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Terence Fisher

Hammer Films’ gothic horror legacy — and its famed onscreen titans of terror that have portrayed the heroes and monsters of legend (most importantly, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee) — has overshadowed the faces behind the camera. One director from the British film studio, however, made an indelible mark on the company and the genre itself, setting the standard Hammer’s filmmakers would continue to emulate throughout the 1970s. Terence Fisher’s style became a Hammer trademark with the monumental feature, The Curse of Frankenstein — the studio’s first foray into horror and their first color picture. The same moral dilemma at the center of the 1957 film, in which Cushing’s doctor battles his own moral ambiguity and the forbidden science he conjures in his lab, appeared throughout Fisher’s filmography. Amongst Hammer’s lurid Technicolor vixens and creatures wrapping the righteous in their capes was Fisher’s thoughtful, emotional study of pity and terror — beings engaged in a mythic power struggle between the darkness and light. Fisher mastered his craft in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed — a sophisticated union of the filmmaker’s layered thematics and dynamic style.