8 Classic Hammer Horror Films You Need To See

Now the movie that started the whole thing off. Until this point, Hammer had been known as a company that made crime stories and mystery thrillers but when producer Anthony Hinds saw the original 6 part BBC production, he went out and bought the rights, single-handedly changing the company's output dramatically over the next three decades.

After the first manned space flight returns to Earth, it is obvious that something is wrong. Two of the three crew members are missing and the sole survivor is a gibbering wreck. An unknown alien entity has infected him, with plans to release reproductive spores in a bid to conquer the planet, and it's up to Prof. Bernard Quatermass to stop this from happening.

One of only 12 films to receive the dreaded "X" certificate since it's launch 4 years prior, The Quatermass Experiment could easily have died under such a tag.

But Hammer embraced it, dropping the E from the title in a bid to grab some of that sweet, sweet money other "X" titles, like Les Diaboliques, had been hoovering up. And it worked.

By the following year, three of their four releases would be horror movies, including the sequel to this, and they found themselves being courted by every major distributor going.

All of which may never have happened if ITV had been around back in 1953.