Admirers of British cinema have long relished the remarkable output of Hammer Films studio, famous (or should that be notorious?) for their censor-baiting horror fare before they became a national treasure with The Queen’s Award for Industry. And those same admirers are relishing a series of deluxe silver disc reissues of some of the studio’s key films. The new Hammer personnel will find it hard to beat the presentation of a particularly key film in the studio’s output – the film, in fact, that inaugurated their matchless run of horror product, even though The Quatermass Xperiment is, in fact, a science fiction film with marked horror elements. This latest multidisc issue with a generous selection of extras is absolutely definitive (it even includes a graphic novel by the great British illustrator Brian Lewis– a mentor of mine in my days in illustration). The film (particularly in its 4K iteration) has never looked better.

TV was a broadcast medium which would furnish key material for the first horror wave of the mid to late 1950s.and Hammer’s first major horror/science fiction genre initiative was a striking, intelligent adaptation by director Val Guest of Nigel Kneale’s seminal Quatermass series, initially just one of their copious rejiggings of other media, but setting the standard for the company from that point onwards.

Interestingly, Hammer’s move into the horror genre was actually occasioned by the success of its adaptation of Kneale’s serial, which, although being firmly in the science-fiction genre, achieved many of its most memorable effects with the use of horror tropes (such as the hideous, sucked-dry husk of a corpse). And it was the latter genre which was to prove the studio’s most enduring legacy in filmic terms.

The cadaverous actor Richard Wordsworth made an important contribution to Hammer iconography by appearing as the doomed astronaut in the film, undergoing a grotesque transformation as he was infected by an alien presence brought back from a space mission (his later transformation in the studio’s Curse of the Werewolf is in the nature of the make-up applied to the actor as a spectacularly unprepossessing beggar at a banquet)

Kneale’s science-fiction character Quatermass frequently encountered menaces that appeared to have a supernatural agency behind them (but customarily turned out to be alien in origin); television plays such as The Stone Tape (1972) similarly brought about the forced marriage between science and the uncanny (in the latter, occult happenings are investigated by a scientific team with all the apparatus of modern technology — a notion much imitated since). And speaking of imitation (or, more kindly, inspiration), the indebtedness of the Doctor Who series (both before and after its revivification) to the concepts originally created by Nigel Kneale is profound.

The much-employed and urbane Val Guest may be regarded as one of the most versatile journeyman directors to have worked steadily in the British film industry – or as a jack of all trades who delivered professional work in a variety of genres. Like many directors, Guest began his career as an actor and even had a period in journalism (an experience that was to stand him in good stead for the pungent, persuasive realisation of the journalistic world in such films as The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)). Born in Maida Vale, Guest was brought up in India before coming to London. His first films involved venerable music hall comedians of the day such as Will Hay, but, as a director with an early grasp of commercial imperatives, he began to make his mark with such studios as Hammer, for whom he created the ground-breaking Quatermass Xperiment. This weighty box set will be a very tempting proposition for any lovers of Hammer Films, British science fiction movies – or, for that matter, British films per se — even though the eponymous scientist is played by the brusque American actor Brian Donlevy.