The Abominable Snowman

Yeti Day, All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away...

The Abominable Snowman

(aka The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas)

UK 1957

Directed by Val Guest

Hammer Region 2

I’ve always been a big fan of productions boasting stories and screenplays by Nigel Kneale. I absolutely adored all four of the original Quatermass serials... and the Hammer remakes of the first three... and the Radio show set between the third and fourth serial... although I was left unimpressed with the condensed down “movie-spliced-together-from-TV-episodes” adaptation of the fourth serial and similarly unimpressed by the still fairly recent TV remake of The Quatermass Experiment, despite featuring the excellent acting talents of Jason Flemyng and David Tennant.

This is the first time I’ve seen The Abominable Snowman and, I have to say that, while it’s not as absolutely terrifying as the Quatermass serials... it does still have that sense of nagging, lurking, building terror coupled with a keen intelligence which seems to be a signature of Kneale’s work. Of course, it helps that we have an experienced director working with Kneale’s material and director Val Guest had already made the Hammer Horror remakes of Kneale’s first two Quatermass serials The Quatermass Xperiment (based on The Quatermass Experiment) and the appropriately named Quatermass 2.

In The Abominable Snowman, Hammer veteran Peter Cushing stars as Dr. John Rollason, a researcher in the Himalayas who teams up with an American “hunter”, Tom Friend, played by the token lets-put-an-American-in-it-so-we-can-sell-it-overseas actor Forrest Tucker... who did the same kind of token American duties that Brian Donleavy was doing in the Quatermass remakes but in films like this one and such genre classics as X-The Unknown and The Crawling Eye (based on the TV serial The Trollenberg Terror). Like Val Guest, Cushing was also no stranger to working on Nigel Kneale’s material since he’d starred in both Kneale’s much lionised, infinitely superior TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 and also the original TV play The Creature, which is what The Abominable Snowman is a remake of... Cushing plays the same role in this movie that he played on TV but I believe Stanley Baker played the part which Forrest Tucker has inherited here... it’s a shame that The Creature is a lost “classic” as I would dearly love to see that one.

The film starts with Dr. Rollason, his wife and his fellow researcher studying artefacts in a Tibetan monastery. Rollason breaks it to his wife, much to her alarm, that he is going with Tom Friend and his crew on a fairly dangerous expedition up a mountain to research evidence of recently sighted Yetis. He leaves his wife and colleague behind the next day and goes off with Friend and his small band, who have pre-loaded the trail with buried food while passing through with a larger expedition previously.

As the crew bed down for the first night, it becomes clear to Rollason that his ideas of locating The Abominable Snowman for scientific study are at odds with Friend’s “commercial showman” mentality, who is definitely there to capture said Yeti and bring it back, King Kong-like, to civilisation and make large amounts of "Yeti cash" from the proceeds. However, what Friend and the gang don’t realise (although Rollason twigs it a lot quicker), is that one of the expedition has payed Friend to be there after seeing one of the beasts (and it is definitely Abominable Snowmen in the plural that our decidedly unheroic heroes eventually find) which has established a psychic link with him and is susceptible to what I can only describe as... “the will of the Yeti!”

And of course, once it’s been established that the Yeti can get inside the minds of humans, it’s not long before members of the expedition start dying by their own hand... at the instigation of the abominable snowmen who, in all fairness, just want to be left alone.

I don’t want to spoil this movie for any enthusiastic Hammer or Kneale fans among you so I won’t tell you who, if any, survives to the end of the movie. What I will say is that director Val Guest has kept the Yeti mostly unseen until an up-close-and-personal encounter near the end... relying instead on just glimpses of the odd Yeti arm or the reactions of the actors to what is left slightly off screen for the most part. A shrewd move by a director who, I suspect, had less faith in the design and execution of the creatures themselves... although I personally thought they were pretty good Yeti suits (and none of them were wearing a watch like their real life counterparts). Although, with people like Richard Wattis turning up in the cast... I was half expecting to see Yeti Jacques walk on!

Definitely not the best of either Kneale or Guest's works but certainly well worth a watch, especially for the seasoned veteran who like’s nothing better than to watch a solid British horror production and have fun playing spot the actor. It also boasts a score by the composer Humphrey Searle, who horror music fans may remember was the composer for the score of Robert Wise’s 1963 horror masterpiece The Haunting. There’s a recent new release of The Abominable Snowman from Hammer on Region 2 and it’s also quite inexpensive to boot. Pick it up if you’ve got nothing better to spend your hard earned cash on. Rawwwwr!

