HopkinsCinemAddicts

Candyman (1992): A Self-Conscious Slasher Film

Of course, the above title may sound rather redundant. It is difficult to think of a more self-conscious genre than the slasher film: not only have there been a plethora of obvious pastiches, but even the ostensibly serious Friday the 13^th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises often poke fun at their own favorite clichés. Every film begins with a group of sexually active teenagers who must listen to the ravings of the obligatory toothless old man (or some other familiar harbinger of doom) before being promptly dispatched ingeniously (or not, depending on how cheap the SFX are) by Jason, Freddy, or whatever other relentless killer the screenwriter has created. The heavily formulaic nature of the genre has caused it to accrue as many critics as fans; indeed, it became commonplace in the eighties for older horror authors like Robert Bloch to unfavorably compare the new outcrop of slasher films with the traditional ghost stories and psychological thrillers of former eras.

            One could argue, however, that it is within the very predictability of these films that their appeal lies. This familiarity causes them to feel more reassuring than unsettling; it is not only “the final girl” who will make it to the film’s credits – it is ourselves, the audience. The sequels sustain this sense of survival: we are familiar with the entire history of a certain slasher, all his quirks and traits, and no matter how improbable (or often contradictory) his sequel-spawned history may be, this knowledge gives us a further sense of security. Like a hardened explorer wading through familiar territory, we know that no matter how bewildering it might get for the unfortunates onscreen, whatever happens will still remain reassuringly familiar to us. Like fairy tales and urban legends, slasher films seduce their audience into a world in which routine sets of clichés and formulae are not only the commonplace fallbacks of lazy screenwriters but are actually embraced by the audiences themselves: a world in which Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees become modern bogeymen and in which every victim’s death is seen as a memorable milestone, hailed at once for the originality of its execution and the predictable place that it occupies in the film’s overall plot structure.

            Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) is a different sort of slasher film, however; one that is self-aware but not comedic; a movie that explores the mythic space that urban legends and slasher tales inhabit, focusing on why these tales absorb our imaginations so deeply and suggesting that there is some mysterious draw even greater than the comfortable familiarity that these gruesome fairy tales have. Based on “The Forbidden,” a novella by British author Clive Barker, its titular supernatural antagonist resembles neither the wise-cracking Freddy Krueger nor the silent, masked killers in Friday the 13^th or John Carpenter’s Halloween. Rather, Tony Todd plays the character of the hook-handed Candyman with an intense, seductive charisma, transforming him into a monster who functions both as a supernatural killer and as an almost allegorical embodiment of all that seduces and terrifies us in the slasher mythos, or even in horror fiction in general. Barker’s work both in literature (The Books of Blood, The Hellbound Heart) and in film (Hellraiser) constantly connects the twin emotions of terror and desire as two related impulses and the dynamic found in Candyman between the film’s heroine Helen (Virginia Madsen) and her terrifying antagonist is no exception. The most compelling moments in the narrative are Helen’s encounters with Candyman – those enigmatic interchanges in which he implores her to “be his victim” and asks “what is blood for if not for shedding?” The point of his appeal is that there is a certain glory in being counted as a legend: if Helen becomes a victim of Candyman, she will become – as he terms it – one of those tales “to frighten children, to make lovers cling closer in their rapture.” She will become immortal like him precisely because she, too, will become a legend of terror. To attain the status of legendry, “the blessed condition” as Candyman terms it, is perceived as a higher spiritual state, the cost of which is, in his eyes, far outweighed by the reward. She will no longer be merely a curious audience; she will, in fact, become a horror tale herself.

            The beauty of Bernard Rose’s film is that it can be enjoyed in the same manner as any other slasher film, for like all the others, it charts the familiar territory of hook-handed killers, flattering us with our knowledge of grisly urban legends while delivering a healthy amount of gore and scares. But for those who choose to contemplate the titular villain’s mysterious seductions more deeply, it holds perhaps the key to what it is that makes many of us not only enjoy Horror but even wish to create our own tales of terror. Candyman is not only an avenging ghost: he is a legend, a horror story himself. Stories are immortal, therefore Candyman himself is immortal – and, moreover, being a legend as well as a ghost, he is an immortal being whom lovers and children both revere, fear, and yet all the same enjoy whispering of. Any lover of Horror can understand how this “blessed condition” could be perceived as quite seductive.

