“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!”
Night of the Demon is a 1957 British horror movie. It was directed by Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie) and it starred Dana Andrews as a occult skeptic who goes to England to denounce an evil cult.
Andrews’ colleague Professor Harrington was about to expose the cult but then died after he ran into a demon in the woods and drove his car into an electrical pole. Niall MacGinnis plays the evil leader of the cult. Andrews doesn’t believe in the supernatural and has spent his life debunking it. He starts to investigate Harrington’s death and soon becomes marked for death by the cult.
The American producers fought with Tourneur all through the production of the film. Tourneur has always preferred to suggest rather than show the monsters in his movies like in Cat People – you never really see Simone Simon transform into a cat or even a cat. In the end the studio won and the demon was shown in the film – I think it looks freaking awesome but it would have still have been cool if the movie left it a little more vague. The American version of the film was retitled The Curse of the Demon and was cut by thirteen minutes but the longer British cut has been available on DVD for some time now and under the American name.
