Unfilmed Hammer: All Hallows' Eve

Charles Walter Stansby Williams was a poet, novelist, playwright, theologian, academic and friend of T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis. At no point did he ever present The Golden Shot or appear on The Comedians. In 1945, the year of his death, the academic Williams had published, by Faber & Faber, All Hallows’ Eve. The novel is back in print from Regent College Publishing.

The end of the war; Lester Furnival is killed by a falling plane; it surprises her to realise this. The London she experiences after her death is almost empty of people but she finds her friend Evelyn, also dead. Lester’s widower, Richard, has an artist friend, Jonathan, who has a fiancée, Betty, who has a domineering mother, Lady Wallingford, who has an earthly god: a preacher called Simon Leclerc, “Father Simon”. Jonathan has painted a portrait of Father Simon which is unwittingly so unflattering (he looks like an idiot; his followers like beetles) that Lady Wallingford immediately storms out, telling Betty never to see the artist again. Simon turns up late at night to view Jonathan’s portrait of him. He is struck by the truth of it and says something strange: “No one has painted me so well for a hundred years.” Wandering the dark London streets, Simon remembers his past. He is a necromancer, born a member of the nobility in Paris not long before the Revolution. Betty is his daughter. Sometimes, at night, he hypnotises her and sends her out into the purgatorial city to gather news about the future. In that city, Lester and Evelyn hear Betty calling out for Jonathan. They follow her back to where her unconscious body lies in Lady Wallingford’s house. Richard seeks out Simon’s place of preaching where he discovers he has a reputation as a healer. Lady Wallingford recalls years before when Simon, her lover, had conducted a magical act and subdivided himself into three, sending the copies of himself to preach in Russia and China. Betty is able to see and communicate with Lester. Richard is now sure that Lester’s spirit lives on. Simon plans to kill Betty by magic and steal away her physical body, leaving her spirit to do his bidding in the purgatorial city. Lester’s presence thwarts his spell. Simon makes Evelyn his spy in the purgatorial city. He conjures and presents her with a dwarfish homunculus in which he wants to trap Lester’s soul. Lester is able to gain control of the homunculus and uses it to make contact with Richard, Jonathan and Betty. They go to return the homunculus (which now contains Evelyn’s bitter, fearful soul) to Simon and to give him the portrait of him and his beetle-like followers. It is All Hallows’ Eve. Simon sets out to kill Betty by stabbing a manikin that he has made of her. The ritual goes wrong and Lady Wallingford is badly injured. When Richard, Jonathan and Betty enter Simon’s house all of the diseases and deformities suffered by those he had “cured” are suddenly revisited upon them. The panicking victims rush to seek out Simon. The homunculus/Evelyn struggles to penetrate the magical protection that Simon has built around himself but, accompanied by Betty, succeeds in getting in. Simon tries to stab Betty but Lady Wallingford unwittingly prevents him. The two copies of Simon return to their source and he tries to unite with them as he is – frankly, I’ve no idea what is supposed to happen to him at the end – cast into hell maybe? Bitter Evelyn returns to purgatory, Lester goes to heaven (presumably), Lady Wallingford is reduced to mental infancy in which she will have to be cared for by Betty who now has the power to heal her father’s invalids.

I’m not sure I have the words to convey how much I despise this novel. It’s like being stuck in a lift for days with a smug, self-congratulating Christian who won’t stop going on about how right they are about their spiritual beliefs for which there isn’t even Biblical evidence while stroking themselves to a bland orgasm. The city-within-the-city stuff might have been interesting but all of the characters are either one-note evil, one-note goody-goody or, in the sole case of Evelyn, one-note mildly unpleasant. We also get treated to some ugly anti-Semitism which is doubly horrible because of when it was written. Simon is a crudely-stereotyped Jew. Jews are described as “… the race which had been set aside for the salvation of the world [but] became a judgment and even a curse to the world and to themselves.”

I have no idea what Hammer thought they were going to do with this stuff. Maybe someone with the flair of Michael Powell could have created an intriguing, ethereal visual feast back in the 1940s. But The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films dates Hammer’s project to 1990 while Last Bus to Bray has it as part of Roy Skeggs’ 1987 announcement, which means it would probably be horribly dated as well. Part of me is amused at the thought of all of the Christian stuff being ditched in order to create an actual horror movie but you’d have to make the characters significantly more interesting to make this a compelling watch.