            And, if the opportunity to unravel the philosophy of Horror is not enough to entice the reader to watch this film, then let me also add that the ending of this film gives an entirely new (and rather eerie) meaning to the common slasher film cliché of the “final girl”…

"Fun and Games:" A Further Look At "The Outer Limits" (Colin)

Note: To Mr. Gorn who kindly commented upon the first part of my introduction to The Outer Limits: here at last is the second part of my behemoth of a blog post. I hope that it was worth the wait.

Comparing The Outer Limits to the vastly more optimistic Star Trek is naturally more difficult – an ironic fact, as the two actually share one thing in common: a story. In June 1944, the science-fiction magazine Astounding Stories published “Arena,” by Frederic Brown, a story about a man and an alien who are forced by another alien of a superiorly-evolved species to fight a duel to the death in order to determine whether the race of humanity or the enemy alien’s race will ultimately be annihilated by this higher species. In 1967, Star Trek featured an episode with the same title based upon this story, an episode that would later become one of the best loved of the show’s first season. However, Gene Roddenberry was not the first to come up with the idea of adapting Brown’s tale. It has long been conjectured that the Outer Limits episode “Fun and Games,” which aired in March 1964, draws upon Brown’s “Arena” as well for inspiration, though this is not explicitly stated.

Like Brown’s story, the Star Trek version of the tale dwells upon the idea of a dispassionate, god-like extra-terrestrial arbiter who, perceiving the foolishness of  warring humanity and its alien enemy, decides to settle the conflict once and for all for the good of one species and the final downfall of the other. In Star Trek, the optimism of Brown’s tale (in which humanity triumphs) is heightened still more when Captain Kirk philanthropically chooses not to dispatch his rival, opting for peace rather than genocide. Their superiorly-evolved arbiter, impressed by this act of mercy, remarks rather sententiously, “You are still savage, but there is hope.” The episode suggests that in order for the human species to survive, peace and the ability to coexist are not only necessary but possible: an optimistic idea for an obvious Cold War allegory.

Yet the interpretation of Brown’s tale could not be more different when in the hands of The Outer Limits’ screenwriters. The highly-evolved alien arbiter in “Fun and Games” is still a superior life-form, but he is no longer the peacemaker: rather, he is the Senator of a race of aliens called the Anderians for whom he collects the denizens of different planets in order to pit them as dueling gladiators against each other, solely for the amusement of the Anderian citizenry. All the qualities of dispassionate justice are thus taken from his character and he is relegated from a coldly god-like status to a gloatingly devil-like force of implacable power. His character is suitably modified as well: whilst the toga-attired arbiter in Star Trek is coolly distant to the point of an almost milquetoast apathy, the Senator is a force of relentless, sardonic energy. Brilliantly voiced by Robert Johnson with a melodrama that positively drips with its genteel English accent and cruel jollity (it is easy to see why the Anderians chose him as their game host), the Senator is not only presented to us as a villain but an arbitrarily-minded one as well, possessing none of the ennobling motivations of his Brown-engendered predecessor or later Trekkian descendant.

In a similar fashion, the personalities of the protagonists are significantly altered as well. The heroic, readily likable Captain Kirk in Star Trek is replaced with two characters who could easily have fit the requirements for a ninety-minute 1940’s noir: Mike Benson (Nick Adams), a small-time hoodlum and ex-boxer, and Laura Hanley (Nancy Malone), a woman suffering from a troubled marriage. Both are deeply flawed and yet deeply sympathetic human beings, tormented as much by their own psychological makeup as by their cruel environment. The spaces that they inhabit on Earth are constrained in the 50-minute episode to dark, cramped apartment rooms, narrow staircases, and gambling rooms lit only by a single light suspended from the ceiling. The nightmarish surrealism of the atmosphere is enhanced by the tortuous wide-angle lenses often employed in the film’s opening sequences, most notably during a gambling game when the camera, positioned close to the center of the card players’ table, slowly pans to focus upon each gambler whilst grotesquely magnifying the size of their card-holding hands to emphasize their grasping, greedy nature. When the game takes a nasty turn and culminates in a shootout and murder, it is almost a relief when Mike – fleeing the scene of the crime in order to escape the police – is ‘electro-ported’ to the Senator’s chamber along with innocent bystander and total stranger Laura.

