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strange_complexThis was the second film we saw at the Manchester double-bill evening, following after Dracula. It was a good pairing, actually. I hadn't realised until I looked it up just now how close together the two films were made (just a year apart, with this one the earlier), and the difference in style really brings home how innovative Hammer's films were in this period in a way that might otherwise be difficult to notice from a distance of fifty-five years.
While Hammer embraced full technicolor, building a rich world of draperies, gowns and Kensington gore, Night of the Demon is in black and white. It's crisp, beautiful black and white, making enviable use of shadows, contrasts and highlights, but it means that visually it looks more as though it should sit alongside Universal's horror output from the 1930s - and the effect is highlighted by having an American as the central character. Though it is based on an M.R. James story first published in 1911, and could thus very legitimately have made use of a period setting, the film is actually set in the present day - again a characteristic of pre-war American horror adaptations (Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein are both set in 1931), which Hammer was just at this moment definitively rejecting in favour of an almost fairy-tale style Gothic aesthetic.
I don't mean to criticise Night of the Demon for any of this. Horror movies were changing, and I suspect it would have looked pretty dated already within about five years of its release in a way that Dracula did not. But it's nonetheless a very compelling story, with some beautiful visuals and some great scary moments. I particularly enjoyed the violent wind-storm which Karswell (the black magician who is the villain of the piece) calls up in order to demonstrate his power to Holden (the American scientifically-minded psychiatrist who becomes his antagonist), as well as a scene in which Karswell's cat turns into a much bigger animal and attacks Holden after he has broken into his house at night. The horror of the latter is all suggested by half-seen close-ups and big shadows, and reminded me strongly of The Cat People - as well it might, given that it is by the same director.
Rather less subtle is the titular demon, which the lore has it Tourneur did not wish to depict literally on screen, but was inserted nevertheless in full-blown animatronic form at the insistence of the producer, Hal E. Chester. Aesthetically, I think Tourneur was right about that, and, as the scene with the cat shows, he certainly had the necessary skills to suggest the demon effectively without ever showing it. Probably the best approach would have been to show a half-formed shadowy face in the smoke (easily done using hand-drawn animation) - enough to show that the demon was real, but not enough to reveal it as a model. But I also think Chester probably had a good sense of what audiences of the day demanded, and again the pairing of this film with Hammer's Dracula helps to make it clear. Hammer was putting dripping fangs and disintegrating vampires right there on the screen, and others needed to compete.
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While Hammer embraced full technicolor, building a rich world of draperies, gowns and Kensington gore, Night of the Demon is in black and white. It's crisp, beautiful black and white, making enviable use of shadows, contrasts and highlights, but it means that visually it looks more as though it should sit alongside Universal's horror output from the 1930s - and the effect is highlighted by having an American as the central character. Though it is based on an M.R. James story first published in 1911, and could thus very legitimately have made use of a period setting, the film is actually set in the present day - again a characteristic of pre-war American horror adaptations (Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein are both set in 1931), which Hammer was just at this moment definitively rejecting in favour of an almost fairy-tale style Gothic aesthetic.
I don't mean to criticise Night of the Demon for any of this. Horror movies were changing, and I suspect it would have looked pretty dated already within about five years of its release in a way that Dracula did not. But it's nonetheless a very compelling story, with some beautiful visuals and some great scary moments. I particularly enjoyed the violent wind-storm which Karswell (the black magician who is the villain of the piece) calls up in order to demonstrate his power to Holden (the American scientifically-minded psychiatrist who becomes his antagonist), as well as a scene in which Karswell's cat turns into a much bigger animal and attacks Holden after he has broken into his house at night. The horror of the latter is all suggested by half-seen close-ups and big shadows, and reminded me strongly of The Cat People - as well it might, given that it is by the same director.
