The Scare Salon

Jacques Tourneur is a name that should be well-known to serious horror fans; he’s often hailed in that community for directing a handful of the classic RKO horror pictures of the 1940s: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man. I had seen those films previously, but for whatever reason, I had never got around to watching his later and equally iconic 1957 movie, Night of the Demon, which often appears on many “best horror movies of the 1950s” lists. So I figured it was about time to rectify this grievous oversight.

The film was retitled Curse of the Demon in the United States, ostensibly to discourage confusion with The Night of the Iguana, the play by Tennessee Williams that was later turned into a film. This story doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, though, because Tourneur’s movie came out in the US in 1958, but The Night of the Iguana wasn’t published until 1961, and the film version wasn’t released until 1964. But whatever.

Night of the Demon is a loose retelling of the popular M.R. James short story from 1911, “Casting the Runes,” which has been adapted for radio and television numerous times. This version takes liberties for sure, and expands the tale out quite a bit, but the broad outlines of the story are more or less the same.

At the beginning, an academic named Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham of Countess Dracula) is desperately begging a magician and sect leader named Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis, who played Zeus in Jason and the Argonauts) to remove a curse that’s been placed on the hapless professor. Evidently, Harrington had been investigating Karswell’s black magic cult, and Karswell didn’t take too kindly to the scrutiny. Harrington basically says that he didn’t believe any of this Satanic nonsense was true, but now he knows better, so how about just backing off on the whole death curse thing, pretty please with black candles on top?

Karswell asks him about a piece of parchment that he gave the Professor earlier, and Harrington says it flung itself into the fireplace and burned to ashes. Karswell is all, “Well, I’ll see what I can do,” but apparently it’s too late to reverse the curse (sorry, couldn’t resist), because Harrington is set upon on his way home by a gigantic and terrifying demon that comes toward him on a cloud of smoke and causes him to smash his car into a bunch of power lines, thereby electrocuting him.

Just a bit of an aside here. I had seen clips of the demon attack(s) from this movie before, and the creature itself is even pictured on some versions of the box art nowadays, so it’s not like the monster’s appearance is a big shocker to modern audiences. But I was always under the impression that the demon wasn’t revealed until the end, so when I watched the movie, I was really surprised that the creature is shown so early in the film. I’m still not sure how I feel about this situation, and as I was watching, I kept going back and forth on it.

According to movie lore, director Jacques Tourneur absolutely hated the idea of showing the demon at all, as he wanted to leave the story more ambiguous, but the producers of the film thought that by showing the audience pretty much immediately that the curse was real, it would increase the dread and tension when the main protagonist subsequently gets on the wrong side of the same curse.

I think I’m going to side slightly more with Tourneur on this one, though I don’t agree that the demon shouldn’t have been shown at all, especially because the monster design looks so cool (fun fact: Ray Harryhausen was initially slated to create the demon, but scheduling conflicts meant that the task fell to production designer Ken Adam). In my opinion, the movie would have worked even better if the reality of the curse was left in question until the very end, when the demon was finally revealed, big as life and twice as ugly. That said, I can see the argument for the other option too, though I will say that playing the demon hand so early in the movie kind of had the unintended effect of making the skeptical main character look like a smug idiot whose refusal to consider the possibility of the supernatural had him blundering cluelessly into danger and being a real condescending douche about it to boot. Anyway.

The aforementioned condescending douche is named Dr. John Holden, and he’s played by Dana Andrews, who I recognized from the excellent and sadly underrated 1965 black comedy The Loved One. Shortly after Professor Harrington’s death, Holden arrives in England to attend a conference at which Harrington was supposed to speak about Karswell’s cult; Harrington and Holden were colleagues who were working along the same lines.

Holden is shocked to learn of Harrington’s death, which of course is being explained away as a freak accident. He attends the funeral and there meets Harrington’s comely niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins), who believes wholeheartedly that Karswell had something to do with her uncle’s demise. She even gives Holden her uncle’s journal, in which he wrote about some weird paranormal shit that happened to him, and how he’d become convinced that Karswell had indeed targeted him with a death curse.

Naturally, Holden pooh-poohs all of this, mansplaining to Joanna that if someone believes strongly enough that they’ve been cursed, then their own psychosomatic belief might be the thing that kills them, but that Satanic curses and black magic are absolutely not real.

After Holden decides to continue Harrington’s investigation into Karswell, though, eerie little things start to happen. For example, Karswell approaches Holden in the reading room of the British Museum, offering to lend Holden a copy of a rare occult book he’s looking for. To this end, Karswell hands Holden a visiting card with his address printed on it, but which also contains a handwritten message that seems to be low-key threatening Holden that his time is running out. Later on, though, the handwriting has disappeared, and rigorous scientific testing reveals absolutely no trace of it. Additionally, Holden discovers that all the pages of his date book after a certain date have been ripped out, almost as though he’s not going to be needing a calendar after that particular time because he’ll be, y’know, dead.

