[in]Transition

This audiovisual essay arises out of the AHRC-funded project ‘The Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema, 1955-85’, which aims to explore the impact of the Eastman Colour 35mm monopack film stock on British cinema as colour became a mainstream technology and aesthetic device. The project is interested in how colour affected different aspects of the film industry, not least the changes introduced at the level of aesthetic, industrial, and intermedial elements.

The Eastmancolor project forms part of a larger development in academic writing that seeks to address the often underappreciated contribution of colour to the moving image, as evidenced by a number of key works on the subject by Scott Higgins, Richard Misek, Steven Peacock, and Sarah Street.[1]  Writing in 2006, Brian Price recognised that ‘[t]he neglect of color in film studies is a curious one’ given its role as a ‘constructive element of mise-en-scene, one that works alongside of lighting, sound, performance, camera movement, framing, and editing.’[2] Price adds:

Color is thus no incidental characteristic of film stock; it is an element carefully considered by set designers, cinematographers, and directors, all of whom must remain sensitive to the way in which color can create meaning, mood, sensation, or perceptual cues.[3]

This is particularly significant when we consider the importance placed upon the colour choices being made during the development of colour technologies in the sound era. Following the introduction of the revolutionary Eastmancolor process in the 1950s, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers published a manual for production personnel recommending an approach to colour design similar to Technicolor during the 1930s and 1940s.[4] The principles of ‘Color Consciousness’ set forth by Technicolor’s Natalie Kalmus in 1935 stated that:

Just as every scene has some definite dramatic mode – some definite emotional response which it seeks to arouse within the minds of the audience so, too, has each scene, each type of action, its definitely indicated color which harmonizes with that emotion.[5]

The continuation of Kalmus’ principles are in evidence across a series of films made by British production company Hammer, which was an early adopter of Eastmancolor in the wake of three-strip Technicolor’s demise.

Illustrated using a number of examples taken from Hammer’s horror films of this period, this essay seeks to visualise Kalmus’ influence during the post-Technicolor era of the late-1950s and 1960s in which the approach to colour design echoed the principles of ‘Color Consciousness’.

Prior to the release of Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the horror genre would be more commonly associated with the monochrome images typified in the expressionist designs and chiaroscuro lighting of the 1930s Universal productions. However, as a genre largely dealing in fantastic themes of the supernatural, incorporated within elaborate period settings, horror shared similarities with other genres for which Kalmus’ Technicolor designs were deemed to be most effective. As Steve Neale recognised, ‘when colour first became technically feasible, it tended to connote not realism, but fantasy. [Therefore] its use tended to be restricted to genres like the cartoon, the western, the costume romance and the musical rather than the war film, the documentary and the crime picture.’[6] In the small number of Technicolor horror films made during this period, such as Universal’s Phantom of the Opera (1943), the application of colour followed this tendency towards fantasy and spectacle through the elaborate 19^th century set and costume designs.[7]

At the time of Phantom of the Opera’s release, the fantasy horrors of the 1930s had largely been replaced by both a series of low-budget, low-brow ‘poverty row’ productions, and a series of films set within a modern milieu, most notably those made by Val Lewton at RKO, which tended towards verisimilitude and contemporary realism in a manner similar to the Noir. A result of which being that colour was incompatible with a genre working with limited budgets and often linked to contemporaneous settings associated with the realism of monochrome. The relative lack of chromatic horrors prior to the Hammer films of the late-1950s, therefore, can be seen as a result of wider shifts within the industry during this period over the genre’s suitability as a subject for colour.

Through the affordability and convenience of the Eastmancolor process, colour was opened up to studios working within genres, such as horror, which were more commonly associated with black-and-white during the Technicolor era. As Peter Hutchings suggests, Hammer’s biggest generic transgression for the horror film wasn’t the ‘controversial representation of sexuality or violence but was simply the fact that it was in colour while the majority of earlier horrors had been in black and white.’[8] Given that Hammer were famed for returning profits on low-budget features, Eastmancolor therefore offered an alternative to the association of horror and black-and-white introduced in the 1930s and developed through the contemporary locales of the Lewton films.

The bold use of colour within the Hammer films echo striking colour designs evident within the earlier Technicolor films which, as Kalmus suggested, aided in establishing mood and provoking an emotional response in a manner similar to the use of musical score, camera movement or editing technique. The foregrounding of these colours was also a significant factor in establishing this association with fantasy which the Hammer films played up to its full potential, indicating the importance of colour to the lurid themes of gothic horror.

In this video essay I demonstrate how four key colours (green, yellow, red and purple) dominated Hammer’s production designs for a ten year period from The Curse of Frankenstein onwards, by using a number of sequences for which colour plays an essential role in the films’ narrative development. Links can been draw between these various films through the meaning afforded to individual colours during key dramatic moments designed to evoke particular emotive responses. For example, a side-by-side comparison of two sequences set within the entrance hall to the mansion in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) offers an alternative perspective on the scene. The use of yellow in the earlier sequence represents the duplicitous nature of Count Dracula as a group of travellers are welcomed by his servant Klove, with this warning turning to an immediate threat later in the film when we see the same location coloured blood-red following the realisation that the guest are intended as the Count’s next victims.

Several sequences taken from the Amicus horror production The Skull (1965) are included at the end of the essay to highlight Hammer’s influence upon subsequent British horror productions in their approach to colour. The legacy of Technicolor was, therefore, not only apparent in the Hammer productions but also in the various imitators which sought to duplicate their successful approach to the colour horror film.