Night of the Demon (1957)

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Night of the Demon (1957)

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Night of the Demon (1957)

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Savant champions a lot of genre movies but only once in a while does one come out like Jacques Tourneur's superlative Curse of the Demon. It's simply better than the rest – an intelligent horror film with some very good scares. It occupies a stylistic space that sums up what's best in ghost stories and can hold its own with most any supernatural film ever made. Oh, it's also a great entertainment that never fails to put audiences at the edge of their seats.

What's more, Columbia TriStar has shown uncommon respect for their genre output by including both versions of Curse of the Demon on one disc. Savant has full coverage on the versions and their restoration below, following his thorough and analytical (read: long-winded and anal) coverage of the film itself.
~ Glenn Erickson

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Night of the Demon (1957)

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Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), a scientist and professional debunker of superstitious charlatans, arrives in England to help Professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham) assault the phony cult surrounding Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall McGinnis). But Harrington has mysteriously died and Holden becomes involved with his niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins), who thinks Karswell had something to do with it. Karswell's 'tricks' confuse the skeptical Holden, but he stubbornly holds on to his conviction that he's " … not a sucker, like 90% of the human race." That is, until the evidence mounts that Harrington was indeed killed by a demon summoned from Hell, and that Holden is the next intended victim!

The majority of Horror films are fantasies where we accept supernatural ghosts, demons and monsters as part of a deal we've made with the authors: They dress the fantasy in an attractive guise and arrange the variables into an interesting pattern, and we agree to play along for the sake of enjoyment. When it works the movies can resonate with personal meaning. Even though Dracula and Frankenstein are unreal, they are relevant because they're aligned with ideas and themes in our subconscious.

Horror films that seriously confront the no-man's land between rational reality and supernatural belief have a tough time of it. Everyone who believes in God knows the tug-o-war between rationality and faith in our culture has become so clogged with insane belief systems it's considered impolite to dismiss people who believe in flying saucers or the powers of crystals or little glass pyramids. One of Dana Andrews' key lines in Curse of the Demon, defending his dogged skepticism against those urging him to have an open mind, is his retort, "If the world is a dark place ruled by Devils and Demons, we all might as well give up right now." Curse of the Demon balances itself between skepticism and belief with polite English manners, letting us have our fun as it lays its trap. We watch Andrews roll his eyes and scoff at the feeble seance hucksters and the dire warnings of a foolish-looking necromancer while letting a whole dark world of horror sneak up on him. The film is so intelligent that we're not offended by its advocacy of dark forces or even its literal, in-your-face demon.

Curse of the Demon is a remarkable film, made in England for Columbia but gloriously unaffected by that company's zero-zero track record with horror films. Producer Hal E. Chester would seem an odd choice to make a horror classic after producing Joe Palooka films and acting as a criminal punk in dozens of teen crime movies. The obvious strong cards are writer Charles Bennett, the brains behind several classic English Hitchcock pictures (who 'retired' into a meaningless bliss writing for schlockmeister Irwin Allen) and Jacques Tourneur, a master stylist who put Val Lewton on the map with Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie. Tourneur made very interesting Westerns (Canyon Passage, Great Day in the Morning) and perhaps the best romantic film noir, Out of the Past. By the late '50s he was on what Andrew Sarris in his American Film called 'a commercial downgrade' where the critic ignorantly lumped Curse of the Demon in with low budget American turkeys like The Fearmakers.

Put Tourneur with an intelligent script, a decent cameraman and more than a minimal budget and great things could happen. We're used to watching Corman Poe films, English Hammer films and Italian Bavas and Fredas, all the while making excuses for the shortcomings that keep them in the genre ghetto (where they all do quite well, thank you). There's even a veiled resentment of upscale shockers like The Innocents because they have resources (money, time, great actors) denied our favorite toilers in the genre realm. Curse of the Demon is above all those considerations. It has name actors past their prime and reasonable resources. Its own studio (at least in America) released it like a genre quickie, double-billed with drek like The Night the World Exploded and The Giant Claw. They cut it by 13 minutes, changed its title (to ape The Curse of Frankenstein?) and released a poster featuring a huge, slavering demon monster that some say originally was supposed to be barely glimpsed in the film itself.

Horror movies can work on more than one level but Curse of the Demon handles several levels and then some. The narrative sets up John Holden as a professional skeptic who raises a smirking eyebrow to the open minds of his colleagues. Unlike most second-banana scientists in horror films, they express divergent points of view. Holden just sees himself as having common sense but his peers are impressed by the consistency of demonological beliefs through history. Maybe they all saw Christensen's Witchcraft through the Ages, which might have been a primer for Charles Bennett. Smart dialogue allows Holden to score points by scoffing at the then-current "regression to past lives" scams popularized by the Bridey Murphy craze. 3 While Holden stays firmly rooted to his position, coining smart phrases and sarcastic put-downs of believers, the other scientists are at least willing to consider other possibilities. Indian colleague K.T. Kumar (Peter Elliott) keeps his opinions to himself. But when asked, he politely states that he believes entirely in the world of demons!

Holden may think he's got the truth by the tail but it takes Kindergarten teacher Joanna Harrington (played by Peggy Cummins of Gun Crazy fame) to show him that being a skeptic doesn't mean ignoring facts in front of one's face. Always ready for a drink (a detail added to tailor the part to Andrews?), Holden spends the first couple of reels as interested in pursuing Miss Harrington as he is the devil-worshippers. The details and coincidences pile up with alarming speed – the disappearing ink untraceable by the lab, the visual distortions that might be some form of hypnosis, the pages torn from his date book and the parchment of runic symbols that Holden believes to be props in a conspiracy to draw him into a vortex of doubt and fear. Holden even gets a bar of sinister music stuck in his head. It's the title theme – is this a joke on movie soundtracks? Is he being set up the way a Voodoo master cons his victim, by being told he will die, with fabricated clues to make it all appear real?

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Night of the Demon (1957)

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Night of the Demon (1957)

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