The Senator delightedly informs his two victims of the “wonderful, terrible game” for which they have been chosen, introduces them to their reptilian gladiatorial rivals, and then explains that the sole reward of winning the game will be the safety of Earth, the home planet of the losing side being obliterated by the Anderians upon conclusion of the game. “Will it be quick?” Mike asks.

“In your reading of time, the entire display will take approximately five years. For us, it will be as a firecracker in a black summer sky,” the Senator replies with his usual grandiose relish. Refusal to play the game would result in the automatic destruction of Earth, since their reptilian opponents would thus win by default.

However, Mike has few qualms about abandoning Earth to its fate. “Five years,” he remarks. “Long enough to enjoy just about all there is to enjoy in the world.” Laura, far more idealistic than the embittered ex-boxer, pleads with him to change his mind but he ignores her, demanding that he be sent back to Earth. “What do you owe the human race?” he counters viciously when Laura again attempts to change his mind. The Senator chooses to compromise, saying that he will send them back and allow them twenty-four hours to decide whether they will participate in the game or not – at the end of which, if Mike still has not changed his mind, Earth’s doom will have been sealed. 

In another departure from Frederic Brown and Star Trek’s “Arena,” Mike does not change his mind due to any sense of responsibility but because of his overwhelming fear of prison – a fear that has followed him ever since childhood when he had been locked in a cage by his rambunctious playmates, resulting in a phobia of enclosed spaces. When a policeman knocks on his door, Mike is instantly jolted out of his callous indifference and the camera’s uncomfortable close-ups of his terrified face forces the viewer to participate fully in his psychological torment. At that moment, perceiving Mike’s desire for any escape, the Senator electro-ports both him and Laura once again to Anderus and, to avoid the prospect of cooling his heels in a cell, Mike accepts the Senator’s offer, choosing to fight alongside Laura against the two reptilian gladiators.

“Your opponents are already on the planet we call the arena,” the Senator genially informs them. “They’re waiting. Good luck, Ms. Hanley, Mr. Benson. May the best team win. As I told you, the unpleasant planet that we call “the Arena” is somewhat similar to the planet Earth – I should amend, of course: Earth as it was a million years ago.” The arena’s identification with an earlier, mythic Earth and the visual nature of the set – a world of shadowy fronds, boiling rivers, and drifting, humid vapors – both create an eerie blend of a prehistoric Eden and a sweltering Hades. It is an appropriate enough environment for two characters who – while confronting their reptilian nemesis – must also confront the more dangerous flaws within their own souls. For Mike, it is his childhood horror that cramps his ability to have courage and faith in himself and the world. For Laura, however, the root of the problem is subtler and thus more difficult to confront. And that is when the character of the Senator re-enters the plot – but in a significantly altered fashion.

When the two protagonists discover that their supply of food will only last for six days, Laura chooses to run away from Mike, hoping to sacrifice herself so that he will survive long enough to kill their alien opponent and save humanity. Unsurprisingly, the alien manages to track her down – but just as he raises his weapon to slay her, the Senator intervenes, saying apologetically, “Oh, I can’t let you kill her just yet. She hasn’t begun to suffer.” Then, speaking to her over some mysterious, invisible transmission, he says, “Miss Hanley, wasn’t it our understanding that you and Mr. Benson were a team? You’ve run away again, haven’t you? Why have you run away from him, Miss Hanley? So that he can eat all the food? So that he can do all the fighting? Your heart is a bottomless box of virtuous motives, isn’t it? Whatever you do, you do for someone else’s good, don’t you? Your husband didn’t want you to mother him, Miss Hanley. He wanted you to help him. It hurts to admit that you’re afraid that you can’t help someone, doesn’t it?”

There is a frightening indictment in the languid mockery of the Senator’s questions: the central flaw in Laura’s idealism is her inability to fight the good fight herself without fleeing at the first sign of possible defeat. This is the subliminal reason she has fled Mike and this is also the cankerworm at the heart of her troubled marriage. But in the process of addressing Laura, the Senator calls our attention to his own role within the narrative, that is, the jarring shift from sadistic demon to sardonic judge. Previously his presence seemed yet another tormenting device to inflict pain upon the tortured principal characters; after this dialogue, however, his character seems far more ambivalent – far more in keeping with the hitherto rejected model of the god-like, moral arbiter in Frederic Brown and Star Trek’s versions.

