Director: Terence Fisher

Terence Fisher directed the films that made Hammer a byword for Gothic horror. The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula, both from the late 1950s, took Universal’s monsters, filmed them in saturated color with visible blood, and made them frightening again to an audience that had grown up on the black-and-white versions.

He worked repeatedly with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and the pairing of Cushing’s clipped precision against Lee’s silent physical menace is largely his construction. The Hammer style, deep reds, candlelight and a moral universe where evil is real, is his.

British critics were hostile at the time and the reappraisal came later, largely from French and American writers.