Directed by Jacques Tourneur / Screenplay by Charles Bennett and Hal E. Chester

Adapted from Casting the Runes by M.R. James, Night of the Demon is a British film with a transatlantic twist. While the source material and most of the cast are quintessentially English (locations include Stonehenge and the British Museum), top billing goes to American star Dana Andrews, enlisted to attract the US box office, while the director is the French-American Jacques Tourneur, whose earlier credits include Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943). The result is a strange brew, mingling film noir with elements of what would later be dubbed ‘folk horror’. Psychologist Dr John Holden (Andrews) is investigating the activities of occultist Dr Julian Karswell (played with urbane malevolence by Niall MacGinnis), who is apparently able to dispose of his enemies by means of runic inscriptions which, when passed to the intended victim, will summon a terrifying demon. Tourneur intended to honour the spirit of the original story by never explicitly showing the demon on screen, preserving the possibility that the deaths are natural accidents: but to his chagrin, producer Hal Chester overruled him and insisted that the demon be shown. Appearing at the beginning and end of the film, the creature is a technical marvel and genuinely ferocious, but Night of the Demon’s reputation rests on its more ambiguous middle passages, including an unsettling seance sequence in which a dead man’s voice is heard to cry ‘It’s in the trees! It’s coming!’ - a line famously sampled by Kate Bush for her single ‘Hounds of Love’. And that’s not the only song to tip its hat to Night of the Demon: it’s among the films referenced in ‘Science Fiction Double Feature’, the opening number of The Rocky Horror Show.

Framed Dimensions: 315mm x 400mm

Acrylic on 230gsm Winsor & Newton canvas paper

Glazed, mounted and framed

Supplied with signed letter of authenticity from Barnaby.