When I was a teenager I had a poster of a page three model on the back of my bedroom door. The only excuse I have now is that it was the 1970s. Another time. The notion of objectification was not one I was particularly aware of at the time. Maybe it was because it was so widespread, so prevalent, so much in front of our eyes back then that we couldn’t see it. Images of partially clothed women were used to sell cars, chocolate bars, cheap aftershave. They turned up similarly (un)attired on TV in Benny Hill and Dick Emery comedy shows. We complain about the sexualisation of culture now, but maybe it was ever thus.

Anyway, the poster and the model’s name are long forgotten now, but she was blonde and pretty and one of the vast range of fantasy females every teenage boy accumulates in his head. Mine included Judy Geeson; Jenny Agutter; one of the dancers in Legs & Co, who succeeded Pan’s People on Top of the Pops (her name was Sue, I think); and Mary Tamm, more an equal than an assistant on Doctor Who (she played a time lord too). And then there was Madeline Smith, a wide-eyed, doe-eyed redhead from Sussex. I probably first saw her on The Two Ronnies or Up Pompeii but she made a more lasting impression, I suspect, when I finally got around to seeing her in The Vampire Lovers (1970), where she appeared in various states of undress as Ingrid Pitt’s intended victim in the first of Hammer’s lesbian vampire movies. It’s not too difficult to imagine why that might have stayed with me.

Smith was one of the many actresses whose beauty (and sometimes bodies) were used as a come-on for the audience. And while Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are still the actors most associated with the British film company in its pomp (a period that stretched from the late fifties to the late sixties), the likes of Smith, Pitt, Yutte Stensgaard, Jenny Hanley, Kate O’Mara and even Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress all flashed their cleavages in the name of the British film industry.

“The Hammer films were not just about horror, they were about sex as well,” agrees Hammer historian Marcus Hearn. He has written a new book, Hammer Glamour, which besides including interviews with as many of the Hammer actresses as he could find, is also a compilation of images of blood and bosoms from the Hammer heyday. That heyday, as is quickly evident from a flick through its pages, was a pre-gym-honed, pre-Brazilian-waxed, pre-size-zero heyday. Another country, then.

“If you had to isolate the X factor of Hammer films it was firstly the X certificate itself,” says Hearn, “then it was the introduction of colour – Hammer was the first to make colour horror movies – and then it was the introduction of sex in Dracula in 1958. Then the formula was complete. So it’s impossible to overestimate the importance of eroticism in these films.”

‘Lesbian overlay’

The link between sex and horror was not new. Bram Stoker combined both forms of titillation in his novel Dracula in the 19th century (read the sequence where Dracula’s brides close in on Jonathan Harker and imagine the rising blood pressure of Victorian readers), but visually Hammer upped the erotic ante. “Count Dracula, who until then had been a bogeyman, explicitly became a sexual predator for the first time [in Hammer films],” argues Sir Christopher Frayling, author of a cultural history of the vampire and professor emeritus of the Royal College Of Art.

“Repressed Victorian misses, in sensual settings, became ravening sexual beasts following a close encounter with the vampire. They started the film with their hair pinned up and wearing a prim, high-collared dress, and ended it with their hair down, lots of lipstick and much cleavage. From governess to seaside postcard. In some ways – given the state of British cinema at the time – it was a form of liberation. And in Hammer’s declining years the count became a countess, with a lesbian overlay on the old stories.”

It was of course their vulgarity that, while alienating critics, attracted audiences. Director Martin Scorsese has talked in the past of the teenage thrill of attending a midnight screening of Curse Of Frankenstein (1957): “There was a graphic quality to it that was totally uncalled for and was extremely endearing to us at about the age of 15.”

Hearn says: “Of course, now they seem rather coy. But in a way Hammer was at the forefront of the permissive society because these films came along at almost exactly the same time as rock ’n’ roll in the UK. I’ve spoken to many people of a certain age who tell me going to see a Hammer film was almost a rite of passage. My father, for example, tells me the day he was able to persuade his local cinema manager to let him see The Camp On Blood Island (1958), even though he was underage, was incredible – the kudos that gave him with his friends. Of course it gave him nightmares for weeks …”

Increasingly, though, as censorship rules relaxed in the 1970s Hammer came to rely on flesh as much as – if not more than – blood.

Innocent vulgarity

Madeline Smith’s first Hammer horror appearance was in a bordello scene in Taste The Blood Of Dracula (1970). It’s not quite a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her role but pretty close: she’s on screen for about a minute. She can be seen with the actor Geoffrey Keen riding on her back. She was just 19 at the time, and wide-eyed in not just a literal way.

“Can I tell you I was a complete, genuine virgin?” Smith asks me when we speak. “Not virginal but a virgin. I didn’t know what a bordello was or why he was riding on my back. And when I made The Vampire Lovers [also in 1970] I was equally virginal. I didn’t know what I was meant to be doing or why. I just rolled around a lot.

“I’d just come out of convent school and we didn’t do anything relating to the facts of life, not even in biology. So the reason I’m looking innocent in both those films is because I was innocent … I was writhing around pretending to have an orgasm when I didn’t even know what an orgasm was.”

She is approaching her sixth decade now, but Smith is still full of enthusiasm for that time in her life. She chats away, recalling the coldness of Elstree studios in January 1970 and being told by the producer of The Vampire Lovers at Christmas that he was worried she’d be too flat-chested for the role. “I assured him I would gain weight over Christmas and New Year and I did so by eating yogurts – lots of them,” she says. “And femininity sprung forth. I still looked like a skeleton with two bosoms stuck on but at least they were real.”

Smith went on to have a highly successful TV and film career in the seventies (she was even a Bond girl in Live And Let Die), before the birth of her daughter and the death of her partner left her a single mother in the mid-seventies. But her Hammer career has its own afterlife. Today she is regularly to be found at conventions meeting Hammer fans. “And all my old performances are still out there,” she says. “Go into HMV and they’re all there.”

So what gives the movies their longevity? Smith believes it’s the acting and directing. Frayling reckons it’s partly “nostalgia for British costume drama and a repertory company of actors and sets and locations – your favourite box of chocolates, over and over again – but, above all, that moment of challenging repression, taboo and censorship, before the widespread liberation of the late sixties”. Hearn feels it may simply be that, like James Bond and Monty Python, “there’s something intrinsically English about them”.

Hammer Films never actually went away. Although the studio stopped making movies in the seventies and TV programmes in the eighties, it was never wound up. Rather like Dracula waiting for the blood sacrifice of some luckless human it has been biding its time, ready to return. Now that appears finally about to happen. A new film, The Resident, starring Christopher Lee – now aged 87 – has been shot and a remake of this year’s Swedish vampire movie Let The Right One In is also on the cards (though both films are set in America). But the name is now a heritage brand. What was once vulgar has become almost innocent. Or as innocent as half-naked lesbian vampires covered in blood can be.

Hammer Glamour is published by Titan Books, priced £24.99. An exhibition of images from the book will form part of The Hammer Festival at the Idea Generation Gallery, 11 Chance Street, London, which runs until November 15. Visit www.ideageneration.co.uk.