Terence Fisher: Hammer’s Master Smith

Founded in 1934, from the 1950s through the ’70s England’s Hammer Films was the dominant worldwide force in the horror genre, and in this stretch no Hammer director had a more proven track record than London native Terence Fisher. A filmmaker without peer when it came to building and sustaining malevolent atmosphere and drawing the very best out of stars like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, his 1957 The Curse of Frankenstein—newly restored and playing in this series—was instrumental in the studio’s pivot to gothic horror. Just in time for Halloween, a sinister selection of Fisher’s most frightening outings at Hammer, heavy on the “Kensington Gore” (the studio’s name for their in-house stage blood) and impossible to look away from.