Night of the Demon

John Chard

You know, the devil has something here. Very pleasant. Dr. John Holden arrives in England to attend a paranormal convention where the recently deceased Professor Harrington had intended to expose Dr. Julian Karswell as being the leader of satanic cult. Upon learning of Harrington's death, Holden finds that the only link to the mysterious death and Karswell's alleged cult is an accused murderer called Rand Hobart, who is currently in a catatonic state. While Harrington's niece Joanna is convinced her uncle was felled by supernatural forces, Holden sets about debunking it all as pure hogwash. Something that may yet prove to be fatal to his well being? Prior to 1957, director Jacques Tourneur could boast on his résumé psychological horror classics I Walked With A Zombie & Cat People, the simmering pot boiling Western Canyon Passage and the rightly heralded film-noir piece that is Out Of The Past. He was in short the perfect choice to direct this loose adaptation of M.R. James' story "Casting the Runes". Why then? That producer Hal E. Chester chose to interfere and not let Tourneur have full rein to deliver a supernatural picture that is more about what you don't see is actually what scares you? Is open for scornful debate. The problem, and the source of much discussion over the years, concerns the demon of the title. Goofy looking and at once taking away the quizzical factor for the audience, Chester had the demon appear both at the beginning and the end of the piece. It was also featured heavily in the film's advertising material (it's on the poster for instance), which quite frankly killed off the minuscule chance the less than scary vision had of shocking the audience. It's now all the years later considered across the board that it would have been better to not have seen the demon at all, certainly at the least to not see it at the beginning of the film. Thankfully though, and with much credit to Tourneur, his team and the cast, Night Of The Demon is still a nerve pulling piece of work that shines bright today as a true classic horror picture. After the demon has shown its unremarkable face, we follow Holden (a knowingly effective and stoic turn from Dana Andrews) as he delves deeper into murky waters that he's convinced do not exist. Only to realise he's in a devilish trap laid by the creepy Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), a trap from which he must escape or face the dire consequence. The tension has been built up beautifully by Tourneur, tension given an added dimension by Ken Adam's spookily adroit set designs. So come the glorious train station finale, nobody can be quite sure what will happen, and this in spite of us knowing the existence of the said demon thanks to the appearance of "it" at the beginning. The film was cut by 12 minutes and retitled Curse Of the Demon for the American market, but both versions have readily been available in disc form in the US. Odd then that in the country where the film is proudly called one of its own better horror entries, it had to wait till 2010 for a home disc release! That is almost as criminal as Chester's insistence on the demon appearing at the start of the film. Only almost mind you. 9/10

FolknHell

*Night of the Demon* commits what ought to be a fairly serious horror-film mistake almost immediately: it shows us the demon. Not a shadow, not an uncertain shape in the trees, but the great medieval-looking brute itself. That means when John Holden arrives determined to explain away witchcraft, curses and Julian Carswell’s occult practices, we already know he is wrong. His professional scepticism occasionally becomes less “rational man investigating the inexplicable” and more “come on, John, do try to keep up”. Oddly, the film survives this beautifully. Partly that is because Jacques Tourneur turns Holden’s certainty into dramatic irony. We are not really waiting to discover whether the supernatural exists. We are watching a man’s intellectual defences being dismantled while a small slip of paper becomes increasingly difficult to get rid of. The film is full of spaces where things can be concealed, transferred or misunderstood: books, newspapers, pockets, train compartments, smoke. Even an enormous old-fashioned newspaper starts to look suspicious once you realise practically anything could be hiding inside it. It helps enormously that *Night of the Demon* is still astonishing to look at. Stonehenge, skeletal trees caught by headlights, the depth and geometry of Carswell’s house, the British Museum reading room, corridors, staircases and railway platforms all give the film a world of strong lines and deep spaces. The modern Britain of aeroplanes, cars and trains keeps colliding with something much older. Then Holden visits the farmhouse and the 1950s appear to drop away altogether. And at the centre is Niall MacGinnis’s Carswell, who may be the film’s greatest special effect. He can entertain children dressed as a clown, fuss around his mother and then become genuinely threatening almost without changing gear. His geniality makes the menace worse. Does it neatly satisfy every folk-horror criterion? Not really. Its community is dispersed, its threat is not straightforwardly born from the land, and much of the film behaves like an unusually elegant supernatural thriller. Yet the runes, witchcraft, inherited knowledge, Stonehenge, closed occult group and collision between modern rationalism and ancient belief are woven through its bones. Perhaps trying to prove the classification too tidily misses the point. *Night of the Demon* feels foundational because it understands one of folk horror’s most enduring anxieties: modernity can be perfectly confident that the old powers are nonsense. The old powers are under no obligation to agree. --- Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of Night of the Demon: folknhell com/night-ot-the-demon-review along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes.