There Are More Things, Horatio: "Night of the Demon"
The best horror movies reach beyond their subject material. They are not allegorical – meaning there's no easy one-to-one correspondence with some larger moral or social theme – and they rarely take clear-cut political positions because to do so would be reassuring to viewers who hold those positions, and the best horror is not reassuring. They're difficult to come to terms with, disturbing because they touch on fears and anxieties we may not even realize we have, raising up shadows from the basement of our minds and asking...what if?
One of the most fascinating ways they do this lies at the heart of that subgenre of movies that revolve around cults and black magic. These stories often feature a protagonist who starts out as an unbeliever and then slowly begins to discover that the truth they take for granted is no more substantial than smoke, while the cult's beliefs – which have initially been seen as fantastical – are the ones that effect the world.
Besides being terrifically scary (for this viewer at least) these films hint at some of the deepest questions involved in the way we experience the world. Central among these is the question of knowledge. How sure are we about what we know, and about what is important? How much faith do we have in what we assume to be the foundations of existence? And why do we so often find ourselves caught in a battle between what our senses tell us is the case and what our "knowledge" – that set of beliefs that we desperately hope is true bedrock – insists is really the case?
There’s no better film at exploring these questions – and no better cult film – than Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon, from 1957.
The architecture of the plot is carefully designed to build a maximum of tension. It opens with a visit by a terrified professor named Harrington to the mansion of a noted British occultist, Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). Harrington has been engaged in an attempt to scientifically disprove Karswell's beliefs and has come to believe that he's been cursed in retaliation; he begs Karswell to rescind the curse. Karswell agrees to do what he can, but when the professor leaves he’s killed by a massive demon that manifests out of the air.
We then cut to an American professor, John Holden (Dana Andrews) who is flying to a conference in England where he was going to join Harrington in exposing the lies of Karswell's cult. En route, he meets Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins), Harrington's niece, who when she hears of her uncle's death becomes convinced that it did not occur through natural causes.
She explains this to Holden, who insists that he doesn't believe in any mumbo jumbo. He’s a man of science, after all. But slowly, against the grain of his faith in rationality, things happen to him that become increasingly difficult to explain. Karswell approaches him in the reading room of the British Museum and warns him that he should call off the investigation, and when Holden demurs he starts to experience strange sensations: he's chilled at odd times, and has the feeling that something is following him. He writes these events off as having physiological or psychological causes, holding fast to his belief that there is no such thing as the supernatural. (If you’re inclined to this kind of reading, note the similarity of his name, Holden, to the world "holding" – these beliefs are exactly what he will try, and fail, to keep his grip on.)
This building of eeriness continues when Holden and Joanna visit Karswell's estate, where they find him dressed as a clown, doing tricks to entertain the children from the local village. He again warns Holden to call off the investigation, and even offers to prove his powers by summoning a sudden, terrible windstorm, which drives the partygoers inside. Holden remains unfazed, although the first cracks in his certainty appear when Karswell announces that he knows how and when Holden's life will end: in three days, at precisely 10:00 PM.
Joanna is frightened but Holden pushes on with his investigation, which leads him to a man named Rand Hobart, a former member of Karswell's cult who lost his mind when he was convicted of murder. As a part of his debunking presentation to the scientific community Holden hypnotizes this man, who reveals what (he believes) Karswell is capable of: if certain ancient runes are inscribed on a slip of paper, and that paper is given to someone without their knowledge, a demon will soon appear and tear them to pieces. The only way to stop this from happening is for the possessor of the paper to pass it on to someone else.
That, the hypnotized Rand Hobart mutters, is exactly what happened to him. Karswell gave him a marked slip of paper and to save himself he foisted it on one of the other cult members, who died terribly. "It was the night of the demon!" he shrieks, "the night of the demon!" Overwhelmed by the horror of the memory, he throws himself out the window to his death.
This precipitates Holden's final revelation: when Karswell visited him in the British Museum, he slipped him a rune-marked piece of paper. Holden has been cursed, and the demon will appear at the appointed time to kill him. Racing against time he and Joanna locate Karswell on a train, and as 10:00 approaches Holden tries desperately to trick him into taking the paper back. He finally manages to do so, and the demon appears and tears Karswell apart on the tracks. The police announce that he must have been hit and dragged by a passing train, but Holden knows better. Despite this knowledge, though, he hesitates about going to examine the body. In the end, Joanna pulls him away, assuring him that "It's better not to know."
One of the primary drivers of the film's greatness is simply Tourneur's ability as a director. Primarily known for his other psychological chillers, like Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, and his noir films like Out of the Past and Nightfall, Tourneur brings the full force of the techniques of both genres to bear here. He's a master at creating atmospheric tension in the subtlest of ways, whether it be a simple shot of a hallway or a frieze of Rand Hobart's rural family members standing and staring in menace. He also uses the shadow and light schemes so familiar from the noirs to great effect, highlighting the degree of similarity between that genre and horror films (among other things, both genres tend to rely heavily on feelings of entrapment and inescapable doom).
