Howling on the Moors

Almost thirteen years after Basil Rathbone had filmed his final screen appearance as Sherlock Holmes, Hammer Studios decided to resurrect Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s internationally famous detective in a Technicolor remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) which had been previously filmed with Rathbone in 1939. The eerie tale, which opens in a flashback sequence to an earlier time, depicts the origins of the Baskerville curse: the decadent Sir Hugo Baskerville brutally murders a servant girl who flees a group orgy at his mansion. Immediately following her death, however, Baskerville hears a strange braying on the moors before encountering an immense spectral hound which avenges the girl’s death. We then flash forward to the present, where Sherlock Holmes and his partner, Dr. Watson, are investigating the mysterious recent death of Sir Charles Baskerville.

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Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper

It seems surprising that Sir Author Conan Doyle’s most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, and London’s most famous serial killer who stalked the Whitechapel neighborhood in 1888, were never brought together for one of Doyle’s novels. But the two were pitted against each other on screen for the first time in A Study in Terror (1966) and it’s one of the most underrated but entertaining entries among the Holmes-on-film mysteries created since the days of the Universal Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce series. 

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