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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, 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.