I would also be remiss not to mention the work of production designer Ken Adam, perhaps better known for being the driving visual force behind the classic look of the 1960s James Bond movies. His interiors are impeccably ominous, and his demon might look dated to today's audiences (incidentally, its appearance in the opening minutes of the film was mandated by the producers and opposed by Tourneur and virtually everyone on the creative side of the film) but in the flow of the movie it maintains a great deal of force.
Beneath all of this, though, the film is worth revisiting because of how clearly it brings out one of the central and most entertaining ideas in horror, which the strange and perhaps too-common disjunction between what we experience and what we assure ourselves must be the case.
In her investigation of our mental existence, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt lays out this distinction nicely. A great deal of Western philosophy, Arendt argues, is premised not only on the search for truth but also on the idea that there is a truer world out there than the one we are given through our senses.
The seminal example of this is perhaps Rene Descartes, who when he wanted to get down to the foundation of things decided that he needed to set aside all of his sense data – which was suspect because it could be fooled (dreams were one of his great examples, which can feel to our senses very much like reality; there are also waking phenomena like mirages) – and simply think his way into the truth. This is also the assumption of a great deal of science, which insists that the truest truth, the most real of the real, lies back somewhere behind the surface of things, in the dark matter and the subatomic particles and the heavy math.
What Arendt would like to suggest is that this idea is upside down. The greater importance, she argues, must lie in what she calls "meaning" (as opposed to the "truth" of the western tradition). For her, meaning is what we make of the world of appearances. It's the aggregation of our sensory experiences and our decisions about what's important, the fabric of our consciousness. The primary question is not so much "what exists?" as "what does it mean?" because this is the question around which our existence, our everyday common-sense moral and experiential existence, revolves. (And through which, incidentally, all scientific knowledge is automatically filtered.)
Heady stuff, certainly, and perhaps a bit abstract. But helpful in understanding the horror in so many horror films.
Professor Holden in Night of the Demon, like so many scary movie protagonists, is an unbeliever, a man of science. He's convinced that the fundamental importance of the world lies in some truth he can access with his intellect, a truth which is more real even than his senses. When he's abnormally cold, or has that spine-tingling feeling that there's something there, or sees another man call up a windstorm on a balmy sunny day, he insists that these things can't be real. His experience, that is, lies to him; the truth denies that experience, and so he must follow the truth.
Karswell the occultist, on the other hand, is a man of sensation. He has deciphered the ancient runes and understands that he can use them to summon demons; this is not an appeal to some deeper or more "real" existence (despite the fact that these dark forces come from somewhere else); it's magical, mystical, a thing of illusion and incantation, not understandable through the intellect that Descartes and the men of science so treasure.
Importantly, these forces are uncontrollable. One of the fascinating things about Karswell's character is that he lives in terror because he knows he's not truly in charge of the dark forces he can arouse. Like all of us, he is as much at the mercy of the sensual world as he is the master of it.
In a horror film, if you get the feeling that something terrible is in the closet, it's probably because something terrible is in the closet. If you feel as though you've been cursed, or marked for retribution, it's because you have been. The most important facts of existence, that is, are about what you feel and see and experience; there is no comforting retreat to some deeper intellectual "truth" that reassures you about the way the world must really be.
It's in this kind of groundlessness, I think, that some of the deepest dismay of horror films lies. We have been encouraged by much of the Western tradition to think that there’s a truth out there accessible to us by calm, rational thought. This is an eminently reassuring idea. Sure, our senses might scare us sometimes, deceive us, tell us that things are not alright, but we can put this all aside and just use the almighty power of cogitation to discern what really is.
In the face of this, many horror films throw the actuality of experience. Living is terrifying. The world is an irrational place, in which humans and the cosmos do things for reasons that approximate madness. “Shoreless, indefinite as God,” Herman Melville termed the reality of our existence, a “howling infinite.”
There would be nothing more comforting than to imagine an intellectually comprehensible substratum we could escape to – perhaps, like Descartes, while sitting snugly in a chair by the fire – where everything makes sense. We cling to (hold onto, Holden to) this idea even in the face of one example after another that insists otherwise. Like Arendt’s scientists and philosophers, we’re blind to the fact that all of our truths are secondary to meaning, to our sensory and lived experience of not being in control, of being at the mercy of terrible forces.
This is, of course, the significance of the ending of Night of the Demon. Holden, the man of science, has the chance to examine Karswell's body and see for himself that the demon was real. Instead, along with Joanna, he retreats. "It's better not to know."
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