During the 1960s and 1970s, Hammer's vampire films redefined not only the transgenre but also British film and Hollywood. Shot on color film stock and accompanied by full orchestral scores, the films rejuvenated vampire stories with new vitality and heightened emotion. Color was employed as an expressive mode. Camera movement was relatively fixed yet punctuated by rapid pans, tilts, and zooms to establish conventions that reappeared for decades. “Hammer vampires and other monsters are not segregated in the black-and-white gloom of 1930s America” (1995: 120), explains Auerbach, but inhabit worlds of “cheerful semi-pornographic opulence” (56). Composer James Bernard's three-note “DRAC-u-la motif,” balanced by “an emotion¬ally weaker motif representing Van Helsing and the ‘good’ people on which [Count] Dracula preys” (Larson 1996: 23), staged an acoustic battle along-side the visual one. The figure of the vampire hunter sometimes eclipsed the figure of the vampire, notably in Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter (UK 1972; dir. Brian Clemens), as an object of desire for audiences. Hammer's formula is most associated with Christopher Lee's reinvention of Count Dracula in Horror of Dracula (UK 1958; dir. Terence Fisher) and its sequels, along with Peter Cushing's reinvention of Professor van Helsing. The films emerged on US screens as the Production Code, banning unpunished sex, violence, and miscegenation, came to a close. Hollywood partly moved production overseas to make films whose content would have been impossible in the United States.

Shot in British studios by British filmmakers, working for a British company and using predominantly British casts, Hammer's films seemed “to represent something intrinsically and culturally British” (Porter 1983: 179), suggesting why the films have not often featured in analysis of transnational Hollywood. Hammer's dominance of the international horror market was attributed to the studio's creation of an “English Gothic” (Pirie 1977: 77), a style that not only implies comparison with Hollywood but also was sometimes financed by Hollywood. Universal's Hollywood Gothic established conventions for dark, cavernous settings, replete with gigantic spider webs and rubber bats along with live armadillos, opossums, and scorpions, and coy cut-away shots to hide all physical contact between humans and vampires. Hammer's English Gothic established new conventions, evident in the generous depictions of partial nudity and copious amounts of bright red blood that drips and splashes.