FEW names in horror command more respect than Hammer.
The director John Carpenter has said that seeing “The Curse of Frankenstein,” the first gothic hit by Hammer Film Productions, as a kid transformed him. Another esteemed veteran of the genre, Joe Dante, said the same movie lived up to its tag line promise to “haunt you forever.” And Martin Scorsese has described an obscure sequel, “Frankenstein Created Woman,” as “close to something sublime.”

What makes the enduring reputation of Hammer, the tiny British fantasy factory, even more impressive is that the company all but disappeared right as the horror genre boomed. Hammer struggled financially through much of the 1970s, ceasing production by the end of the decade. What’s more surprising perhaps is that since then reviving Hammer, built on sequels and remakes, has proven far more difficult than reanimating Frankenstein’s monster.

A group of admirers, including the director Richard Donner, looked into buying Hammer in the 1980s before discovering that it didn’t own many of its best-known properties. A consortium led by the art dealer Charles Saatchi did buy Hammer in 2000, announcing plans to make new films but never doing so. Then in 2007 Simon Oakes, a cable television executive who had noticed the frequency that Hammer was mentioned in the press, spearheaded the acquisition of the company’s film library and raised what was reported as $50 million to make new movies. His focus has not been on remaking Hammer movies, although he’s not ruling that out...