The Dracula image hardwired into your brain, with pronounced fangs, bloodshot eyes, and bright red blood dripping from the chin, did not come from Bram Stoker or Hollywood. It was born in a nearly derelict English country house by a scrappy studio that started out making cheap comedies. This episode traces Hammer Film Productions from its 1934 founding by Will Hammer and Enrique Carreras, through bankruptcy in 1937, to its postwar revival churning out quota quickies from rented mansions along the Thames that became Bray Studios.

The conversation explains how an American distribution deal, director Terence Fisher, and the X-certificate marketing of The Quatermass Xperiment set up the 1957 breakthrough of The Curse of Frankenstein. It covers Jimmy Sangster's script that dodged Universal's copyright by making the Baron the monster, the shock o ...