This ambivalence is further exploited when – as the battle between Laura, Mike, and their opponents progresses – the Senator, in a voice-over, urges his unseen Anderian audience to observe the actions of the gladiators closely. The shock behind this sudden remark stems from the fact that – because we are never shown the Anderian audience – his remark seems directed toward us: we are, at that moment, equated with the Anderians themselves, voyeuristically watching the physical and psychological travails and struggles of the two principals to satisfy our own “passions,” as the Senator earlier put it. This is enhanced by the manner in which the combat is frequently filmed with the camera observing the action through the projection screen that the Senator has set up in his chamber.

But if we are relegated to the status of the Anderian voyeurs, then we are also very close to Laura by the end of the episode when she asks the Senator whether she shall have to remember all that has taken place within the arena. “Only those memories which might be helpful to you and perhaps to your marriage,” he replies, rather tersely summing up the goal of every cautionary tale: to entertain the audience and to leave them with a moral that they shall never forget as long as they live.

At this point in the episode, the Senator’s character seems, in our mind, significantly transformed: if he is indeed cruel and arbitrary, then he is also a redemptive force, offering both Laura and Mike changed perspectives of themselves and their world and allowing them to escape the psychological cages that they have welded for themselves. They return as less flawed beings to their equally flawed world. As such The Outer Limits eschews the sunny Star Trek resolution. The Senator’s show for the Anderians, like Stefano’s show for us mortals, jolts us with its unrelenting darkness and its portrayal of human desperation, but the darkness and the desperation are not without a didactic purpose. And the lesson – once learned – will not easily be forgotten by those fortunate enough to encounter this or any other episode of The Outer Limits. 

Note: Both seasons of The Outer Limits are available on DVD from both Amazon.com and Netflix.  

The Darker Side of Science Fiction: An Introduction to "The Outer Limits" (Colin)

A pilot episode entitled “The Galaxy Being” premiered on American national television on September 16^th, 1963, heralding a science fiction/noir series that would run for a total of only two seasons but would leave behind an impression that still lingers powerfully in contemporary audiences’ imaginations. “The best program of its type ever to run on network TV,” Stephen King would later say of it. The Outer Limits, though never as popular as Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, was the brainchild of producer and screenwriter Joseph Stefano – and, like Serling, he had a taste for the macabre as well as the fantastic in fiction: a taste that is evident throughout his Serling-esque series. Stefano, who had adapted Robert Bloch’s sensationally chilling novel Psycho for Hitchcock’s eponymous film, was peculiarly suited to cross-mixing genres. In Psycho, he had worked on a noir/horror/ psychological melodrama; for The Outer Limits, a show in which his screenwriting capabilities are evident time and again, he let that peculiarity run rampant, blending the elements of science fiction and horror with expressionist film noir a full two decades before Ridley Scott directed the neo-noir Blade Runner.

But the time of noir had passed; the sixties, no longer quite as preoccupied with the internal corruptions of capitalist government and suburban life, now focused upon the imminent crises of nuclear conflict and Communist expansion. Consequently, the destruction of the world, the misuse of technology, and the loss of individuality in a mechanized, totalitarian society – rather than brutal street life melodramas and police procedurals – occupied much of the darker cinema of the decade. Cinematic style had changed as well: more and more directors were filming their projects in dazzling Technicolor and though the black-and-white film had not yet died, it was certainly on its way out. As a result, the deep chiaroscuro shadowing and German Expressionist sets so prevalent in the noir – and in the art design of The Outer Limits – was on its way out as well.

