Tales From Development Hell: Night Creatures
- cepmurphywrites
- Apr 25
- 9 min read
By Ryan Fleming.
Since the birth of film censorship, the relationship between censors and film production companies has veered from vitriolic to chummy, depending on how intertwined the censors are to the industry and how much capital the production company commands. Even at the most contentious of relationships, however, it is very rare that a film can be completely abandoned by a production company at the behest of the censors before filming a single frame.
One exception to that is the attempt of Hammer Film Productions to adapt Richard Matheson’s 1954 post-apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend. The adaptation was to be called Night Creatures, adapted by Matheson himself, but in response to objections from the British Board of Film Classification, it was never made. Though the script was filmed and Hammer did release a picture entitled Night Creatures, neither were related.
Hammer had their horror breakthrough in 1955 with an adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s 1954 BBC television serial The Quatermass Experiment. Their adaptation was called The Quatermass Xperiment (1955). The misspelled title called direct attention to its X certificate rating from the BBFC, a case of a studio using their higher certification as a marketing ploy. More science fiction horrors would follow in the next few years: Quatermass 2 (1957), adapting another Kneale serial, and X the Unknown (1956), a very Quatermass-esque tale made when Kneale refused them permission to use his character. They would not have their Gothic horror breakthrough until 1957, with The Curse of Frankenstein. It would be followed by Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959). These pictures would be successful on both sides of the Atlantic, and the American studios soon went from Universal threatening to sue Hammer if Curse of Frankenstein bore any direct similarity to their old Frankenstein film series to scrambling to get the US distribution rights. Sequels to their most successful films soon followed, but unlike later these were not the majority of their horror output.
Night Creatures would have come at a time when Hammer films were not yet all in on Gothic horror. Had it been made, it might have altered the entire trajectory of the company’s output.
I Am Legend, despite being steeped in popular vampire mythology, actually bears a far closer resemblance to Hammer’s science fiction horrors, having allegories of contemporary anxieties, than their popular Gothic horrors. It would prove influential in both later zombie fiction and modern vampire fiction. In retrospect, it seems an atypical option for Hammer given their stereotypical output. It’s worthwhile remember, however, that during the during this period Hammer would still do more than just lurid Technicolor Gothic horrors. They also ran a line of lurid Technicolor swashbuckling adventures and would later begin a line of lurid black-and-white thrillers 'inspired by' (ripping off) Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).
Hammer brought Richard Matheson over to the UK in 1957 to adapt his own novel. (Matheson was already coming off a successful adaptation of his own work in the shape of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) when contacted by Hammer.) It’s interesting to consider the prospect of Hammer adapting both Dracula and I Am Legend back-to-back, the traditional vampire novel and its modern progeny. The latter even features a scene in which the main character, Robert Neville, casts aside a copy of Bram Stoker’s novel.
Night Creatures would be just as free in adapting the source material as was Dracula, including a change in location. Anyone familiar with both I Am Legend and Hammer’s horror oeuvre will have thought of a way Matheson’s novel stands out with all the other works: it is very, very American and set in Los Angeles. The rest of Hammer’s output was very, very British. Even their films which featured American leads like the Quatermass films (to Kneale’s chagrin) were based on UK television serials. American producers even corresponded with their Hammer opposite numbers once the UK studio began making films with specific mind for US distribution as to how much American audiences might have a problem with British accents.
In a compromise between the source material and production, the location of The Night Creatures was changed from Los Angeles to Canada, presumably because the location could conceivably have a mix of both North American and British accents. This being amenable, Hammer promised Universal a picture for distribution under the name Night Creatures. They had a script, had likely settled on a director, and even a star, and had a US distributor all lined up. Then, the censors became involved.
The exact objection that the BBFC had to Matheson’s Night Creatures script is unknown. The end result is the same, but it is worthwhile to speculate on some of the material the BBFC found objectionable.
Perhaps it was the corpses littering the street outside Neville’s house at the end of the film. Perhaps it was the torture of a shackled female vampire. Perhaps it was a communal fire for the bodies of plague victims, including Neville’s daughter. Maybe it was Neville frequently referring to the vampires as “bastards”. Could have even been the contemporary setting bringing such horrors home than if it had been set in some indistinct period between Napoleon’s defeat and Franz Ferdinand’s assassination.
The most likely answer is that they objected to every single aspect of the script. It wouldn’t have been some notes that to which Hammer would have probably acquiesced. The BBFC were outright refusing to certify any film made from that script. The Motion Picture Association of America were equally unimpressed, if more muted, in their response to the film. Hammer, rather than protest or commission a complete rewrite, abandoned the project.
However, Hammer were nothing if not an efficient, some might say cheap, producer of motion pictures. When told by the BBFC they could not make a Gothic horror about the Spanish Inquisition, despite having already commissioned set designs, the studio simply changed the setting of their adaptation of Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris from France to Spain as The Curse of the Werewolf (1961). Hammer had still promised Universal a picture entitled Night Creatures, and they would deliver. It would not be an adaptation of I Am Legend, however. Nor a vampire film. Nor even, strictly speaking, a horror film. With only the most tangential amount of relevance, Hammer’s pirate adventure adaptation of Russell Thorndike’s Doctor Syn: A Tale of Romney Marsh, Captain Clegg (1962), was renamed Night Creatures for its US release!
It received mostly positive reviews then and now but sticks out as an oddity when often packaged with Hammer’s horror films. However, Hammer did have a line of swashbuckling adventures at the time with likes of The Pirates of Blood River (1961) and The Scarlet Blade (1963). One aspect of Night Creatures that is shared with Captain Clegg is its star. Peter Cushing, already Hammer’s most frequent lead actor along with Christopher Lee, was likely first in line to have played Robert Neville in the original version of Night Creatures.
