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Folks, you know that TGM loves some Hammer horror. We even wrote a little love letter, which you can find here. It covers the personal feels we get when daydreaming about Hammers’ usual suspects: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Hound of Baskervilles, and then there are the strange, feral outliers. The ones that feel half-buried, cursed, and slightly dangerous to resurrect. Cry of the Banshee belongs firmly to that second category, a Hammer-adjacent nightmare that has spent decades lurking on the margins of horror history.

If you are looking to get your hands on a collected Blu-ray set, may I suggest starting off with HAMMER ULTIMATE COLLECTION? It has 20 films that will keep you busy for nights to come!

This February, Hammer is finally pulling it back into the light with a brand-new 4K restoration as part of the newly launched Hammer Presents line. It’s not just a reissue, it’s a reclamation. And honestly, it’s long overdue, but these things take time, so don’t hang me for my sass.

Released in 1970, Cry of the Banshee arrived during a turning point for British horror. Gothic melodrama was giving way to something colder and more punitive, where faith, power, and superstition bled together in ugly ways. Directed by Gordon Hessler ( Kiss and the Phantom of the Park), the film abandons the familiar comfort of capes and castles and instead digs into witchcraft, cruelty, and social rot. It never quite fit the image audiences expected from Hammer, which may explain why it slipped through the cracks while flashier titles took center stage.

Speaking of flash, the new box art is absolutely killer. If you are a fan of the Art of Hammer, check out this collection of posters put in beautiful book form.

At the center of it all is Vincent Price, delivering one of the most venomous performances of his career. As Lord Edward Whitman, a sadistic Elizabethan magistrate, Price plays authority as a blunt instrument — religion weaponized, law used as an excuse for torture and murder. His persecution of a local coven of witches sets the film’s curse in motion, and what follows is not chaotic revenge but something far worse: slow, inevitable punishment.

The banshee itself is less a monster than an omen. It doesn’t stalk loudly or kill indiscriminately. It waits. Death arrives with ritualistic calm, moving through Whitman’s bloodline as if history itself is correcting a moral imbalance. The result feels closer to a dark folk legend than a traditional horror movie, steeped in fatalism and dread rather than shocks.

Seen now, Cry of the Banshee plays like proto–folk horror, predating the wider cultural embrace of the subgenre. Long before the term became fashionable or at least recognized, the film was already exploring how belief systems curdle into fanaticism, and how nature and the supernatural stand quietly opposed to human cruelty. It’s grim, mean-spirited, and completely uninterested in offering comfort, which is exactly why it still works today.

Hammer’s new 4K release finally gives the film the respect it’s been denied for decades. Restored from original film elements, the set includes both the director’s cut and the theatrical version, along with new commentaries, interviews, archival materials, and striking new artwork. For a movie that has existed mostly as a cult whisper, this is a full-scale resurrection.

What makes this release especially timely is how modern the film feels in its themes. Power abused under the guise of righteousness. Women are persecuted for existing outside accepted norms. Violence justified as a moral duty. These aren’t relics of the past; they’re ideas that still haunt the present to some degree, which gives Cry of the Banshee an uncomfortable relevance.

If the Hammer Presents line continues to champion films like this, the overlooked, the abrasive, the morally rotten, it could become one of the most interesting preservation efforts in genre cinema today.

Cry of the Banshee isn’t just an obscure footnote in Hammer’s orbit. It’s a missing link between Gothic horror and the folk-horror explosion that followed. This 4K release finally lets the film breathe, scream, and linger the way it was always meant to.

The banshee has been crying for decades. Now we finally get to hear it clearly….that was super cheesy, but you get my point.

Let us know what your favorite Hammer flick is, and if you will be knee deep in these new releases.

Until next time – stay spooky!