Yet if The Outer Limits was uncharacteristic of the sixties in style, its thematic obsessions were every bit a product of its time. Cold War paranoia, the quest for an identity and loss of individuality, sci-fi technology’s uses (and, of course, misuses) dominate many of Stefano’s relentlessly dark episodes alongside the more traditionally noir themes of existential alienation and surrealism. As stated before, Stefano’s genius lay in his ability to take the traditional atmosphere and dramatis personae of the noir and update them with the bells and whistles of science fiction and the Cold War concerns of the sixties. The result was a very dark – oftentimes horrific – but nonetheless fascinating television series that, in addition to featuring Stefano’s talents, would often make use of other accomplished writers such as Harlan Ellison, Robert Towne (of Chinatown fame), and Jerry Sohl.

When watching The Outer Limits – or any science fiction show of the period, for that matter – one inevitably compares it to the more well-known Star Trek and Twilight Zone. The latter, as I already mentioned, was very similar thematically to Stefano’s show; yet the mood of Serling’s Twilight Zone in spite of its occasional expressionist and surrealist touches, is warmer by worlds than The Outer Limits. While Serling’s plots, in the main, focus upon an unsympathetic anti-hero and the rightful judgment visited upon him or her, Stefano’s tend to focus more often upon the anguish visited upon flawed but nonetheless sympathetic characters who live out their lives in a cold, harsh, and unjust world. This is not to suggest that while Serling seeks to be more conventionally moral, Stefano means to portray the cold, harsh truth of ‘reality.’ Both shows are at heart morality plays that seek to point out the flaws in mankind and society. However, while Serling enjoys introducing the concept of a just and implacable Fate that awaits each of his unsavoury protagonists and serves them appropriately ironic ends, Stefano prefers to allow his more sympathetic anti-heroes to struggle in a surreal and oftentimes alienating world with a knowledge of what is morally right and morally reprehensible and a power to act upon those principles, even if their fate may be ultimately and undeservedly dark. Or, to put it in more apocalyptic terms, if Serling with his dry wit and sense of poetic justice is the Inferno’s cheerful usher visiting judgment on the odd malefactor in an otherwise decent society then Stefano is Purgatory’s gloomier apologist (or, perhaps more fittingly for both Serling and Stefano, dis-apologist) for a society in need of a systemic overhaul, one overburdened individual at a time. That happy day must await the hereafter, perhaps. Until then, from The Outer Limits perspective, i.e., Stefano's, – whether on Earth or in one of her neighboring galaxies – one is on one’s own. And -- whether utilizing the motifs of horror, science fiction, or horror -- the uniqueness of this perspective is made manifest in each episode, both defining and separating the show within and apart from the mere constraints of genre. 

 

Disquieting Truths: Jacques Tourneur’s "Night of the Demon" and the Logic of Evil (Colin)

“Well, the sense of being watched whenever one was alone was the most distressing thing to him. After a time I took to sleeping in his room, and he was the better for that: still, he talked a great deal in his sleep. What about? Is it wise to dwell on that, at least before things are straightened out?”

– “Casting the Runes,” M.R. James

 “There are sacraments of evil as well as good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.”

– “The Red Hand,” Arthur Machen

Dr. John Holden: I see you practice white magic as well as black.

Dr. Julian Karswell: Oh yes, I don't think it would be too amusing for the youngsters if I conjured up a demon from hell for them.

-- Night of the Demon (1957)

 

            The films of Jacques Tourneur are often typified by intricate plots set against shifting, illusionary atmospheres in which much of what seems obvious at first to both the protagonist and his audience is proven to be less straightforward than it first appeared and in which an apparent belief is often proven – often with terrible consequences – to be false. In the realm of the film noir, Tourneur demonstrated this sensibility with powerful effect in Out of the Past, creating the deadly Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) as the archetypal femme fatale who lures the half-willing protagonist (Robert Mitchum) to his death by allowing him to fall in love with what he imagines her character to be and disillusioning him with her true nature only when he is already under her spell. It is little surprise, then, that Tourneur made his name not so much as a director of noirs but as the talented helmsman of a number of subtly directed and imaginatively plotted horror films, many of them produced under the auspices of Val Lewton. Yet though Tourneur’s well-deserved fame lies in such classics as I Walked With a Zombie and Cat People, it is in the more obscure 1957 supernatural horror film Night of the Demon that the auteur not only equals his previous fame in the genre, but in many ways surpasses his own ability to invert established conventions and to surprise out of both his protagonist and his audience a sense of unease both fundamental to the horror experience and, in many ways, particular to the subgenre of supernatural terror.

