Night of the Demon 1957

Night of the Demon (or Curse of the Demon as it was called in The US, more on that later) is a 1957 British horror starring Dana Andrews as John Holden who strongly opposes all things supernatural.  He travels to England to disprove claims made by a deceased colleague about a Satanic cult.  The cult is led by Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) who summoned a demon to kill Holden's deceased colleague.  It is through the deceased diary that is given to Holden by the man's niece, Joanna (Peggy Cummins) that the man feared Karswell's power.  Holden decides to go speak to Karswell to get to the bottom of his colleagues death.  Karswell tells Holden that he will die in three days. 

There is not a bad acting job to be found in this film.  Everyone is convincing and the seance scene is surprisingly creepy.  The sophistication that this movie is crafted with absolutely astounds me every time I see it.  MacGinnis plays his character so well that you can't believe if he is a Satanic cult leader or not, he is, but he's so good at it you don't know that he is especially when we see him playing a clown at a child's Halloween party.  There's some really great interactions between him and Andrews.  Speaking of interactions, Andrews and Cummins have some really great scenes as well.  The demon that we see a few times in the film is really well done.  The visual effect almost didn't appear in the film which would have been criminal.  Producer and screenwriter Hal E. Chester wanted to put the demon in but everyone else including the director Jacques Tourneur, co-writer Charles Bennet, and even Dana Andrews himself didn't want it in.  I'm so glad it was included; I cannot imagine how this film would have been if they had not included it. 

Now for what didn't work and a couple of things didn't, let's face it some effect techniques were still fairly raw in the 1950's.  There is a scene where Andrews is attacked by a a leopard or cheetah or something like that and some of the time you can clearly see it's just a stuffed animal.  The other part comes when a piece of paper that has a curse written in runes on it takes on a life of it's own and starts to move on it's own.  Or is it blowing in the wind?  Either way it's being pulled around by an obvious piece of string or fishing line or something really visible.  That's the only negatives I have for this one; everything else is perfection.  I give it a real modest 4 Stonehenges out of 5.  It's really close to a 4 and a half if not for those two effects blunders.  Denise, The Horror Honey gives it 3 and a half.

Oh, I forgot to mention a few things; the movie was called Curse of the Demon in the U.S. and it was edited down from 95 minutes to just 81 minutes.  One of my favorite scenes, the seance was cut out as well as the scenes at Stonehenge.  Now, I've never seen the shorter version but I can't imagine it can be better so I will stick with the one I've always seen although I do own both versions.  The other point I wanted to make is this film is very much cemented in my culture by two degrees of separation.  First it is quotes from the seance scene that appear in Kate Bush's song Hounds of Love.  The lines "It's in the trees.  It's coming." appear at the beginning of the song.  Speaking of songs; the theme to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Science Fiction/Double Feature) makes reference to the film as well.  A line from the theme says: "Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes and passing them used lots of skills.".  Night of the Demon will live on is pop culture for many years to come.