Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (also released as Curse of the Demon) has slowly become one of my favorite horror films. Each time I watch it, I love it a little more.
Dana Andrews stars as Dr. Holden–stubborn, square-jawed, and smugly skeptical–who has come to England to help a colleague debunk the satanism practiced by Julian Karswell (Niall McGinniss) and his followers. But by the time Holden gets there, his friend is already dead, having spent the last few days of his life hounded by terror, convinced that the runes on the slip of paper Karswell passed him have set a demon upon him. (We’re convinced too, mostly because producer Hal E. Chetser insisted on toning down the ambiguity and shoehorning in an actual demon puppet. It is, to be fair, a pretty good demon puppet. It shouldn’t be there, but since it is, I’m glad it looks good: animalistic, wrathful, and steaming from the fires of hell.) Holden, too, soon meets Karswell, and he gets his own runes and appointed “night of the demon.” While he’s convinced–at least at first–that it’s nothing but a mind-game, his dead colleague’s niece, Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins), wants him to take it more seriously. And as the days pass and Holden sees more and more things he can’t easily explain, he starts to wonder too ….
McGinniss turns in the film’s finest performance, playing Karswell as a man who is genuinely enjoying his life and who is often amused by the scampering of the little creatures around him as they try to avoid the awful fates he’s determined for them. He’d probably make for good company. But neither McGinniss nor Tourneur ever forget that this man is terrifying, and some of the best, subtly unnerving parts of the movie are when his genteel surface is scratched. A simple conversation with Holden about Snakes and Ladders at first turns into a playful little “remember: Satanist!” jab and then becomes something far more unsettling:
“You see, if you land at the foot of the ladder you climb all the way to the top. But if you land on the head of the snake, you slide all the way down again. Funny thing, I always preferred sliding down the snakes to climbing up the ladders. You’re a doctor of psychology, you ought to know the answer to that.”
“Maybe you’re a good loser,” Holden offers.
Karswell smiles a little. “I’m not, you know,” he says, a warning Holden can’t quite hear. “Not a bit of it.”
No, he’s not.
The header image is from one of my favorite scenes, where an idyllic English countryside party Karswell is throwing for the local children turns on a dime into something else. The party is sincere–Karswell is having fun playing the local squire, doing magic tricks while dressed as a kind of hobo clown. It’s his old career, he tells Holden: he used to be “Bobo the Magnificent.” He seems to genuinely like entertaining the children, making them laugh and watching his mother serve them homemade ice cream. But when he needs to convince Holden that he’s serious, he casually calls up a terrifying windstorm that wrecks the party in an instant, and he enjoys that too. It’s the power that he likes, the confidence that he can give people a good time or a bad one as it suits him.
One of the film’s only natural, as opposed to studio-imposed, fumbles comes when it rushes to make sure we buy Holden’s competence by overselling Karswell on it. His final scene with Holden, set only minutes before Holden’s appointed death, is 98% perfect, but I simply don’t buy that he is, as Joanna and the film insist, afraid of Holden. So far, nothing has indicated that Holden could beat him at his own game. If anything, he has every reason to believe the eminently punchable Holden will go on denying what’s happening until it’s entirely too late–and in any case, Karswell is so self-satisfied that I have trouble imagining he’d deem anyone his equal at all. Having him fracture before he breaks doesn’t work for me, but if it’s an error, it’s only a slight one, and I suspect it’s partly there just as a contrivance to get everyone properly in place for the ending.
McGinniss may be the single biggest reason the film works, but he’s far from the only one. Almost everything here is excellent, from small lines from supporting characters (“He’s most dangerous when he’s being pleasant,” one of Holden’s colleagues says of both Karswell and the devil) to the masterful M.R. Jamesian tone to the scares. One of the reasons I knew I needed to see this film, years and years ago, was seeing a clip of the characters discovering that all the pages in Holden’s day planner had been torn out after the date of his appointed death; it’s subtle, plausibly deniable, and brilliant. I said the demon puppet was good as far as those things go, and the less concrete effects are even better, from the massive footprints pursuing Holden to that windstorm to the smoke and light materializing out of the trees. It’s all beautiful, thoughtful, and disquieting. I just watched it on Saturday, and writing this up already makes me want to watch it again.
Night of the Demon is streaming on Tubi, under the title Curse of the Demon.
