With its mediocre acting, clich�d scripts and clumsy sets, it is hard to believe that the mere sight of the phrase �this is a Hammer film� could chill an audience. The brand, now relegated to cult status, was at one time the doyen of devil drama, constructing a particular type of British horror it held sway over for more than a decade. Hammer�s first Dracula and Frankenstein films grossed some �4m, and in 1968 it received the Queen�s Award to Industry for three years of film production when it bought �1.5m a year into the UK. It also forayed into comedy and romance, making it one of the most prolific film companies in the world.

Hammer�s history dates back to the 1930s. Will Hinds, a jeweller and amateur variety performer under the name of Will Hammer, owned film production company called Hammer Productions Ltd. He formed a film distribution company called Exclusive with cinema owner Enriqu� Carreras. The two men�s sons joined the company and it grew as a family business, with the sons doing a bit of everything - directing, editing, scripting, eventually producing about eight films a year.

The first Hammer picture was The Public Life of Henry the Ninth (1935), a 60 minute comedy distributed by MGM as a supporting feature, followed by The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1936) starring horror legend Bela Lugosi - a portent of things to come, and The Song of Freedom (1936) with the mighty Paul Robeson. After the Second World War they made Dick Barton, Special Agent (1948) which spawned a successful series of Dick Barton films, as well as many more moderate hits from other radio spin-offs.

Productions with conventional comedy, crime and romantic elements followed, and were used as supporting features on American television. A collaboration with an American producer-distributor, Robert L Lippert (the first of its kind for a British film company), allowed Exclusive to distribute Lippert�s American productions and increase its output. The first co-production was The Last Page (1952) starring Diana Dors as a busty blackmailer with screenplay by Dial M For Murder writer Frederick Knott. The deal with Lippert also allowed Hammer to feature many Hollywood stars in their productions such as Cesar Romero and Paulette Goddard.

Socially and economically the 1950s were a changing time in Britain. Censors were allowing more to be revealed on screen, audiences were getting younger, and British notions of national identity and gender were shifting. Hammer jumped into this space, bursting with their particular brand of horror steeped in the gothic past but full of contemporary symbolism (rampant and repressed sexual desires, and desexualised male vampire hunter Van Helsing to name but a few). Another important factor was Hammer�s move to Bray studios which provided them with an almost repertory-style permanent studio, crew and cast, enabling them to production line signature films on a modest budget.

One of the first productions at Bray, Stolen Face (1952), was an embryonic Hammer horror, the story of a mad surgeon who is so upset about losing his girlfriend he remodels a replica of her face onto that of a patient who is a criminal psychopath. Similarly, their first venture into science fiction-fantasy was Four-Sided Triangle (1953) about two scientists in love with the same woman who agrees to marry one so the other makes a clone of her for himself.

The early fifties also saw a trip into space with Spaceways (1953) and a series of thrillers about blackmail and murder, including Mask of Dust (1954) guest starring Stirling Moss and The Glass Cage (1955) with a young Honor Blackman.

By the mid-fifties cinema audiences had become more interested in television and filmmakers were having to work harder for their money. Movies were getting longer so support features weren�t needed, and an international success required big-name stars which was beyond Hammer�s budget. So it came up with The Quatermass Xperiment in 1955 (the X in acknowledgement of its expected certification, which had been introduced into Britain just a few years earlier) and with it found a winning horror-fantasy formula. They also continued with their usual staple of Second World War support features, Frankie Howerd comedies and Captain Clegg (1963) an inventive ghost story set on Romney Marshes with horsebacked smugglers dressed as hooded skeletons that frightened people to death.

The Quatermass Xperiment was followed by a series of films about space creature invasions and radiation poisoning, including Quatermass sequels as well as the socially relevant The Damned (1961), starring a young Oliver Reed, about a group of children reared in an artificially radioactive environment so they can survive a nuclear war.

