In November 1934 William Hinds, a comedian and businessman registered his own film company – Hammer Productions Ltd. – based in a three-room office suite at Imperial House, Regent Street, London. The company name was taken from Hinds' stage name, Will Hammer, which he had taken from the area of London in which he lived, Hammersmith.

Work began almost immediately on the first Hammer film, The Public Life of Henry the Ninth at the MGM/ATP studios, with shooting concluding on 2 January 1935. The film tells the story of Henry Henry, an unemployed London street musician, and the title was a "playful tribute" to Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII which had been Britain's first ever Academy Awards 'best picture' nominee in 1934. During this period Hinds met Spanish émigré Enrique Carreras, a former cinema owner, and on 10 May 1935 they formed film distribution company Exclusive Films, operating from a single office at 60-66 National House, Wardour Street. Hammer produced a further four films distributed by Exclusive:

• The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (US: The Phantom Ship) (1936), featuring Bela Lugosi
• Song of Freedom (1936), featuring Paul Robeson
• Sporting Love (1937)
• The Bank Messenger Mystery (1936)

A slump in the British film industry forced Hammer into bankruptcy and the company went into liquidation in 1937. Exclusive, however, survived and on 20 July 1937 purchased the leasehold on 113-117 Wardour Street, and continued to distribute films made by other companies.

James Carreras (son of Enrique) joined Exclusive in 1938, closely followed by William Hinds' son, Anthony. At the outbreak of World War II, both James Carreras and Anthony Hinds left to join the armed services and Exclusive continued to operate only in a limited capacity. In 1946, James Carreras rejoined the company after demobilisation.

He resurrected Hammer as the film production arm of Exclusive with a view to supplying 'quota-quickies' - cheaply made domestic films designed to fill gaps in cinema schedules and support more expensive features. He convinced Anthony Hinds to rejoin the company, and a revived 'Hammer Film Productions' set to work on Death in High Heels, The Dark Road, Crime Reporter and Dick Barton Special Agent (an adaptation of the successful Dick Barton radio show). All were shot at Marylebone Studios during 1947. During production of Dick Barton Strikes Back (1948), it became apparent that the company could save a considerable amount of money by shooting in country houses instead of professional studios. For their next production – Dr Morelle - The Case of the Missing Heiress (another radio adaptation) – Hammer rented Dial Close, a 23 bedroom mansion next to the River Thames, at Cookham Dean, Maidenhead.

On 12 February 1949 Exclusive finally registered "Hammer Film Productions" as a company with Enrique and James Carreras, and William and Tony Hinds as company directors. Hammer moved into the Exclusive offices in 113-117 Wardour Street, and the building was rechristened "Hammer House".

In August 1949, complaints from locals about noise during night filming forced Hammer to leave Dial Close and move into another mansion, Oakley Court, also on the banks of the Thames between Windsor and Maidenhead. Five films were shot there: The Man in Black (1949), Room to Let (1949), Someone at the Door (1949), What The Butler Saw (1950), The Lady Craved Excitement (1950). In 1950, Hammer moved again to Gilston Park, a country club in Harlow Essex, which hosted The Black Widow, The Rossiter Case, To Have and to Hold and The Dark Light (all 1950).

In 1951, Hammer began shooting at its most famous home, Down Place also on the banks of the Thames. The company took out a one-year lease and began its 1951 production schedule with Cloudburst. The house, a virtual derelict, required substantial work, but it did not have the kind of construction restrictions that had prevented Hammer from customising its previous homes. A decision was therefore made to turn Down Place into a substantial, custom-fitted studio complex. Its expansive grounds were used for almost all of the later location shooting in Hammer's films, and are a key part of the 'Hammer look'.

Also during 1951, Hammer and Exclusive signed a four-year production and distribution contract with Robert Lippert, an American film producer. The contract meant that Lippert and Exclusive effectively exchanged products for distribution on their respective sides of the Atlantic – beginning in 1951 with The Last Page and ending with Women Without Men (AKA Prison Story, 1955). It was Lippert's insistence on an American star in the Hammer films he was to distribute that led to the prevalence of American leads in so many of the company's productions during the 1950s. It was for The Last Page that Hammer made one of its most significant appointments when it hired film director Terence Fisher, who went on to play a critical role in the forthcoming horror cycle.

Towards the end of 1951, the one-year lease on Down Place expired, and with its increasing success Hammer looked back towards more conventional studio-based productions. A dispute with the Association of Cinematograph Technicians, however, blocked this proposal, and instead the company purchased the freehold of Down Place. The house was renamed Bray Studios after the nearby village of Bray and it remained Hammer's principal base until 1966. In 1953, the first of Hammer's science fiction films, Four Sided Triangle and Spaceways, were released.

Hammer's first significant experiment with horror came in the form of a 1955 adaptation of Nigel Kneale's BBC Television science fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment, which was directed by Val Guest. As a consequence of the contract with Robert Lippert, American actor Brian Donlevy was imported for the lead role, and the title was changed to The Quatermass Xperiment to cash in on the new X certificate for horror films.

The film was an unexpectedly big hit, and led to an almost equally popular 1957 sequel Quatermass 2 – again adapted from one of Kneale's television scripts, this time by Kneale himself and with a budget double that of the original: £92,000. In the meantime, Hammer had produced another Quatermass-style horror film, X the Unknown, originally intended as a full part of the series until Kneale denied them the rights.

