Folk Horror Season: Night of the Demon (Dir Jacques Tourneur, 1h35m, 1957)

The term "folk horror" first appears in print in KineWeekly to discuss the luridly named The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), then being made under the title of The Devil's Touch. The idea of folk horror largely stems from the survival of paganism explored in the non-fiction work of E. B. Tylor and James Frazer, especially Frazer's multi-volume work The Golden Bough (first published 1890). From here, inspired by Frazer's study, fiction writers, including M. R. James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and Algernon Blackwood's The Great God Pan, works that explored the survival of often sinister pre-Christian religions and cults, appeasing dark gods and supernatural forces with human sacrifices in the hinterlands of rural and remote communities.

Cinema, led by the British, was never far away, and the folk horror film, like the novel, has tramped its way across Hebridean islands, through American cornfields, on "death-trips" through Wisconsin, and through English fields, fascinating-and thrilling- generations of filmgoers. Over the next four weeks, we will join this strange and brilliant cult, discuss four films, from the iconic The Wicker Man, to the modern classic, the claustrophobic The Lighthouse to the beautiful, and bizarre Icelandic entry to this strange pantheon, Lamb. Where better to start a tale, though than at the beginning, with the 1957 adaption of M.R. James' "Casting the Runes"(1911), in Jaques Tourneur's Night of the Demon, a tale of demons, pagan occultism, and belief.

Night of the Demon takes some liberties with James' story; both focus around a black magician named Karswell, who uses the power of ancient runes to curse his fellow man to death, but in Charles Bennett's script, this has transformed into a battle between magic, and the occult, represented by Karswell, (played as equal parts charming and ruthless by Irish actor Niall MacGinnis) against science and logic, represented by the figure of academic John Holden (Dana Andrews). Before Holden has even arrived on the scene, Karswell has had a hand in the mysterious death of his previous rival, Harrington (Maurice Denham), thus leading to his niece, Joanna, (Peggy Cummins) joining Holden to get to the bottom of her uncle's death.

Searching for answers, so the trail takes them from the Reading Room of the British Museum in search of a text, to Karswell's residence where, in MacGinnis' best scenes, he displays his charms-and considerable powers. Confronted by the magician's threats and hexes, so the film transforms into a tense, and often, even for 21st Century audiences, a remarkably frightening tale turned race for survival, as the film considers the nature of the occult and to what degree its supernatural threats are real. Much of this comes from the sterling work of director Jacques Tourneur, already a master of matching noirish sensibility-strip away the supernatural, and this is a tale of blackmail, power and above all, atmosphere. Night of the Demon is dripping in it, making the most of the spell it casts to scare in effective setpieces. 

Moreover, as Tourner's previous works: Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) capture, Night of the Demon largely hinges on whether you are a believer, as the locals who have joined Karswell's cult in the English countryside have become-another common thread in the decades of folk horror to come-or believe that it is a trick, to con the easily superstitious. Even in the face of what seems to be proof, such as the seance in which Harrington is seemingly conjured up-and in so doing gives Kate Bush the opening sample to the title track on her supernaturally-inflected album, Hounds of Love-Holden stands his ground and remains a sceptic. It's a tension that, to one degree or another, every film in the genre has replicated, to varying degrees of success.

This delicate balancing act, this sense of the film's superbly pitched tension between the occult and the scientific, as to what is real and what is imagined, is fatally undermined by the film's bookends, the only time where the film feels dated. That these caused bitter disagreements between director and scriptwriter in one camp, and producer Hal E. Chester, going for more sensationalist, on the other, Chester attempting to bring on his Beast from 20,000 Fathoms effects man, Ray Harryhausen. Worse, Chester would hatchet off a full ten minutes of the film post-production for its first UK and later US release, cutting many of the scenes that best built the atmosphere in pay to cheap scares and jumps, only released uncut on the continent. All of this would lead to Bennett, in perhaps the most blood-curdling thing I'll recount this season, threatening to murder the producer should he ever see him again.

Yet, despite its surrounding juvenilia, at its heart Night of the Demon remains a masterful entry in British horror cinema, and the genre at large; it has become, as horror at its best can become, beloved, a masterclass in creating a tone, a sense of the supernatural roaming the English countryside, from a director who knew how to balance the real and the imagined, as the forces of reason, and of the occult, do battle among the rune-scratched stones.

Rating: Must See

Night of the Demon is available via streaming on AppleTV, and on DVD and BluRay from Indicator in the UK and via streaming on AppleTV, and on DVD from Sony in the USA

Next week, we continue on the folk horror trail, and arrive in Summerisle, for the towering horror masterpiece that is The Wicker Man.