Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

One of Hammer Films most recognizable stars was Peter Cushing. The range of Cushing's role are celebrated with sample clips from many of his best-known films. He portrays the vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing in Horror of Dracula (1958) and again, two years later, in The Brides of Dracula (1960). He became kindly, English botanist Dr. Rollason in The Abominable Snowman (1957) as he and a gruff American scientist, played by Forrest Tucker, mounted an expedition to the Himalayas in search of the legendary Yeti. Sherlock Holmes was his role for The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), helping when a nobleman is threatened by a family curse on his newly inherited estate. As Holly in a 1965 remake of H. Rider Haggard's She, he and two companions stumble upon a lost city in East Africa, run by a beautiful queen (Ursula Andress) whose love holds the promise of immortality. Cushing became archaeologist John Banning in the 1959 version of The Mummy, where a team of British archaeologists find and open the tomb of Egyptian Princess Ananka with nefarious consequences. Christopher Lee romps as the mummy. In Twins of Evil (1971), Cushing leads a religious sect as Puritan Gustav Weil and hunts all women suspected of witchcraft In the process, he kills a number of innocent victims. Young Frieda, Gustav's niece, will involve herself in a devilish cult, and become an instrument of Justice in the region. A young woman recovering from a nervous breakdown (Joan Collins) moves with her husband to a boys' school and finds herself being terrorized by a mysterious one-armed man, but nobody believes her in Fear in the Night from 1972. Here, Cushing is the Headmaster, Michael Carmichael. Six times he starred as Baron Frankenstein, the last being Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) in which he is hiding out in an insane asylum so that he may continue his experiments in reanimating the dead along with fellow inmate Dr. Simon Helder, who has been institutionalized for conducting such experiments.