Night of the Demon

Dana Andrews - Dr. John Holden
Peggy Cummins - Joanna Harrington
Niall MacGinnis - Dr. Julian Karswell
Maurice Denham - Professor Harrington
Athene Seyler - Mrs. Karswell
Liam Redmond - Mark O'Brien
Reginald Beckwith - Mr. Meek
Ewan Roberts - Lloyd Williamson
Peter Elliott - Kumar
Rosamund Greenwood - Mrs. Meek
Brian Wilde - Rand Hobart
Richard Leech - Inspector Mottrarn

Night of the Demon is a horror picture based on a story by that master of understated horror, M.R. James. James' story Casting The Runes concerns a mild-mannered man who incurs the wrath of a magician and is passed a slip of paper with runic symbols. If these are destroyed, or are still on his person seven days later, he will die. The crux of the story is the man's gradual realisation that these things are true, and that he must return the runes to the magician to prevent his own death.

Taking these bare bones, Chester and co-writer Charles Bennett take the late Victorian setting of the original and make it contemporary. To establish Dr. Holden’s (Dana Andrews) presence in the UK, he becomes a psychology professor attending a conference on witchcraft, at which he intends to expose the sect headed by Dr. Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) as a fraud. However, the co-presenter of the paper, Prof Harrington (Maurice Denham), meets a sticky end just before Holden arrives, via a very silly looking demon. The death appears to the police as an accident, and it takes Denham's niece, Joanna (Peggy Cummins), to persuade Holden that something is going on after he is handed the runes by Karswell in the British Museum reading room.

Director Jacques Tourneur turns in one of his best pieces of work. From the beginning, when Harrington is pursued by a strange cloud, to the very end when Karswell, knowing the runes have been passed back, tries to escape along railway tracks before being savaged by the demon, the atmosphere is always on the edge of fear. Every scene is loaded with tension, the latent fear of the unknown bubbling below the everyday surface. This is achieved by the performances, and also by the lighting, Ted Scaife's photography complementing Tourneur perfectly. The secret of the film's success lies in the way that Tourneur and the scriptwriters keep to the spirit of James' original understatement. Fine support to Andrews, MacGinnis and Cummins comes from Athene Seyler as Karswell's doting mother, finally driven too far by his excesses and turning against him, and Liam Redmond as a colleague of Andrews' who is not so keen to dismiss witchcraft out of hand.