Horror As Folk: The Strange and Terrifying Secrets of Night of the Demon (1957)

If I continued with the films in the All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set, either Il Demonio or Dark Waters would be next up, but this was originally supposed to come out in October, and neither of those felt quite right for the Halloween season. So, we’re once more reaching beyond our remit to talk about Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon from 1957, which is perfect for Halloween, and even takes place in the days leading up to October 28, even though it was first released in December, which is closer to when this is going to actually see the light of day, thanks to various uninteresting behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

Also known as Curse of the Demon, this flick was the first feature film adapted from the works of classic ghost story writer M.R. James, specifically from his story “Casting the Runes.” In fact, screenwriter Charles Bennet actually bought the rights to the story from the James estate himself, hoping to direct the film as well as write it. A highly successful screenwriter from the 1930s, Bennett was known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, and had been called “Britain’s best known blood curdler.”

Ultimately, directing duties for the film, which was originally going to be called The Bewitched, landed in the capable hands of Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie). Tourneur notoriously and strenuously objected to actually showing the demon, arguing that it transformed Night of the Demon into a “teenager horror film” for the drive-in crowd. The appearance of the demon is probably the most controversial and contentious aspect of the film, with many agreeing with Tourneur that it robs power from an otherwise almost perfect picture.

In this case, however, I think Tourneur is wrong. The demon may look like an absolute goon, especially in close-up, but it is also one of the most iconic monster designs ever committed to film, and the picture would be considerably less memorable without it. Tourneur is dead on about the shoddiness of the cat scene, though.

So, is Night of the Demon folk horror? It’s one of the million or so movies mentioned in Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, so someone obviously thinks so, and it seems to meet all the criteria, at a glance, but when I brought it up to Stu Horvath, author of Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, he was pretty emphatic that it actually wasn’t, at least for him.

His reasoning mostly boiled down to something that Kat Ellinger also touches upon in an essay that accompanies the (incredible) Blu-ray release of the film from Indicator: the presence of Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) as the film’s antagonist. Though Karswell may be drawing from ancient sources of power, he is a thoroughly modern occultist, of a kind that, as Ellinger argues, was “mixing in high society circles” in England at the time when James was writing his original story.

The demon itself may be ancient, but the man weaponizing it is not a part of the “folk.” Besides a largely pointless sequence at Stonehenge, the only connection to a folk tradition that we really get in the film comes in the form of certain members of Karswell’s cult of the “True Belief.” Even then, they are not necessarily practicing rites that were passed down to them organically, but rather have been converted by Karswell after he translated a mysterious book and “unlocked the ancient mysteries of the occult through study and practice” – Ellinger’s words, again.

It is this “Crowleyesque” magus figure who arguably stands between the folk horror film and the occult horror picture. Like the real-life figures who inspired them, these characters are outsiders to the folk tradition from which they borrow, even though they claim to have found hidden truths within them, and often to be the only way to access such truths.

In this way, regardless of whether they are actually correct, the “charismatic magus” (Ellinger again) who is so often at the heart of the occult horror story, can be seen as engaging in a kind of cultural appropriation. Stealing knowledge from the folk traditions and then ransoming it back, sometimes to the people who actually originated it, which is exactly what Karswell is doing, as he points out that it is the money he collects from his followers that pays for his grand house and his extensive library of occult tomes. And ultimately, what could be more distinctly British than that?

Folk horror or not, though, Night of the Demon remains one of the greatest horror movies ever made. Tourneur may hate what the studio did to his masterpiece of suggestion and restraint, but for those of us who love the film as it is, what we get is a juxtaposition of two very different schools of filmmaking. A drive-in monster movie with the heart of an M.R. James story; a quiet tale about “the things which lurk within the deepest recesses of the imagination” (Ellinger again, last time I promise) that also flaunts those things in larger-than-life images. The result is a movie quite unlike any other, no matter what you choose to call it.