Oakley Court: How a haunted Berkshire hotel ended up as the go-to destination for hundreds of horror movies
England is full of supposedly haunted locations, and Berkshire is said to be home to many of them, from the royal lodgings of Windsor Castle to Basildon Rectory. Old buildings, especially castles, are ripe for ghost sightings and stories, although how much is simply a figment of the imagination based on myth is anybody’s guess.
We always doubt supernatural stories until we experience something unexplainable ourselves, but once you have, it makes visiting a building with hundreds of years of history all the more thrilling, and when a supposedly haunted manor house is also one of the country’s most prolific horror movie filming locations, then things get even more exciting.
That’s exactly the case for Oakley Court, a gothic country house built in the Victorian era, which sits in Bray, a village in Berkshire on the banks of the River Thames. That river alone is one steeped in history as London’s central stretch of water (think about the number of dead bodies in there), but upon the banks, you can find the house, which was taken over by Hammer Films in 1949.
The company began making movies in the 1930s, becoming the country’s major producer of horror films, revolutionising the genre with adaptations of classic gothic tales and making stars of everyone from Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee to Ingrid Pitt and Veronica Carlson. The company ruled over the genre for decades, and they shot several movies at this opulent gothic mansion, such as 1950’s The Lady Craved Excitement.
Just across the way from Oakley Court was Down Place, which Hammer transformed into a proper studio, known as Bray Studios. Still, even though this became their new headquarters and go-to filming location, they didn’t stop using Oakley Court every so often, finding its architecture, which looks fit for a vampire to live in, too irresistible.
It was only fitting, then, that they filmed one of Hammer’s many Dracula movies there, specifically, The Brides of Dracula, featuring Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing, but it wasn’t just them that used the lavish house, though.
Slightly more exciting for movie-lovers, perhaps, is the interiors and exteriors of the house featuring as the iconic Frankenstein Place, home of Dr Frank-N-Furter, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, while nearby Bray Studios was also utilised for the film, which became a huge hit, and to date, remains the quintessential horror comedy musical. One wonders what the ancient ghosts of Oakley Court made of Tim Curry strutting about in fishnets and corsets.
Also filmed at Oakley Court was the underrated 1974 horror Vampyres, with which Spanish filmmaker José Ramón Larraz hopped on the erotic lesbian vampire trope that Hammer had championed just a few years before with The Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil, taking inspiration from the novella Carmilla, while another underappreciated cult British horror, Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly, was written with Oakley Court in mind, which it subsequently used, adding to the mansion’s rich legacy.
But is Oakley Court itself haunted? Perhaps it’s the combination of its legacy as an old mansion and its frequent use in horror movies, but many people have experienced strange goings on while visiting or staying at the building, which is now a hotel. From unnerving noises and sightings to the feeling of a cold chill (they probably just forgot to turn the heating on), who knows what’s lurking inside the mansion, but, sure enough, it certainly lives up to its scary reputation.
