In praise of Night of the Demon: Jacques Tourneur’s pro­to-folk horror

“It’s in the trees! It’s com­ing!” cries the ill-fat­ed Pro­fes­sor Har­ring­ton (Mau­rice Den­ham) ear­ly on into Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, the first hor­ror film the direc­tor made out­side of the influ­ence of mav­er­ick pro­duc­er, Val Lew­ton. There’s some­thing catch­ing about this phrase that real­ly sum­maris­es the rest of the film that fol­lows it – that some­thing is com­ing for the char­ac­ters and it’s prob­a­bly from the rur­al land­scape, for­ev­er a sig­ni­fi­er of pre-enlight­en­ment thinking.

Play­ing loose and fast with MR James’ unnerv­ing mys­tery ​‘Cast­ing the Runes’, Tourneur acci­den­tal­ly stum­bled across a now pop­u­lar strand of hor­ror that is con­cerned with belief, the occult, land­scape and super­nat­ur­al enti­ties. Night of the Demon (or Curse of the Demon as it was called in Amer­i­ca) is arguably the sec­ond film sum­moned into exis­tence of the folk hor­ror genre, fol­low­ing on 35 years from Ben­jamin Christensen’s Häx­an: Witch­craft Through the Ages. The film’s spir­it would cast an equal­ly long shad­ow over hor­ror cinema.

The film fol­lows an Amer­i­can psy­chol­o­gist, John Hold­en (Dana Andrews), vis­it­ing Britain for a con­fer­ence. He is a scep­tic of the super­nat­ur­al and is drawn into the intrigues sur­round­ing the increas­ing­ly infa­mous super­nat­ur­al writer and researcher, Julian Kar­swell (Niall MacGin­nis). Becom­ing aware that Kar­swell has the pow­er to sum­mon a demon to kill through the unknow­ing pass­ing of a set of runes – a pow­er he has already used to silence pre­vi­ous crit­ics of his writ­ing – the film becomes a race against time to some­how call off the crea­ture from its fat­ed attack on Hold­en and to stop Kar­swell from fur­ther occult mis­chief. With the help of Joan­na (Peg­gy Cum­mins), the niece of the demon’s first vic­tim, Hold­en must con­front the dis­turb­ing real­i­sa­tion that there is knowl­edge beyond that of the acad­e­my, ratio­nal­ism and reason.

MR James’ sto­ries were the mod­el for so many of these ideas, espe­cial­ly the notion that some old­er knowl­edge – often evoca­tive­ly denot­ed as ​“the old ways” – is pow­er­ful, dan­ger­ous and out­side of enlight­en­ment under­stand­ing. Mix­ing these ideas with the imagery of stand­ing stones (in this case, Tourneur’s enjoy­ably need­less excur­sion to Stone­henge), runic sym­bols and eerie, fore­bod­ing land­scapes, Night of the Demon moved the genre on from Christensen’s faux-doc­u­men­tary blue­print and into the pure nar­ra­tive ter­ri­to­ry that it would occu­py and build on in the fol­low­ing decades.

Tourneur ditched the Lew­ton empha­sis on impli­ca­tion alone, as seen in such ear­li­er col­lab­o­ra­tions as Cat Peo­ple and I Walked With a Zom­bie, and com­bine it with a dread that pays off through a full reveal. This bal­ance is arguably again indebt­ed to James, a writer whose work often builds an ambi­ence of place that even­tu­al­ly leads to a detailed reveal of some fiend, ghost­ly or demon­ic. Even the demon itself, 60 years on from its first fiery reveal in the for­est, still unnerves with its coy grin. The black and white pho­tog­ra­phy of the forests and night-time vis­tas on the tracks of the Lon­don to Southamp­ton line have an unusu­al effect on its visu­al, allow­ing a ful­ly revealed mon­ster to still feel glanced, half unseen, almost still ques­tion­able as being part of the land­scape, at least until its final, dead­ly moments of attack.

The film’s influ­ence has grown stronger as the years have gone by. In 1962 there was anoth­er occult ​‘night’ dawn­ing in the form of Sid­ney Hay­ers’ Night of the Eagle, fol­lowed by lat­er eso­ter­i­ca such as Ter­ence Fisher’s The Dev­il Rides Out, Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Don Sharp’s Psy­cho­ma­nia. This is before con­sid­er­ing the sam­pling of ​“It’s in the trees…” in Kate Bush’s 1985 song ​‘Hounds of Love’ that has tak­en on a demon­ic life all of its own. But the film is more than a catch-basin for sam­pling and pop cul­ture references.

The decade of the sev­en­ties would seem per­pet­u­al­ly haunt­ed by MR James thanks to Lawrence Gor­don Clark’s BBC ghost sto­ries, a fol­low on from the suc­cess of Jonathan Miller’s Whis­tle and I’ll Come To You for BBC Omnibus in 1968. Clark would even end the decade with his own edge­land strewn adap­ta­tion of Cast­ing The Runes for ITV Play­house in 1979. The influ­ence of the film’s atmos­phere has, how­ev­er, come to an equal­ly pal­pa­ble head in more recent years. Joe Dante has been in the process of re-adapt­ing the sto­ry for some time though the film is still to materialise.

From the occult rit­u­als of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and the eso­teric strange­ness of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, to the qui­et, sea-demon haunt­ing Paul Wright’s For Those in Per­il and the rit­u­al nas­ti­ness of David Keating’s Wake Wood, Night of the Demon’s themes still have an unnerv­ing, almost super­nat­ur­al pull on the stranger end of British cin­e­ma even today. What­ev­er was in the trees has now most cer­tain­ly arrived.