H. Rider Haggard’s She – originally serialised from 1886 to 1887 – was a fantasy adventure novel that was very much the product of the colonial era, and was very much steeped in its prejudices and its swaggering self-confidence – though with a note of gothic horror suggestive of anxieties as to whether the Empire would really endure.
Let’s fast forward to the 1960s. For two decades after World War II, Britain’s colonial empire had crumbled, with the Suez crisis of the early 1950s underlining the point that if a colony truly wished to leave the Empire, Britain was in no position to stop it. In an era where the vast majority of adults remembered an era when the British Empire was the pre-eminent superpower and had witnessed it comprehensively lose that status, anxiety about Britain’s place in the world specifically and the formerly solid-seeming axioms of their worldview in general is only to be expected.
It makes sense, then, that Hammer Studios would have put out a couple of movies in the mid-to-late 1960s inspired by She. However, would they turn out to have the progressive attitude to the questions of race, gender, and colonialism raised by the novel which would allow them to do an interesting evaluation of the original novel and perhaps re-imagine the story from a modern perspective… or would they produce a load of regressive trash?
Spoiler: the movies are regressive trash.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 