Night of the Demon

Last night I saw the film Night of the Demon (released in the USA as Curse of the Demon), a 1957 film directed by Jacques Tourneur and based on the short story "Casting the Runes" by M. R. James. The film, which is set in 1950s Britain, revolves around a sceptical American psychologist (played by Dana Andrews) who travels to Britain to help a colleague investigate a local cult of devil-worshippers. However, he arrives to find his colleague is dead, and soon discovers that he has been passed a slip of paper, with old Runic symbols upon it, which in four days will summon a demon to make off with him. Jacques Tourneur, who made a reputation for himself making horror films in which the horror was suggested rather than explicitly shown, had a huge amount of trouble with the film's producers. Tourneur apparently never wanted to show the demon of the title, but to hint at it, the producers, however, insisted that the demon be shown at the film's start, as well as the climax, and feature heavily in the advertising. Hence much of the shock value of the creature, which looks like a reject from an old Godzilla film to begin with, was lost. However, despite that, the film manages to be genuinely creepy and suspenseful, for most of it's run time. M. R. James, an early 1900s author, whose day job was professor of antiquities and classics at Cambridge University and Eton, is one of the best ghost story writers, and his stories were often genuinely scary. One amusing story about the film I heard was that Jacques Tourneur asked a production assistant to produce a set of runic symbols. The next day the assistant returned with two cymbals and said "I couldn't find any runic. Will brass do?"

Today was another dull day at work. I wasn't feeling very well today, with a very bad cold, a persistant headache and a sore throat. My friend Joe was feeling pretty bad as well, and, at his invitation, we went to the New Yorker for "a quick pint", which soon turned into three by the time we left after two and a half hours, by which time we were both feeling considerably more cheerful.