Joanna tells Holden that her uncle had the same thing happen to him; the pages in his date book were also mysteriously ripped out after a certain date, and that date also happened to be the day that Harrington died. Again, Holden isn’t having it; he says that Harrington’s dying on that particular day was either a strange coincidence, or a case of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Holden actually goes to see Karswell at his palatial estate, and while the magician is genteel and cordial, he doesn’t try to hide the fact that yep, he totally summoned a demon to curse Holden, and tells him directly that he’s going to die in three days if he doesn’t knock off the investigation. To prove that he has powers, he even stirs up a magical cyclone while he and Holden are in the garden, but Holden still isn’t convinced, thinking it’s all just parlor tricks.

In Harrington’s diary, Holden discovers that before the professor’s death, he was passed a piece of parchment with runic symbols on it without his knowledge; this was the scrap of paper that got burned in the fire at the beginning of the movie. Joanna persuades Holden to see if Karswell passed him a similar parchment, and lo and behold, it turns out that Karswell slipped one surreptitiously into Holden’s papers while he was at the British Museum. The parchment whips itself out of Holden’s hand and tries to incinerate itself in the fireplace, but is thwarted by the metal screen, so Holden stows the scrap in his pocket, just in case.

There’s also a sort of silly scene where Karswell’s mother organizes a séance that Holden and Joanna attend, at which the deceased Professor Harrington apparently communicates through a medium, warning Holden that the curse is real and that he needs to find Karswell’s translation of the runic symbols. Even though Holden thinks the séance is unmitigated horseshit, he agrees to go with Joanna and straight up break into Karswell’s house to find the translated book.

Holden gets busted, though, and not only that, but he gets attacked in Karswell’s study by a sweet kitty named Greymalkin who appears to be a panther for a few brief seconds. Karswell claims the whole thing was done using magic, but Holden is still maintaining his skeptical stance, despite all evidence to the contrary. As Holden leaves the house, Karswell magnanimously offers to turn all the outside lights on so Holden can use the driveway to return to his car, but the stubborn Holden prefers to go through the woods, since that’s the way he approached (his only superstition, he explains, is going back the same way he came, which seems a tad random). Karswell warns him against venturing into the woods, but Holden doesn’t listen, and predictably, he is chased by the creepy smoke configuration and high-pitched crickety noise that preceded the demon during its initial appearance.

Holden is still carrying on the investigation into Karswell, and in the course of said investigation, he and his colleagues hypnotize a catatonic man named Rand Hobart, who was a member of Karswell’s cult. Under hypnosis, he tells the assembled people that he was also chosen for death and passed a parchment, but that he avoided said death by sneaking the paper back to the person who gave it to him. Holden then shows him the parchment he received and asks him about it, but Hobart flips the fuck out, thinking Holden is trying to give it to him, thus restarting the curse, presumably. But then, in a completely nonsensical move, he tears off down the hall and leaps out a window to his death. So he wouldn’t take the parchment because it meant that he would die, but then he goes and yeets himself off a building and dies anyway? Seems sort of counterproductive, man.

Well, the whole “being chased by clearly supernatural smoke in the woods” situation has FINALLY gotten Holden on board with the reality that he is, in fact, the recipient of a death curse, but now, thanks to Hobart, he has the knowledge of how to combat it. Time is running short, however; he only has a few hours before he’s supposed to die. He finds out that Karswell is going to be taking a train to Southampton that evening, and what’s more, also discovers that the wily old magician has bewitched Joanna into coming with him, likely as insurance. Holden manages to get on the train just as it’s leaving the station, and there’s then a bit of back and forth in the train compartment, with Holden trying to return the parchment to Karswell without the suspicious Satanist figuring it out. The tetchy Karswell refuses to take anything Holden tries to hand him, like a matchbook or what have you, and hustles to get off the train at the next stop, but it so happens that Holden was able to sneak the rune paper into the pocket of Karswell’s overcoat, so after the magician hops off the train, the demon comes streaking down the tracks in the movie’s coolest and most impressive sequence, and attacks the cult leader. It’s implied (I think) that no one can actually see the demon except for the person that it’s coming after, so Karswell’s death is explained away as him getting run over by the train and dragged along the tracks. So the demon must have really mangled the dude.

This was definitely one of the better horror films from the 1950s, and though it’s not really all that scary by today’s standards and it’s pretty easy to see where it’s going, I found myself really enjoying it. Dr. Holden is a bit bland and also infuriatingly pompous, at least until he twigs onto the fact that an actual demon is gunning for his ass, but I liked that Joanna didn’t take any shit from him and told him off multiple times for being a conceited jackwagon. Niall MacGinnis was also delightful as the villainous Karswell, charismatic and sinister without going over the top. I could have done without the séance scene, which seemed as though it was only there for some mild comic relief and conveyed information that the audience pretty much already knew, but I didn’t mind it all that much. I also wish the demon hadn’t been shown at the beginning of the movie so that viewers would have cause to doubt whether the curse was real or not, before being blindsided by the big shocking reveal at the end of this massive, medieval-looking demon approaching down the train tracks, which again looks just awesome. But these are minor nitpicks, and it’s plain to see why this film is so revered in horror history. It’s not quite as atmospheric or stylish as Tourneur’s 1940s films, but it’s still a classic.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.