Hammer Film Scores and the Musical Avant-garde

Hear The Blood Of Dracula

Hammer Film Scores and the Musical Avant-garde

Written by David Huckvale

McFarland Press

ISBN: 0786434562

When I bought this book I was pretty sure I was buying into something I wasn’t really going to fully understand, to be honest with you. After all, the scores used in horror films are, for the most part, less tonal and much more complicated than the kinds of scores used in other kinds of movies and, since I don’t read music, I was expecting a much less comprehensible (to me) but ultimately more satisfying experience (I might learn something) from this book than what I got here.

Let me say, before I get into all that though, that this book is a really entertaining, well put together and easy to read publication. My real problems with it, and they are minor problems and I’m probably the only reader whose going to have those, lie in the exploration of the relationship of the music in the context of what Huckvale calls “the musical avant-garde” in that, the author states an intention at the start of the book... and then takes us on a merry tour of absolutely fascinating and first-hand, straight from the horses mouth anecdotes about, or by, the composers themselves, without pushing his points as much as I would have liked.

Stating, quite correctly, that horror movies are genuinely the biggest audience for certain styles of musical composition which includes atonal music and twelve tone serial music where the audience is not necessarily aware that they are listening to such things is an interesting thought to ponder when the audiences for concerts of such music (always popular in musical lessons throughout recent decades and probably a mainstay of compositional study to this day) are so small and these things are barely programmed in, when compared to classical music by composers who use melody and harmony in their work. However, I can’t agree with the authors claims that the Hammer and Amicus horror films made in Britain from the mid fifties to the mid seventies are necessarily, as claimed, the first exposure that audiences to these films would have had to these styles of composition in a cinematic context. And while these scores may well have been as influential on contemporary horror score writing as the writer claims, I can’t help but think that some of those late thirties and onwards “Universal Horror” scores by such mainstay composers as Hans Salter and Frank Skinner had some interesting passages which invoked a certain musical disharmony worked in with the more melodic writing which they also captured to an extent in their work. In fact, as I’m writing this now, I can hear Hans Salters early fifties three note motif for Creature From The Black Lagoon echoing around my head and I’m thinking to myself... well this really wasn’t meant to do anything but disturb you... musically it’s really not supposed to be that easy to digest.

What we have here then, is a less rigorous approach to the authors own intent which, while not sloppy, is certainly a little less analytical than I’d have liked for the majority of the volume (it does have its moments however)... and I guess if it had been more rigid in its exploration of the music in more technical terms I wouldn’t have understood a word of it so, in a way, I’m slightly disappointed but certainly grateful.

That being said, the book is jam packed with some really interesting stories about a whole slew of Hammer and Amicus composers and I was particularly interested to see both Elizabeth Lutyens (whose music I know from her brilliant and as yet unreleased score for The Earth Dies Screaming) and Richard Rodney Bennet covered in the text. Odd little production tales and the occasional analysis of the way the music works in certain movies make for a very entertaining, if quick to read, package and it’s especially useful when a score which hasn’t had a commercial release, such as The Satanic Rights Of Dracula, is discussed. I have the 19 albums of Hammer scores and compilations that GDI put out years ago but the majority, if not all, of these score CDs are no longer in print so this is a good book to have if actual musical samples are not to hand, although some first hand familiarity with the style of musical writing used in these particular movies would obviously enhance the readers experience of this worthy tome.

One other thing I noticed was that, although it’s an American book, the language used on the occasions that the author does get into the music written on the page seems to be mixed up between British and American terminology from chapter to chapter. For a while Huckvale will be talking crotchets and minims, which are terms I understand, and the next he’ll be talking about thirds and fourths, which I don’t. I found this a little confusing and it made me wonder if, perhaps, certain chapters of this book were sourced from previous works and essays.

Not much more I can say about this one to be honest... while less exploratory in sheer musical analysis than I was hoping for, it certainly is a joy to read if one has any interest in the music of these kinds of movies and it’s certainly a quick and jolly entertainment that everyone will be able to understand without knowing too much about music. While I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wants to really study the scores of these movies as a necessity, it’s certainly of interest to people with a basic love of these kinds of scare-fests and their musical compositions. This book will certainly make you appreciate that you don’t have to just Taste The Blood Of Dracula... you can hear it too!