Matheson’s screenplay itself was sold for shortly after production was abandoned to American producer Robert L. Lippert. Lippert had been keen to make a film about the “last man on Earth” and to that end had tried to adapt George R. Stewart’s novel Earth Abides unsuccessfully in the late 1950s. That desire would carry all the way through to the title of the eventual adaptation: The Last Man on Earth (1964). Vincent Price would star as a renamed Robert Morgan in this American-Italian co-production. Matheson, dissatisfied with changes made to his script, was credited under the pseudonym Logan Swanson. Per Matheson, Lippert had told him the film would be directed by the legendary German filmmaker Fritz Lang, calling eventual director Sidney Sallow “a bit of a drop.” He also felt Price was miscast. Unsuccessful in its original release, it has since found an appreciation with the passage of time.
I Am Legend would be adapted twice more: The Omega Man (1971), with Charlton Heston, an action driven picture, and as I Am Legend (2007), with Will Smith, an adaptation noted for its own development hell.
The relationship between Hammer and Matheson would resume when the author would adapt Dennis Wheatley’s Satanic horror novel The Devil Rides Out in 1968. By then, Hammer was very committed to Gothic horror as their bread and butter. How might it have been different if they had made Night Creatures?
It’s actually a difficult prospect to have Matheson’s script produced by Hammer when it was originally intended. The outright rejection of it by the BBFC would have required time to edit, and Hammer were not prone to extended development when they could start filming something now.
Maybe the easiest way is if the BBFC are asleep at the switch when the script is submitted. Even that essentially required the entire BBFC to be asleep at the switch all the way up to its premier. Perhaps the circumstances could exist in which people are distracted, but creating political instability or worsening the contemporary economic downturn feels like hammering a nail with a sledgehammer.
Perhaps if the whole endeavour had been delayed by 12-18 months. By that time, Hammer’s Dracula would have been released (ironically, this British film would be released in the US – as Horror of Dracula – a full fortnight before it’s London premier) and an appetite for Hammer’s horror on both sides of the Atlantic, proving Curse of Frankenstein wasn’t just a fluke, would have evidence to back it up. The BBFC and Hammer had been chummy in the past (“Look at our X certificate!”), they could be again. “Listen, mate, we’ll do what we need to get an X certificate over here, but you’ve seen how those classless Yanks love all this blood and guts. If we don’t make it, Universal will, and what will that do for the economy of dear old Blighty?”
Hammer really did earn that Queen’s Award to Industry, after all. We can only speculate what might be changed to placate the BBFC, and whether two cuts might emerge, a UK one and a more overtly gruesome US one. In such circumstances the US print would likely be a holy grail to UK fans.
Even if it was sanitised as much as it could be, the release of the film would likely still be controversial. Maybe instead of R v Penguin Books Ltd over Lady Chatterly’s Lover it’s R v Hammer Film Productions with prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones asking the jury if Night Creatures is the sort of film that they’d want their wives or servants to see. An extreme possibility, but any controversy that is generated will likely just encourage the public to see it more. Remember, there was good reason Hammer so proudly leveraged their X certificates into marketing gimmicks. Of course, it is also possible that any version that can be made is defanged enough that the script still winds up credited to Logan Swanson, but some of the ideas in Matheson’s script are so ahead of their time that it’s better to speculate otherwise.
The notion of a lone man wandering a deserted metropolis was already present in literature between I Am Legend and John Wyndham’s earlier post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids. Night Creatures would even come before the BBC had deserted streets of London crawling with Daleks and Cybermen for Doctor Who in the 1960s. Peter Cushing, a man already familiar to Hammer fans for his characters’ inhuman experiments and staking of vampires, would be treated to a far more desperate interpretation of those actions in Night Creatures. It would create, or rather allow to continue, another strand of Hammer, namely science fiction horrors. That might see them adapt Kneale’s third Quartermass serial, Quatermass and the Pit, earlier than 1967; or them following through with adapting the Fred Hoyle/John Elliot serial A for Andromeda after its original BBC broadcast in 1961. It also might completely alter the development of both the zombie film and later vampire films. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) was heavily inspired by I Am Legend, and in an amazing coincidence one of the most haunting lines of that film appears a decade earlier in Matheson’s Night Creatures script: “Another one for the fire.”
Despite any controversy it might generated, Night Creatures would have been a transformative picture for Hammer and for horror (and science fiction) films in general. It never happened, and the reason it’s so difficult to imagine the circumstances in which it could have happened, is because the censors bluntly told them “No.”
The legacy of I Am Legend can still be seen today later films like 28 Days Later (2002) and its sequels, or in-development sequel to the 2007 adaptation with Will Smith. Hammer Film Productions could have become the definitive take on the novel.
It was not to be, unfortunately, but we still have these glimpses into what could have been. The aforementioned Last Man on Earth, Night of the Living Dead, but also Hell Is a City (1960), a crime thriller film made by Val Guest, likely director of Night Creatures, and filmed on location in Manchester. This gives an indication of how the film might have looked. There’s also Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), which opens on the deserted streets of London and portrays the sheer desperation of an apocalyptic scenario that would have played out in Night Creatures.
In another world, we might have had an increasingly deranged Peter Cushing prowling the streets of some Canadian city, staking all the “bastards” until they lie in great piles outside his home.
“Another one for the fire.”
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.
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