In 1965 She was released as the first of Hammer�s exotic/lost world films featuring one-off directors. It was a huge success with Ursula Andress starring alongside by then Hammer stalwarts Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. This was followed by the prehistoric films of Slave Girls (1966), One Million Years BC (1965), Viking Queen (1967) and a few other sword, skin and breast films verging on the sensationalist and exploitative.

But Hammer is most well known for its scares and this is where its legacy should really be consigned. The Curse of Frankenstein was Hammer�s horror ground-breaker in 1957. The film is perhaps most noteworthy for bringing together two actors who became synonymous with Hammer: Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, as well as cementing the reputation of principal Hammer director Terence Fisher. It was made more effective by being filmed in colour, which heightened the impact of bloodletting. The film exceeded all expectations and was played 24 hours a day across America. It was followed by a whole series of sequels spanning three decades, from Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) to Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1973), all but one starring Peter Cushing.

After the success of The Curse of Frankenstein Hammer gave similar treatment to the Dracula myth, and virtually the same leading players and production crew worked on Dracula (1958), with equally good results at the box office. Christopher Lee�s interpretation of the Count made him world renowned, and to this day he remains synonymous with the role. It was the start of a 15 year career for the company�s vampire films whose allure became more sexual and bloodthirsty as time went on. Locations and plot lines grew ever more ridiculous and the theme was eventually exhausted in 1974 by The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, a martial arts extravaganza.

After the success of the Frankenstein and Dracula films, Hollywood studios gave property rights for horror remakes to Hammer, such as The Mummy (1959) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). Hammer covered pretty much every classic monster angle from werewolves, to gorgons to zombies including Plague of the Zombies in 1966 which paved the way for George Romero�s Night of the Living Dead two years later.

Part of the studio�s unprecedented success was also its great skill at marketing. It was one of the first companies to make different cuts of its films for different markets, grading the intensity according to the tastes of UK, American and Japanese audiences. Hammer posters were also wonderful achievements in advertising, full colour spreads with scantily clad women and shocking taglines. Sometimes they even used different posters to depict the same film in a different genre, i.e. one would show the film as science-fiction and another suggested it was prehistoric-fantasy.

With the release of Hitchcock�s masterpiece Psycho in 1963, Hammer like many other studios were influenced to make a series of copy-cat psychological thrillers. These came out in rapid succession during the sixties and early seventies, starring by now Hammer regular Oliver Reed, and later attracted other Hollywood stars such as Tallulah Bankhead, Donald Sutherland and Bette Davis.

Hammer�s horror reign ended with one of its occult films To The Devil � A Daughter (1976) which was an attempt to cash in on the success of Rosemary�s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1974), featuring a 16-year-old Natassia Kinski. This was also Lee�s last role for Hammer and was an ignominious end. Overall Hammer�s foray into the witch/occult genre was fairly successful and threw up some notable black magic gems such as The Witches (1966) and The Devil Rides Out (1968).

By 1971 Hammer found a cheaper way of making big box office hits with TV comedy programme spin-offs (no new thing for Hammer) which had become the mainstay of the waning British film industry. Hammer�s On the Buses (1971) is said to have grossed over �1m in its first six months of release, followed by various other sequels and film adaptations of TV series. But this was no substitute for the hardened Hammer fan, reared on the science-fiction/horror fantasy it excelled at. By the early seventies horror was becoming more rooted in realism with the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and more nihilistic than Hammer was used to. After To The Devil �. A Daughter  there was no where left to go and Hammer bowed out having exhausted its particular blend of schlock-horror.

Michael Carreras (Enrique�s grandson), and eventually managing director of Hammer, had great visions for the company before it stopped production, with plans to diversify into bookshops, the record industry and an entertainment complex: �a west-end theatre-restaurant-late night movie house-museum complex� he extolled a year before he died in 1973. With rumours in recent years that the company is to be resurrected by new owners, his legacy may yet be honoured.