Exciting news for Hammer Horror fans (I’ll assume that’s all of you). After much rumour and none-too-subtle hints, its been confirmed that the studio is working on restored versions of over thirty of its classic titles.

Any attempts to produce a definitive Hammer collection have always been halted by the fact that so many different rights-holders own their back catalogue, but now Hammer are working with several studios – amongst them Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox – to produce new, restored versions of their back catalogue. We’ve already seem the fruits of this with Studiocanal’s Blu-ray of Quatermass and the Pit, and they are following that excellent release with a restored Dracula Prince of Darkness, including the original UK title cards and a new thirty minute documentary, for release in March. Hot on the heels of this will be The Reptile and Plague of the Zombies.

More exciting is the news that the recently discovered extended footage from the 1958 Dracula (Horror of Dracula to US readers) has been restored to the new version that the BFI released theatrically in 2007. This footage – long claimed to be nothing more than a rumour – features a longer version of Dracula’s death and a moment cut in Britain as ‘too erotic’. This new cut gets its world premiere on February 18th as part of the Vault Festival in London. Let’s hope a Blu-ray isn’t too far off.