The mid-1950s were eager for a Gothic revival. The cycle of Science Fiction creature features was petering out, increasingly the province of no-budget off-Hollywood productions. Audiences and critics were nostalgic not just for horror films, but for an older style of horror – and, crucially, the production values – that they associated with Universal in the 1930s. Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) et al. had, after highly successful re-releases in the late 1930s, remained in semi-regular circulation and stayed at the forefront of the public imagination, but Universal had long since ceased producing monster classics, and Abbot and Costello were as prominent in the studio's monster productions of the 1950s as were any of the iconic creatures. Hammer Film Productions’ Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) arrived at precisely the right moment to inaugurate what is often thought of as the last great Gothic horror revival, including a decade-plus of Hammer horror films and films by Roger Corman in the United States and by Mario Bava, Riccardo Fredo and Antonio Margheriti in Italy, but also the enormously successful ‘Shock!’ (and, then, in 1958, ‘Son of Shock’) packages of the 1970s that brought hundreds of horror films to American television audiences. This television revival also ensured that no critic or fan in the US could fail to compare Curse or Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) with their Universal forerunners. Hammer's films to an extent depended on those associations, beginning their horror output by re-imagining Frankenstein and Dracula, with an official collaboration with Universal – on a remake of The Mummy – not far behind.

Associated with this rosy look backwards, Hammer and its Gothic followers tend to be thought of as the last gasp of an older style of cinematic horror but infused with the vividly coloured blood and gore of an era-to-come: castles and monsters, foreign aristocrats and horse-drawn carriages, fog machine atmospherics, all the while boasting moments of stomach-wrenching spectacle horror. This style was essentially old fashioned but decorated with blood and scandalously deep cleavage to stand out among 1950s genre cinema.