The run of horror movies produced by the British studio Hammer pumped new blood into the genre from the mid-1950s through the '60s before being reduced to a bone-dry husk by the time of 1976' To the Devil...a Daughter. Now, the first new Hammer horror film in more than thirty years--Beyond the Rave, described as "a blood-spattered tale of vampires on the rampage among hardcore dance fans"--is about to hit theaters. And when I say "theaters", I of course mean "computer screens and iPods." The movie, which stars Jamie Dornan and Nora-Jane Noone, with cameos by Sadie Frost and the now seventy-year-old veteran Hammer cutie Ingrid Pitt, is going into "distribution" on MySpace, where it will be serialized in twenty five-minute chunks. The first-time director, Matthias Hoene, is an old-school Hammer fan and duly humble about the responsibility he faces as the designated resurrector of the brand. "What I love about horror," he says, "is that you can take certain serious subjects - political, social - and talk about them in an entertaining way that would be impossible in another sort of drama. You can deliver messages in a horror film that you couldn't otherwise."
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