Background
Terence Fisher was born on 23 February 1904 in London, City of London, United Kingdom.
Terence Fisher was born on 23 February 1904 in London, City of London, United Kingdom.
Fisher worked for Hammer as early as 1953 on its two modest science fiction ventures, Four-Sided Triangle and Spaceways. From 1957 onward, he was effectively incarcerated in the neo-Gothie product. There are some who rate his achievement there very highly. Paul Willemen has referred to Fisher’s films as “a major example of what a truly creative artist can achieve within the limits of an ostensibly sensational and popular genre.
Enyone with a studio’s resources and some twenty films ought to have established his talent more clearly. We celebrate Val Lewton for less. Tod Browning on much less evidence. Fisher’s films are rich in color and setting, but not as vividly imaginative as Roger Corman’s pictures. Too often one has to wait for odd, piercing moments, like the ending of Brides of Dracula, a dull film suddenly brilliant as Dracula dies in the cruciform shadow of a windmill’s sails.
Again, the conception of Two Faces of Dr. Jckijll—that Hyde is a sexual charmer—is bereft of any proper development. Overall, the invention in the films seems fitful, desperate, and cynically detached from the genre. Revealingly, Hammer tamely remade earlier films and resurrected hardly any ol the worthwhile subjects in English Gothic literature. The studio’s originality mav rest more on the English aristocracy of Christopher Lee’s Dracula than on Fisher’s invention.
The English are proud of Hammer Films: it appeals to their need for the ridiculous made respectable that the company devoted to horror films should have won a Queen's Award lor Industry and commendations for their export record.
But Hammer’s prosperity only supports the theory that, artistically, horror requires conviction. No matter how assiduously a company concocts Gothic atmosphere, still commercial bias withers the proper sense of awe. Hammer horrors have always seemed the work of decent men who tended the garden on weekends. This is sadly true of Terence Fisher, the man responsible for most of them. Middle-aged before he began to direct, he was in his fifties when Hammer committed itself to Dracula and Frankenstein. A merchant seaman first, he worked as an editor before and after the war: Tudor Rose (36, Robert Stevenson); On the Night of the Fire (39, Brian Desmond Hurst); The Wicked Lady (45, Leslie Arliss); and Master of Bankdam (47, Walter Forde). His first features were light and romantic, including Noel Coward in The Astonished Heart. But in So Long at the Fair he made no mistake over the first frisson that greets the discovery that the hotel has disclaimed one of its guests and lost a room.