Repurposing the Archive: Unmade Films, Vampirella and Adaptation

Abstract

The Hammer Script Archive is held at De Montfort University in Leicester and was opened to researchers in 2012. Primary materials held in the Archive include screenplays, treatments, financial documentation, correspondence, posters, production stills and press books. This article will utilise specifically the material held in the Archive that relates to Hammer’s unmade films. The archive currently holds files on exactly 100 unmade television and film projects, with 185 separate pieces of ephemera directly related to these unmade works. This article examines how archival materials on unmade or unreleased films not only provide valuable evidence for revisionist film histories but can also be repurposed as events and media that imaginatively reconstitute unrealised projects. While archives are valued by film historians for the contextual evidence that they provide, and are often the only sources of information about films that are lost, when it comes to films that never were, they hold potential beyond the circumstantial. Unmade films have also been used to frustrate and complicate existing methodologies. But here, papers on unmade films in the Hammer Script Archive provide the point of departure for an examination of the unproduced project Vampirella, which was developed in the mid-1970s, and its subsequent adaptation as a script read live in 2019. As such, documentation in the Archive will be used to provide the production contexts for the original unmade film from which the script was adapted, and then studied to see how these primary materials were repurposed in the subsequent publicly read script. By examining this public event and two other live readings of scripts adapted from unmade Hammer projects, this article will explore the appeal and cultural function of this phenomenon. In doing so it will pose questions about the scripts’ status as adaptations (part-augmentations, part-simulacra?) and fan response (nostalgia for that which never was). What can the film historian recover from such creative plundering of the archive that might be useful methodologically?