Terence Fisher

Born on February 23, 1904, in Maida Vale (London), Terence Fisher was an only child. When he was four years old, he suffered the loss of his parent, so he was left in the care of his mother and his grandparents. At the age of 16, he left the Christ’s Hospital school in Horsham (Sussex). Honoring his last name, Fisher (fisherman), the young man was passionate about the sea who enlisted on the Conway training ship, of the merchant navy.

For five years he travels the world by boat. When he leaves him, at the age of 21, he doesn’t have a clear vocation, so he ends up working in a clothing store. But before the monotony that invades his life, he begins to go regularly to the cinemas, and is fascinated above all by the films of Frank Borzage . He decides to try his luck in the industry, and after many attempts he gets hired as a ‘clapper boy’ with a low salary but the promise of promotion if he proves his worth. The boy learns quickly, becomes an assistant editor, and finally makes his debut as a solo editor with The Rose of the Tudors , by Robert Stevenson, in 1936. For a decade he dedicated himself to this trade, in titles with a certain impact in England at the time, such as While the Fire Burns and The Bandit Woman . “I learned everything about cinema at the editing table, because doing that job gives you a global vision of cinema,” explained the director.

He did not participate in World War II, since his occupation as an assembler requires him to work making material to raise the spirits of the population. During one of the constant bombardments that ravage London, he notices an attractive young woman, Morag, who takes refuge with him. Both end up in love and eventually get married.

When the conflict ends, the Seventh Art industry has completely disappeared, and many filmmakers have died or emigrated to the United States, where the fighting has not reached. Thus, in Great Britain new filmmakers are needed, and the Rank production company organizes filmmaking courses for which it selects Fisher. His wife, Morag, has become his main support and encourages him to participate. The boy proves his worth, and the production company assigns him his first film as a director, Colonel Bogey , where a ghost already appears, as if it were a sign of his future in the fantastic genre. But he goes unnoticed on billboards like To the Public Danger and A Song For Tomorrow . However, Portrait from Life, from 1948, about an army officer fascinated by the portrait of a woman, sweeps against the odds at the box office.

The best film from the period before he specialized in the horror genre, and also the best known, is undoubtedly Strange Happening , co-directed with Antony Darnborough . It would seem that it is a good copy of Alfred Hitchcock ‘s Alarm on the Express , because here Jean Simmons is looking for her brother despite the fact that everyone assures him that she had not arrived at the hotel with him.

In 1951 he was signed by the Hammer production company, then still very small. The company is not very clear about the path to follow, and Fisher shoots films of different genres, almost always with very little-known actors and ridiculous budgets. In any case, sometimes the results are interesting, as in the case of the 1954 film noir Murder by Proxy , where an American passing through London agrees to marry a mysterious blonde who turns up dead the next day for a sum of money. His reference was still clearly Hitchcock.

But after several mediocre films that Fisher shoots without much enthusiasm, the filmmaker feels stuck, and thinks he has no future. He is about to break definitively with Hammer when the executives offer him to shoot with a bigger budget than they used to give him The Curse of Frankenstein , a revision of the novel by Mary Shelley , with two promising actors, Peter Cushing , as the doctor, and Christopher Lee , in the role of the monster. It was going to be his first color film of his, and also his first foray into horror movies.

The first to be scared by the tape was Fisher himself, who saw that his career was at stake. “I was terrified on the set, as the earlier version of James Whale was so famous, and I was afraid I would do badly in the comparisons,” says Fisher, who had never seen the Universal film before, and decided to forgo seeing the horror classics of the American production company, at least until he had finished his film, so that they would not influence him.

Thanks to that, the film has its own style and moves away from the one starring Boris Karloff . To begin with, it leaves the monster in the background and focuses on the figure of the doctor, an intellectual with authority and good intentions, who nonetheless crosses the moral limits of science due to excessive zeal.

The success of the film caused the production company Hammer to decide that its future was in the field of terror. For his part, Fisher had also found his way, since from then on he would always follow a very similar line, to the point that he used to repeat with the actors –Lee and Cushing–, the screenwriter Jimmy Sangster , the cinematographer Jack Asher , the composer James Bernard and even the make-up artists and decorator.

The following year, the team embarks on a revalidation with Dracula (1958) , which is a far cry from Tod Browning ‘s extremely famous version.a bit theatrical. Fisher invents a whole vampire iconography: the bloody fangs, the cape, the red eyes of Dracula, which since then have been imitated ad nauseam. Its sinister setting made history, and set a benchmark for all subsequent genre cinema. He resumes the figure of the doctor who is torn between respecting moral limits or not, with Van Helsing exemplarily incarnated by Cushing, who pursues his goals by relying equally on science and faith. In Fisher’s films, ambiguous characters like Van Helsing and diabolical ones like Dracula himself are much more attractive and interesting than pure-hearted heroes like Jonathan Harker, who also tend to die quickly.

Since then, Fisher has made little effort to explore new fields, merely repeating (sometimes memorably) the tried-and-true formula. Once again, Cushing plays a scholar faced with a monster played by Lee in The Mummy (1959) , which also followed in the footsteps set by Universal. Both are present in The Dog of Baskervilles , one of his best works outside of terror, with Cushing embodying another of the great characters of the most popular classic literature, none other than Sherlock Holmes (later he would return to the character in a weak but weak German production enchanting titled The necklace of death , where the detective is played by Lee).

Other great ultra-well-known myths addressed by the filmmaker were Dr. Jekyll, in The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll , where Lee plays a supporting role, and The Curse of the Werewolf , with great work by Oliver Reed. Lee and Cushing starred in The Medusa , with an ancient monster that takes human form and terrorizes the inhabitants of a European city.

Hammer lavished itself on producing sequels to its best-received products. Fisher shot several with great solvency. For example, he reverted to Bram Stoker’s characters twice, with The Brides of Dracula (where Cushing was in as Van Helsing, but there was no sign of Lee’s vampire) and Dracula, Prince of Darkness (where the exact opposite was true ). , because Lee reappeared, but Cushing was not).

His favorite franchise was Dr. Frankenstein. He shot The Revenge of Frankenstein , Frankenstein Created Woman , Frankenstein’s Brain and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell , where Cushing always returned, but the monster kept changing. Cushing also starred in another installment, The Evil of Frankenstein , where for once Fisher left the baton to Freddie Francis , another of Hammer’s heavyweights.

In The Devil’s Bride he had Richard Matheson as a screenwriter , whose most popular novel, “I am legend”, he wanted to make a film, but never got the green light. He made his foray into adventure film with The Sword of Sherwood Forest , with the little-known Richard Greene as Robin Hood, while Peter Cushing was the Sheriff of Nottingham. He also shot two science fiction films, SOS: The World in Peril and The Earth Dies Screaming , for Planet Films, a modest company. But he notes that he does not feel as comfortable in these parts as in terror. When he was about to shoot a fourth Dracula, Dracula comes back from the grave, Fisher suffered a terrible accident, so he has to be replaced by the aforementioned Francis.

Bad luck fell on the director, as he later suffered a second accident that left him in a precarious state of health. In addition, he is diagnosed with cancer and suffers from cataracts. Since Hammer’s films also began to earn less, he left the cinema in the mid-70s. He died on June 18, 1980 in Twickenham, near London, at the age of 76.