At the time, Hammer voluntarily submitted its scripts to the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) for comments before beginning production. Regarding the script of X the Unknown, one reader/examiner (Audrey Field) commented on 24 November:

"Well, no one can say the customers won't have had their money's worth by now. In fact, someone will almost certainly have been sick. We must have a great deal more restraint, and much more done by onlookers' reactions instead of by shots of 'pulsating obscenity', hideous scars, hideous sightless faces, etc, etc. It is keeping on and on in the same vein that makes this script so outrageous. They must take it away and prune. Before they take it away, however, I think the President [of the BBFC] should read it. I have a stronger stomach than the average (for viewing purposes) and perhaps I ought to be reacting more strongly."

Thoughout Hammer Films' long association with motion pictures, there have always been the leading and the glamour ladies. From Ursula Andress to Raquel Welch, the ladies of Hammer have entranced and entertained us with their beauty, their guile and sometimes their sheer evil!

In celebration of some of the leading ladies of Hammer, there are a few pages dedicated to the ones that had the most impact on me, as I grew up watching Hammer Horror films at the cinema and the Hammer House of Horror television series:

• Valerie Leon (1945 - ) Blood From The Mummy's Tomb

As audiences became more sophisticated in the late 1960s, with the release of artfully directed, subtly horrific films like Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), the studio struggled to maintain its place in the market. It responded by bringing in new writers and directors, testing new characters, and attempting to rejuvenate their Vampire and Frankenstein films with new approaches to familiar material.

While the studio remained true to previous period settings in their 1972 release Vampire Circus, their Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, for example, abandon period settings in pursuit of a modern-day setting and "swinging London" feel. These films were not successful, and drew fire not only from critics, but from Christopher Lee himself, who refused to appear in more Dracula films after these. Speaking at a press conference in 1973 to announce The Satanic Rites of Dracula, then called Dracula is Dead... and Well and Living in London, Lee said:

"I'm doing it under protest... I think it is fatuous. I can think of twenty adjectives - fatuous, pointless, absurd. It's not a comedy, but it's got a comic title. I don't see the point."

The film itself also indulges the turn toward self-parody suggested by the title, with more humour appearing in the script, undercutting any real sense of horror.

Hammer films had always sold themselves, in part, on their violent and sexual content. After the release of films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969), audiences were increasingly able to see more explicit gore, more expertly staged, in relatively mainstream films. Night of the Living Dead (1968) had also set a new standard for graphic violence in horror films. Hammer tried to compete as far as possible - Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), for example, features a scene where the Baron kicks a discarded human brain - but realised quickly that, if they couldn't be as gory as new American productions, they could follow a trend prevalent in European films of the time, and play up the sexual content of their films.

Hammer Films also had commercial success with some atypical output during this period: the film version of the ITV situation comedy series On the Buses (1971). This was popular enough to produce two sequels, Holiday on the Buses (1972) and Mutiny on the Buses (1973).

In the latter part of the 1970s, Hammer made fewer films, and attempts were made to break away from the then-unfashionable Gothic horror films on which the studio had built its reputation. Neither The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974), a co-production with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers which attempted to combine Hammer's Gothic horror with the martial arts film, nor To the Devil a Daughter (1976), an adaptation of the Dennis Wheatley novel, were very successful. Hammer's last production, in 1979, was a remake of Hitchcock's 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, starring Elliot Gould and Cybill Shepherd. The film was a failure at the box office and all but bankrupted the studio.

The Hammer Horror films were often praised by critics for their visual style, although rarely taken seriously. "Altogether this is a horrific film and sometimes a crude film, but by no means an unimpressive piece of melodramatic storytelling" wrote one critic of Dracula in The Times in 1958. Critics who specialise in cult films, like Kim Newman, have praised Hammer Horror more fully, enjoying their atmosphere, craftsmanship and occasional camp appeal.

Hammer House of Horror

In the early 1980s Hammer Films created a series for British television, Hammer House of Horror, which ran for 13 episodes with 51 min per episode.

In a break from their cinema format, these featured plot twists, which usually saw the protagonists fall into the hands of that episode's horror. These varied from sadistic shopkeepers with hidden pasts, to witches and satanic rites. The series was marked by a sense of dark irony, its haunting title music, and the intermingling of horror with the commonplace.

In the 2000's, although the company has seemed to be in hibernation, frequent announcements have been made of new projects. In 2003, for example, the studio announced plans to work with Australian company Pictures in Paradise to develop new horror films for the DVD and cinema market.

On 10 May 2007, it was announced that Dutch producer John De Mol had purchased the Hammer Films rights via his private equity firm Cyrte Investments. In addition to holding the rights to over 300 Hammer Films, De Mol's company plans to restart the studio. According to an article in Variety detailing the transaction, the new Hammer Films will be run by former Liberty Global execs Simon Oakes and Marc Schipper. In addition, Guy East and Nigel Sinclair of L.A.-based Spitfire Pictures are on board to produce two to three horror films or thrillers a year for the U.K.-based studio.

The first output under the new owners is Beyond the Rave, a contemporary vampire story which premièred free online exclusively on myspace in April 2008 as a 20 x 4 min. serial.

The company began shooting for a new horror/thriller film in Donegal in 2008, backed by the Irish Film Board. The film is titled Wake Wood and is scheduled for release in the United Kingdom in the Autumn of 2009. In production in the U.S. as of Summer 2009 is The Resident, a thriller directed and co-written by Finnish filmmaker Antti Jokinen and starring Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Christopher Lee. Hammer has also recently acquired the rights to remake the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In. In June 2010 it was announced that Hammer acquired Wake, a script by Chris Borrelli for an action feature to be directed by Danish filmmaker Kasper Barfoed.

In 2009 it was announced that Hammer Films and Alliance Films are producing a remake of The Woman in Black scheduled for a 2011 release. Daniel Radcliffe will star as lawyer Arthur Kipps. Jane Goldman will write the film.