A Film Canon

Night Of The Demon is a compromise between Tourneur's return to the elliptical, atmospheric aesthetic of the Val Lewton horror cycle, and producer Hal E. Chester's insistence on the cruder, more overtly theatrical aesthetic of the Universal horror cycle. Although the most disastrous index of Chester's influence is the extended depiction of the eponymous demon in the opening and closing scenes, his role as co-screenwriter is perhaps more pervasive, imbuing the script with an unbearably discursive tendency that surpasses any of its Universal progenitors, and makes every utterance feel caught somewhere between a diary, a conference presentation and a journal article, as if the most appropriate way to evoke the hieroglyphics around which the narrative revolves were to fuse written and spoken language, or to encourage the actors to speak as if reading directly off the page. Fortunately, Tourneur's exquisite direction takes every opportunity to transform the English countryside - especially the brooding woods - into so many variations on his trademark vision of inky, claustrophobic passage (hotel corridors, an underground rail station, the tunnel of light carved out by a moving car), relegating its inhabitants to the foggy, runic distance of Stonehenge, and making the transplantation of Dana Andrews' investigative screen persona less jarring than it might otherwise have been, insofar as American psychology adopts the exotic and explanatory distance previously afforded by German psychoanalysis, from which a plethora of English accents, traditions and beliefs are poetically defamiliarised and wrly Americanised - most memorably in a seance prefaced by the recital of an old English nursery rhyme, and 'guided' by a genial native American spirit.