The run of horror movies produced by the British studio Hammer pumped new blood into the genre from the mid-1950s through the '60s before being reduced to a bone-dry husk by the time of 1976' To the Devil...a Daughter. Now, the first new Hammer horror film in more than thirty years--Beyond the Rave, described as "a blood-spattered tale of vampires on the rampage among hardcore dance fans"--is about to hit theaters. And when I say "theaters", I of course mean "computer screens and iPods." The movie, which stars Jamie Dornan and Nora-Jane Noone, with cameos by Sadie Frost and the now seventy-year-old veteran Hammer cutie Ingrid Pitt, is going into "distribution" on MySpace, where it will be serialized in twenty five-minute chunks. The first-time director, Matthias Hoene, is an old-school Hammer fan and duly humble about the responsibility he faces as the designated resurrector of the brand. "What I love about horror," he says, "is that you can take certain serious subjects - political, social - and talk about them in an entertaining way that would be impossible in another sort of drama. You can deliver messages in a horror film that you couldn't otherwise." (Yes, the new movie has an Iraq-war plot element. But, inevitably, his the first thing on his mind with this project had to be the tricky demands of the "webisode" format. "Normally in a feature film, you would spend the first 10 or 15 minutes setting up the characters and the background. But in this project we had to ensure that every five minutes there would be character development, thrills, fun - the whole package that you'd expect from a full-length film. And, of course, not every episode could end in a cliffhanger - that would be too forced." There were also content-restriction issues: some of the gore had to be cut to appease MySpace.

Hoene rejects the idea that the format itself is just a gimmick, though: "This is just another way of telling stories. Dickens wrote serialised stories - were they bad for being short? It can be a great format." Hammer Films CEO Simon Oakes chimes in: "This was not designed cynically; it was designed creatively. And it is not about the death of cinema. It's actually the reverse. It is about making film available to people who don't watch movies that often." As Oakes sees it, making films for the Internet is both a means of reaching a "younger generation" and the latest manifestation of the "real can-do attitude in British filmmaking" that gave rise to Hammer in the first place. (He wants it understood, though, that the studio isn't looking to go exclusively into on-line product but will also be making new films for theaters.) The first "webisode" of Beyond the Rave goes on-line April 2, but for those who still prefer to ingest their feature films at full length, the whole thing will be issued on DVD this summer. With, to Matthias Hoene's great relief, all the Internet-unfriendly gore restored.