Anthony Hinds

Biography

Anthony Hinds (Ruislip, 1922 – Chadlington, 2013) was an English screenwriter and producer, also known as Tony Hinds and, for his screenwriting work, as John Elder. The son of the founder of Hammer Film Productions, he became a key figure in British horror cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.

After serving as an RAF pilot in the Second World War, he returned to Hammer in 1946 and spent years producing modest thrillers. His most notable contribution was urging the company to buy the big-screen rights to The Quatermass Experiment, the BBC serial by Nigel Kneale, and proposing that films be shot in country houses, a cheaper alternative to a full studio. The company settled at Bray Studios until 1966.

From the mid-1960s he concentrated on screenwriting, often under the name John Elder, and wrote for the studio's Dracula and Frankenstein series. His last screenwriting credit came in 1984. A horror script he wrote in the 1970s, The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula, was never filmed, but it was staged as a reading in 2015 and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in 2017, with Michael Sheen as narrator. He died in 2013 of complications from Parkinson's disease.

Key films

• The Curse of Frankenstein (1957): the first film in Hammer's Frankenstein series, on which Hinds worked as producer or writer.
• The Quatermass Xperiment (1955): the first big-screen adaptation of the BBC serial, a project Hinds championed.
• Dracula (1958): the starting point of Hammer's Dracula cycle.
• The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959): a Conan Doyle adaptation, one of Hammer's forays into mystery.
• Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966): a sequel in the cycle, made while Hinds was focused on writing.