Horror from United Kingdom

Why it matters

British horror has two strong strands: lavish gothic productions made in studios, and a quieter, stranger tradition rooted in the landscape, old customs and the idea that the past is never gone.

The second strand, now called folk horror, has had a major revival in recent years.

British horror has produced some of the genre's most recognizable images, from candlelit castles to windswept fields, and it did so under conditions that were often difficult: tight budgets, strict censors and an industry that came and went. Two strands run through its history. One is the lavish gothic picture, made in studios with elaborate sets and period costumes. The other is a quieter and stranger tradition drawn from landscape, folklore and the sense that old things persist underneath modern life. Both are worth knowing, and they sometimes overlap.

The best-known film from the early part of the story is Dead of Night, released in London on September 9, 1945, by Ealing Studios, a company better known for comedies. Four directors worked on it, Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer, and it is an anthology in which guests at a country house trade supernatural stories. Horror film production in Britain had effectively been halted during the war, which makes the film an unusual product of its moment. Its best-remembered segment involves a ventriloquist, played by Michael Redgrave, and a dummy. It is considered a classic and was influential on later anthology films.

The postwar boom came from Hammer Film Productions. The company, which was founded in 1934 and revived under that name in 1949, began its horror run with The Quatermass Xperiment in 1955, adapted from Nigel Kneale's BBC serial. In 1957 it filmed The Curse of Frankenstein in color with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and in 1958 it released Dracula, which broke box-office records. The Mummy followed in 1959. Hammer worked from Bray Studios from 1951 until 1966. Between 1958 and 1974 it made six Frankenstein sequels, eight Dracula sequels and three Mummy sequels. The studio's red-blooded, color gothic style defined British horror for a generation, and it carried an X certificate, the age restriction that made horror an adult category.

Not all British horror looked like Hammer's. Peeping Tom, directed by Michael Powell and premiered in London on April 7, 1960, was a thriller with horror elements about a killer who films his victims. British critics attacked it, with Caroline Lejeune of The Observer writing that she had not been so disgusted by a film in a long time, and the reaction is widely credited with ending Powell's directing career in Britain. It was reassessed from the 1970s on, partly thanks to the efforts of Martin Scorsese, and is now considered a masterpiece. It premiered about two months before Hitchcock's Psycho, and the two are often compared.

The decade after brought the strand now called folk horror. Witchfinder General, released on May 19, 1968, was directed by Michael Reeves and starred Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins, a witch hunter in 1645 East Anglia during the English Civil War. It was produced by Tigon with American International Pictures, who retitled it The Conqueror Worm in the US. The British censors required cuts. It is often grouped with The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man as the so-called unholy trinity of British folk horror, a label used by the writer Adam Scovell in a piece for the British Film Institute.

The Wicker Man is the centerpiece. Directed by Robin Hardy, it was written by Anthony Shaffer, loosely based on David Pinner's 1967 novel Ritual, and produced by British Lion, a studio in financial trouble that was later bought by EMI. Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee led the cast. The setting is the fictional Scottish island of Summerisle, but most of the filming took place in Galloway, with other scenes at Culzean Castle and Plockton and cave interiors at Wookey Hole in Somerset. It was released in early 1974 as the lower half of a double bill with Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), and it came in several versions of different lengths, from about 87 to 99 minutes. A 2013 Final Cut was assembled from a print found at the Harvard Film Archive. Over time it earned a reputation as one of the greatest British horror films.

The term itself has its own history. An early use of folk horror appears in John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus, though not as a genre label. The reviewer Rod Cooper applied it to a genre film in Kine Weekly in 1970, and Mark Gatiss helped popularize it in his 2010 BBC documentary A History of Horror. Scovell's 2017 book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange gave the idea a fuller treatment. In recent years the style has returned, in films such as Ben Wheatley's Kill List (2011) and later in The Witch (2015) and Midsommar (2019), which drew renewed attention to the tradition. See Folk Horror.

The 1970s were hard on the older studio model. Hammer tried to modernize with more sex and contemporary settings in films like Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, which did badly, and Lee left the role of Dracula after the latter. The cycle associated with Hammer, Amicus and Tigon wound down in that decade, and Hammer went into liquidation in 1979. British talent often moved elsewhere. Alien was a British-American production, directed by the Briton Ridley Scott, and it shows how British filmmakers continued to shape the genre from abroad.

The 1980s brought a moral panic. As home video spread, low-budget horror flooded the market and the press and campaigners took aim at it, coining the label video nasty. The Director of Public Prosecutions published a list of 72 films, of which 39 were successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. The Video Recordings Act 1984, which took effect on September 1, 1985, required the classification of videos by the British Board of Film Classification. The result was a long period during which some titles were unavailable. In the same decade, Clive Barker's Hellraiser, which premiered in London on September 10, 1987, showed that British horror could still produce a new mythology.

A revival followed in the 2000s. Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, written by Alex Garland, opened in the UK on November 1, 2002. It was shot largely on Canon XL1 digital video cameras, which were small and flexible, and it grossed more than $80 million worldwide. It is credited with reviving the zombie genre by presenting fast-moving infected, and it influenced many later films. Hammer returned too: the name was bought in 2007 by a group led by John de Mol, which acquired a library of 295 films, and the revived studio released The Woman in Black in 2012.

Taken together, these developments show a country that kept reinventing horror while working under pressure. The constraints of censors, small budgets and shifting studios produced both lavish pictures and spare, eerie ones. To explore further, use the Movie Explorer to filter by United Kingdom, or follow the links to Folk Horror, Supernatural Horror and the 1970s and 1960s guides.

Films from or co-produced in United Kingdom