Send for Vampirella: Tales from The Hammer Script Archive
My research utilises the extensive archival materials available at De Montfort University’s Hammer Script Archive to examine the unmade horror projects of the British film production company Hammer Films.
One of the most infamous of these projects is Vampirella, a proposed big-budget adaptation of the sci-fi comic of the same name. The project underwent extensive pre-production development at Hammer, with multiple screenplay drafts being written, key roles cast, and locations scouted.
This paper will have two primary aims. Firstly, it will chart the history and eventual failure of Vampirella, utilising archival documentation to contextualise the project within Hammer’s history, and the disastrous effect its failure had on a company already in decline.
Secondly, the paper will self-reflexively examine how we as researchers utilise unmade films within our research, and their potential for public engagement. As a case study, I will examine my own post-doctoral project- Vampirella – A Live Script Reading. This 6-month project was an M4C/AHRC funded event held at the Regent Street Cinema on the 17th October 2019. The event saw ten actors perform a dramatized reading of Christopher Wicking’s Vampirella screenplay to a sold-out audience.
Utilising both the history of Vampirella and my own post-doctoral project, the paper will examine the role of unmade films in film scholarship, and how they offer researchers exciting opportunities to uncover lost or unknown production histories, and new ways to present our research to the public.
Unmade, Unfinished, Unseen: Shadow Histories of Cinema and Television 