Rather less subtle is the titular demon, which the lore has it Tourneur did not wish to depict literally on screen, but was inserted nevertheless in full-blown animatronic form at the insistence of the producer, Hal E. Chester. Aesthetically, I think Tourneur was right about that, and, as the scene with the cat shows, he certainly had the necessary skills to suggest the demon effectively without ever showing it. Probably the best approach would have been to show a half-formed shadowy face in the smoke (easily done using hand-drawn animation) - enough to show that the demon was real, but not enough to reveal it as a model. But I also think Chester probably had a good sense of what audiences of the day demanded, and again the pairing of this film with Hammer's Dracula helps to make it clear. Hammer was putting dripping fangs and disintegrating vampires right there on the screen, and others needed to compete.
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Date: Sunday, 10 November 2013 19:20 (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 10 November 2013 19:30 (UTC)You're right, though - it shows nicely how effective suggestion can be, and also that drawing attention to the fact that you are stopping at suggestion by saying something is too terrible to speak of directly can be powerful too.
M.R. James is just great, in short.
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Date: Sunday, 10 November 2013 19:35 (UTC)I've tried it three times now....
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Date: Sunday, 10 November 2013 19:44 (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 10 November 2013 23:38 (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, 11 November 2013 09:06 (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 8 July 2018 08:06 (UTC)I saw most of this movie for the first time this spring—TCM screened the shortened American Curse of the Demon rather than the original British Night of the Demon and I could not readily find the thirteen missing minutes on the internet afterward—and I really liked how seriously the script handles Holden's skeptic-to-believer arc. He's not simply frightened into faith, as happens to so many horror protagonists; the weirdness mounts to the point where if he's going to stick to his guns as a rational man who considers all the evidence, then he'll have to start considering evidence that points (shades of Sherlock Holmes, shades of Van Helsing) toward the irrational, however frightening that acceptance is. It's belief as heroism, not as last resort. I think that may be one of the reasons he can use Karswell's own magic against him. And when he's going through his doggedly denialist phase before then, I like that Peggy Cummins' Joanna is not there to represent the emotional-hysterical elements of the picture; she calls him out on his condescension, reminds him of her own degree in psychology, and gives him the heaven-and-earth-Horatio speech when he insists too stridently on a reasonable explanation.
I was also really impressed with how little about the rules of its magic the film spelled out for the viewer. Like Holden, we learn how the parchment functions as the vector of the curse without almost any direct explanation, and the fact that it can be passed from person to person made me wonder if this film/its source story is the ancestor of Ringu (1998), It Follows (2014), all those contagious, scapegoat hauntings. You can live if you're willing to give someone else the death that was meant for you. It must be accepted of the target's own free will, but that doesn't have to mean wittingly. And once called up, the demon will take someone; it cannot be banished or harmlessly deflected and its deadline cannot be delayed. Burning the parchment locks the target. We have to understand all of this by the time we see Holden at the climax handing Karswell his coat, or we won't be holding our breath along with him for the trick to work. It makes it work.
Horror movies were changing, and I suspect it would have looked pretty dated already within about five years of its release in a way that Dracula did not.
It doesn't feel dated to me, for whatever that's worth. It has a sort of deadpan mid-century modern style that I agree is different from Hammer's full-splatter Technicolor Gothic, but if I have to make comparisons, it feels much more like Hitchcock than Universal to me. I think it was the correct choice not to make it a period piece. It could have come off as cozy; an Edwardian demon might not feel like such a break with reality. The ruined children's party in the finished film is daylit and contemporary and wrong.
Aesthetically, I think Tourneur was right about that, and, as the scene with the cat shows, he certainly had the necessary skills to suggest the demon effectively without ever showing it.
