Night of the Demon vs. Casting the Runes

While our next blog will be dedicated solely to discussing Night of the Demon, I felt the need to comment on what, exactly, makes this film different from Montague R. James' Casting the Runes. In my opinion, Casting the Runes fits much more securely into the true horror genre--but why, you might ask? Essentially, the plots are the same. Both feature a magical man named Karswell whose purpose is to kill a man who threatens him. Each central character--Karswell's victims--undergoes a state of paranoia brought about by mysterious pieces of parchment containing ancient runes. This paranoia is strengthened by evidence of other deaths at Karswell's hands and by a belief in the presence of malicious demons that will ultimately become deadly. It is precisely these demons, however, that separate Night of the Demon from Casting the Runes.

In Night of the Demon, one of the first shots we see is the monster--a hideous and enormous demon that flails its arms wildly and, by today's standards, is far more comical than horrifying. However, whether horrifying or not, the choice to show the demon from the onset is a highly controversial one. In fact, Jacques Tourneur, the director of the film, publicly expressed his contempt for the demon on more than one occasion. But why? Before reading up on Tourneur's beliefs, I would have assumed that the best way to inspire art-horror in an audience would be to scare them from the onset. And what better way to accomplish this by showing the monster? After comparing both the film to the story, however, it is easy to see why prolonging the appearance of the monster--or removing its appearance altogether--would be a highly effective way of accomplishing the goals of a horror film.

In Casting the Runes, there are virtually no descriptions of a monster of any kind. The fact that the demon is not described from the onset lets readers remain in a state of suspense throughout the duration of the plot. After each development, no matter how blatantly supernatural, I was still left wondering whether or not there really was a supernatural element to the story. It is precisely this confusion that left me with an unshakably eerie feeling throughout the duration of the plot and, in my opinion, this feeling is from what a true sense of art-horror was derived. Displaying the demon from the onset of Night of the Demon forced me to believe in the presence of monsters; it left me with no doubt that there was a supernatural element at play. I must admit that this mindset was relatively boring and, essentially, not scary at all.

I fully agree with Tourneur's belief that displaying the demon at the beginning of the film was a huge mistake. Perhaps what is most terrifying to me is a sense of the unknown; that feeling that you must continue to explain things scientifically in your mind until there is simply no more room to doubt that a supernatural element is at work. Whatever the reason, I think Night of the Demon should only have revealed its monster toward the end of the film, and that these glimpses should have been short-lived and mysterious as they were in Casting the Runes.