't resist). In his words:

The world created in these films was so foreign to my experience in small-town Australia, so strange, so old, so … European, that it became imprinted on my mind as a vision of Europe. And when, many years later, I traveled to Europe and spent time living there, that imprint remained.

It's his small-town experience that Potts' intertwines with his cinematic small-town one; his experience growing up in a town founded on coal-mining contrasted against his "experience" with the typical small-town depicted in the Hammer canon. As Potts succinctly and accurately puts it: "Most probably for budgetary reasons, Hammer has subsumed both Transylvania and Victorian England into a Germanic milieu." Or, much like the typical village depicted in the Universal Horror canon, it is a place combining disparate elements, rendering it hard to classify as to time and locale. Aside from budgetary reasons, this also makes the location less susceptible to perceptions of ethnocentric bias by your all important ticket buying audiences.

While you're at Senses of Cinema, you wouldn't want to miss Catherine S. Cox's essay on Vampyr (1932), either.