I just reviewed a French disc release of the great Night of the Demon / Curse of the Demon back in May of 2017. Why look at it again? Because of the fine extras on this new disc, that’s why.
The French Wild Side disc from 2013 was a class act, but U.S. purchasers may have felt at a loss thumbing through a collector’s book they couldn’t necessarily read. In the last few years the UK firms Arrow and Powerhouse Indicator have been reinvigorating the video disc market with lavish special editions. This new item has extras that diehard fans will drool over. It’s quite an achievement, considering how difficult it is to concoct good extras for a picture nearing sixty years of age.
For a general review and essay on Night of the Demon please check out the earlier CineSavant review — I’ll indulge myself here with more general observations about Jacques Tourneur’s super horror classic, before settling down to admire some of the better added value extras I’ve seen this year. The important news for U.S. horror fans is that, like the earlier French disc, the Region coding is not enforced — the two discs in the Powerhouse Indicator release play fine in Region A.
Curse of the Demon has long been a special favorite. In my neck of the woods it didn’t play much on television until the later half of the 1960s, so I was introduced to it piecemeal. It’s pointless for me to imagine the film without a demon, because images of the demon were all I saw of it for years, in the pages of Famous Monsters magazine. Then came a two-dollar 8mm silent ‘condensation’ about two minutes long, that had some pretty impressive shots. That classic demon portrait in Carlos Clarens’ book prompted me to show it in the UCLA dorms on Halloween, where it was a big hit.
Then came an article by Ronald V. Borst and Scott MacQueen in the great magazine Photon, which told us of a long-lost extended version called Night of the Demon, identified as an ‘English cut.’ I must have read the article ten times, wishing that the longer version wasn’t lost. The business with Julian Karswell’s mother and Holden’s visit to The Hobart Farm are what give the film’s notion of a Satanic cult real weight — all this necromantic hocus-pocus is blighting lives. When the extended, so-called English cut surfaced on home video and cable TV in 1987, it felt like a gift.
Finally, the last big ‘historical’ step in the progress of Curse/Night of the Demon was Wayne Schmidt’s rescue of the long cut — that early NTSC transfer might have been the last anybody saw of it, had not Wayne negotiated the return of the only good film element from a responsible collector who had bought it thinking it was a print. I asked Wayne to write up the experience for me, which he did last May, in Rescuing the Runes: The Almost-Lost Original Long Cut of Night of the Demon.
I’m not sure that somebody just getting into film studies now would know what it was like for film fans of the ’70s and ’80s, before home video made most everything available, and prompted studios to take inventory of their vaults. Today one can discover James Whale’s The Old Dark House in its incredible new restoration, something that older viewers never had a chance to see. In 1980 films that just weren’t available in the U.S. except at rare screenings were Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Lewton’s The Seventh Victim and Val Guest’s Quatermass 2. Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers was just beginning to circulate in an uncut form, as was the long version of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. I had shown Losey’s These Are the Damned twice at UCLA, unaware that Columbia had printing elements for a version almost fifteen minutes longer. For this viewer, the best thing about the recent Powerhouse Indicator discs are extras that document the history of cut versions and censor elisions. Their examination of Hammer’s The Stranglers of Bombay was a revelation, and their video essay on Curse/Night of the Demon opened my eyes to many version differences I hadn’t noticed.
Re-reading my earlier essay, my main thought is that I didn’t fully express the uniqueness of Night/Curse of the Demon. One can make a case for it as an extension of the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur films, but only in its bloodline — it’s not the same kind of intimate psychological study. The Lewton pictures now seem almost too sophisticated for the horror genre. The supernatural is used as a metaphor for sexual unease (Cat People), family dysfunction (I Walked with a Zombie) and existential despair (The Seventh Victim). The Leopard Man’s disconnected killings now play as a proto- giallo scenario. In general, the Lewtons point to the psychological future of serial killers and the ‘horror of personality’ subgenre, such as Psycho; perhaps the most progressive character in the Lewton films is the deranged sea captain in The Ghost Ship, who knows full well that he is a murderous fiend, but cannot do anything about it.
Night of the Demon instead goes to the core of ‘did it really happen?’ ghost stories, and invents one of the few convincing Satanic cults in film. There are no unlikely coven gatherings, no bizarro inverted Christian ceremonies as in Ulmer’s The Black Cat. The cult is not a polite book club, as in The Seventh Victim. Karswell’s minions live in fear, tithing to him and remaining silent to avoid becoming the next prey of a demon summoned from Hell. It’s all about morbid fear, and Karswell knows he’s running a supernatural protection racket. The clincher is that Karswell is himself relatively powerless, equally vulnerable. A debunker like Holden could wreck his life, but that’s nothing compared to what will happen if Karswell takes a single step not pre-approved by the Satanic Book.
Perhaps we don’t reject the supernatural in Demon because Dana Andrews’ Dr. Holden is already doing it for us. We are instead kept fascinated by the film’s mechanics to summon a demon. We see no hokey scenes of Karswell donning robes or speaking a Lovecraftian language. We instead see the runes in action — the impish slip of paper has a life of its own, like a Satanic Tinkerbell. They engage us the way all those millennial J-horror gimmicks do — cabalistic rings and spirals and demonic VHS tapes. While we’re busy worrying about how the runes work, we’re being seduced into the larger premise. This evil art of distraction and misdirection is producing terrific results for politicians these days.
So, how about that sequel? With Karswell gone, will the British Museum get its book back, or will some cult member steal it and set himself up as a new necromancer-despot? I’m not sure the powers of darkness made the right move in liquidating Karswell — if nobody knowledgeable remains to spread unholy fear across the land, one would think Beelzebub’s influence and glory would drop to nothing. Or, thinking over the concept again, is there a Satan behind this at all, or just a Hell-world with nasty rules about intersecting with us feeble humans up here in the sunshine?
The other amazing thing about Night of the Demon is that its fascinating premise contradicts Holden’s rational skepticism, without giving rational viewers offense. Most of us love ghost stories that simply ask us to suspend disbelief for a few minutes to enjoy some spooky scares. I personally loathe pictures that take a superstitious premise too seriously. The Exorcist drags serious religion into the mix, and uses it like a club on sensitive viewers. That doesn’t seem to bother most fans the way it does me. Night of the Demon doesn’t demand that we believe anything, and instead ends on a soft note asking, “Perhaps it’s better not to know.” We’ve just seen the world’s most accomplished skeptic put through an ordeal that ends with him prevailing by besting a supernatural sorcerer at his own tricks. For the sake of ghost story thrills, we’ve accompanied Holden as his eyes are opened to ‘a world he would never have believed existed.’ Through Jacques Tourneur’s superior direction and striking visuals, the show makes its fight between Good and Evil into an exciting battle of wills and wits.
Back in 1985, the English critics of Phil Hardy’s Encyclopedia of Horror Movies were likely correct when they tapped Night of the Demon as a predictor of visually-oriented Eurohorrors to come. Tourneur’s show seems more connected to them than it does the newly-hatched Hammer brand of up-market Technicolor thrillers. Ted Scaife’s marvelous night scenes extend the atmospherics of Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie to a new height in artistic spookery. Further elaborations into eerie imagery would be forthcoming in the work of Mario Bava.
Night of the Demon is a fully satisfying experience in a genre where fans frequently find themselves making excuses: ‘It’s really good considering how little it cost.’ ‘The market insists that this exploitative content be included.’ ‘That kind of horror movie is obsolete, Glenn.’ Tourneur’s film stands alone, outside the shadow of any tradition, house style or fashionable trend. The show needs no excuses. It wins over audiences that have little or no use for horror movies.