Tourneur was famous for not showing things, especially in his films for Val Lewton at RKO. (Have you seen the others beside Cat People?) It's really on display in Night of the Demon in the scene with Holden in the hallway—he's tired, he's jet-lagged, he's in an unfamiliar place, and it might just be that freezing defamiliarization that grips perfectly well-known spaces at late nights or odd moments, except that the way the light is lying on the floor is wrong and there's that distant, icy, half-heard whistle of something like a tune that we don't even realize is diegetic until Holden hums it for his colleagues. The seance is the same way. It's shabby and amateurish and it goes from hideously embarrassing to ghastly with nothing more than a dubbed line, the dead man's voice we recognize coming out of a living stranger's mouth. "It's in the trees! It's coming!" spoken by a man who has already died of it. His ghost might not even be a sentient thing, just his last terrified moments like a recording on the air. So the demon works for me when it's little flickering fires in the air billowing into smoke and then coalescing into the shape of a woodcut centuries old; it works when we can't see it properly against the cable-tangled telephone pole and it works best of all when it's glimpsed in the racketing strobe-effect of passing trains; and it totally does not work when the camera holds on it long enough for us to see that it's a very well-sculpted rubber mask. I do think we need to see something in the opening scenes because it fuels the suspense of Holden's later flight from Karswell's house: when we see those sparks gathering in the treetops behind him, the air brightening and combusting, the smoke thickening to pursue him, we know what it is and he has no idea; we know he could end up like Harrington, slashed and steaming. (I like the demon's association with fire in all forms including the modern, the downed electrical wires, the steam locomotives in the railyard.) I just fall into the camp of viewers who almost never want to see everything, no matter how good the special effects, and the special effects here were a really well-sculpted rubber mask.
(I was reading back through some of your tags. I hope you do not mind.)
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Date: Sunday, 8 July 2018 09:39 (UTC)That's absolutely fine! It's part of why I've been carefully putting them here all along. (That, and so I had some way of finding my own past entries.)
Holden's skeptic-to-believer arc.
You make a very good point about this. I think making him American was a stroke of genius here too - he is literally an outsider, from a modernist country which will mean aristocratic stately homes and silent, staring rustics in tumble-down hovels will all seem strange and inexplicable to him anyway, so it makes sense that it would take him a while to disentangle the actual magic from all of that compared to an equivalent English character who was already familiar with the rest.
the fact that it can be passed from person to person made me wonder if this film/its source story is the ancestor of Ringu (1998)...
Good point - that and those chain letters / emails which insist that something horrible will happen to you if you don't pass it on, anyway.
Have you seen the others beside Cat People?
No, but this reminds me that I must!
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Date: Sunday, 8 July 2018 18:46 (UTC)Agreed. Doylistically, I suspect he's American for the same kind of production-funding reasons that had Ben Lyon headlining the otherwise British The Dark Tower (1943), but it works brilliantly for all the reasons you name.
that and those chain letters / emails which insist that something horrible will happen to you if you don't pass it on, anyway.
Do you have any idea how old those are? I know they predate the internet, but I think of them as really having been boosted by the ease of forwarding rather than copying out the message yourself.
No, but this reminds me that I must!
Enjoy!
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Date: Sunday, 8 July 2018 19:29 (UTC)I know I got one from a girl who lived down my street when I was somewhere between about 10 and 13 (i.e. in the late '80s), which she had typed. You've inspired me to Google the bigger picture now, though, and it looks like they've been around in some form for centuries, but really took off after the typewriter (and carbon paper?) had been invented.
I did send the one I got onwards (forgive me, I was young!). It was one of those which only asked you to send it onwards to one new person, but also to send a postcard to the first on a list of addresses supplied as part of the letter. I believe I simply used Tippex to change the recipient's and sender's names and one of the addresses on the letter I'd received myself, thus saving me the trouble of typing out the whole thing again from scratch. So people did pass them on before the internet was available, but yes - obviously copy-and-paste has made it all a lot easier.
Going back to the stories, potentially M.R. James could have had early examples in mind, though it isn't compellingly likely, but whoever came up with the story of Ringu would certainly have known of them.
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Date: Sunday, 8 July 2018 20:28 (UTC)Thank you! I don't think I ever participated in a chain letter, print or e-mail.
"Aside from the occasional deluge of undergarments, it's always a losing proposition."
Going back to the stories, potentially M.R. James could have had early examples in mind, though it isn't compellingly likely, but whoever came up with the story of Ringu would certainly have known of them.
Where it combines very fruitfully with the idea of the thing that will kill you to look at—Holden doesn't have to read the parchment to be in the demon's crosshairs, but you do have to view Sadako's tape. That's in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992), in David Langford's BLIT stories which go back to the late '80's, the mythology of the basilisk. And then I fell down a rabbit hole of reading a lot of unrelated things.