The years in which Hammer, Amicus and a plethora of smaller studios and independent producers made such a huge impact on British horror are well known and been very well documented. Less well known are the dark ages before the coming of Hammer, from the silent era through to the advent of The Quatermass Xperiment (1955).

British cinema was prolific in the silent era and there were all manner of horror subjects being explored - ghosts haunted, skeletons danced, guilt over Empire was exorcised and for some bizarre reason Faust turned up dozens of times. Directors like the great pioneer George Albert Smith, Cecil M. Hepworth and Fred Paul dabbled with fantasy and horror.

Real horror didn't arrive in Britain until Boris Karloff returned home in 1933 to appear in The Ghoul for director T. Hayes Hunter. Karloff was Britain's first horror star, though most of his work - and certainly his best - was done in Hollywood. He was soon joined by the extraordinary Tod Slaughter, a barnstorming ham whose theatrical style and bombastic presence still fascinates today, though it must be said that the films he appeared in were terrible.

The 1927 Kinematograph Act - the so-called "Quota Act" - demanded that a certain percentage of films shown theatrically in Great Britain actually be made there, leading to the rise of the dreaded "quota quickie." Knowing that their product would be virtually guaranteed a screening somewhere, producers were soon cranking out hundreds of cheap programmers, often little more than an hour long. The majority of these were crime films and mysteries, though a good number of them had enough horror trappings to make them of interest here.

Though much despised, the quota quickies at least proved useful as a testing ground for talent that would be put to much better use later. Chief among these was Michael Powell, whose quickie work included a horror flavoured offering in The Phantom Light (1935).

Things continued this way throughout the 30s and 40s - interrupted only by the onset of war - until Hammer came along to give British horror a much needed boost in the mid-50s. They'd already been active in the genre, with films like The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1936) (with Bela Lugosi), Room To Let (1950) and A Stolen Face (1952) but it would be their adaptation of Nigel Kneale's hugely popular TV series The Quatermass Xperiment that would change British horror forever.

Part Two: Hammer and Beyond