Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense
Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense is a short-lived (one season) anthology television series produced in Britain in 1984 by Hammer Film Productions. Though similar in format to the 1980 series Hammer House of Horror, the Mystery and Suspense series had feature-length episodes, usually running around 70 minutes without commercials.
| Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Horror |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 13 |
| Production | |
| Producers | Hammer Film Productions 20th Century Fox Television |
| Running time | 70 minutes |
| Release | |
| Original network | ITV |
| Original release | 5 September – 17 December 1984 |
The series was a co-production by Hammer Film Productions with 20th Century Fox Television (as was the 1968 anthology series Journey to the Unknown), and is known in the United States as Fox Mystery Theater. It was first aired in the UK by ITV in 1984, though it was shown in different timeslots (and a different running order) throughout the various ITV regions.
Episodes
Two of the episodes, "A Distant Scream" and "In Possession", were remakes of stories that had been made for the fourth season of the BBC anthology series Out of the Unknown, originally titled "The Last Witness" and "The Uninvited". The master videotapes for both of the original teleplays were wiped by the corporation during the 1970s and no copies are known to exist, leaving only still photographs, a short video clip of "The Last Witness" and a complete audio recording of "The Uninvited" surviving. "A Distant Scream" and "In Possession" are effectively the only way these two stories can be viewed in a full audio-visual format.
Home media
The series was released as a six-DVD set in the UK in 2006, but is currently out-of-print. In Germany, a four-DVD set was released in March 2018 under the title Vorsicht, Hochspannung!, which has 11 "main feature" episodes with a choice of either dubbed German language audio or the original English language audio, along with 2 "bonus episodes" with just the original English language audio.