            Based on a tale by English ghost story author M.R. James (1862-1936), Night of the Demon centers around the death of an eminent professor who, before his untimely death, was in the process of exposing a Satanic cult headed by a Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). Fellow psychologist Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), determined to uncover a non-supernatural explanation for his colleague’s seemingly supernatural death, travels to England, interviewing several other colleagues as well as the murdered man’s niece Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins) in order to learn more about the details surrounding Harrington’s last days. Rather than uncovering evidence pointing to a “natural” murder, however, he begins to find clues that seem to point to black magic as the only solution. Naturally, he spends a good deal of the film as a stalwart skeptic, attempting to disregard this theory as implausible; it is only when he himself falls under a similar curse that he at last realizes that, if he wishes to survive, he must acknowledge the terrifying existence of the shadowy supernatural world that he had spent all of his life attempting to explain away in scientific terms. The film ends with the successful defeat of the sorcerer Karswell (he is, like every good Faustus, dismembered by the demon that he has been ritually summoning throughout the entire film) and with Holden’s realization that his formerly materialistic perspective is, of course, forever untenable in light of all that he has experienced.  

            The plot’s murder-mystery construction causes one to inevitably draw a comparison between the film’s premise and the school of “rational” supernatural horror emergent in the late eighteenth-century and officiated by the mistress of the Gothic, Anne Radcliffe (authoress of the infamous Mysteries of Udolpho). This comparison, however, would prove misleading. Members of the Radcliffean school crafted lengthy and elaborate plots hinging upon seemingly supernatural events – all of which would be explained away at the novel’s often vaguely bewildering and interminable conclusion as the charlatanry of duplicitous murderers and schemers. A product of Enlightenment thought, the Radcliffean “rationalist” supernatural authors stood in direct opposition to true supernatural horror authors who wrote Gothic novels at the same time: authors such as Matthew Lewis (The Monk), Charles Robert Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer, Fatal Revenge), and John Polidori (“The Vampyre”). Indeed, this unacknowledged war continued into the age of the Victorians –  Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and Stoker’s Dracula being the towering, representative legionaries from these two respective literary camps during the late nineteenth-century.

It would be a logical assumption to believe that with the rise of Darwinism and accelerated scientific discovery in the early twentieth-century, that the true supernatural horror tale would fall somewhat out of favor. Curiously enough, the opposite proved to be true; with the rise of materialism, Nietzschean thought, and Freudianism, there also rose some of Western culture's most infamous occultists such as Montague Summers, Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – all of them standing in direct opposition to the growing tide of skeptical thought that suffused much of Western philosophical thought at the time. Many members of occult orders such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood were more famously known as supernatural horror authors and, though he was not himself an occultist, Professor M.R. James himself was a member of this self-same literary (and, in light of the rise of materialism, revolutionary) movement, crafting many fine ghostly tales besides “Casting the Runes,” all of them of the truest non-rational order.

Jacques Tourneur and screenwriter Charles Bennett faithfully follow the mood of James’ subtle masterpiece, deftly blending the gentle, Old World atmosphere of the English countryside with the ever omnipresent, hovering fear of a supernatural underworld existing beneath the surface and threatening to erupt upon the moors, into the mansions, or – and perhaps even more disquieting – into the conference rooms of materialist scientists at any moment. But more importantly, the film successfully maintains the original tale’s ploy of constructing a deceptively Radcliffean, murder-mystery-esque plot only to turn this plot on its head and show that the gruesome, masked figures are – terrifyingly – wearing no masks at all. To a practiced auteur such as Tourneur, such a horrific inversion of convention came all too naturally.

Much of the film’s subtly subversive supernaturalism is derived from the atypical characterizations of the hero Dr. Holden and his sinister opponent Karswell. In many horror films of the period, the psychologist was portrayed as a sort of materialist equivalent of the priestly Van Helsing: a character who understands the minds of men better than they themselves do and who can even use this knowledge for certain maleficent ends himself. Whether good or evil, it was characteristic of all psychologists to be portrayed in serious cinema as learned, wise, and usually the guiding influence or omnipresent antagonist of the hero. Likewise, Dana Andrews, famed for his portrayal of hard-boiled protagonists in films such as Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), was typically cast in the role of a reliable, intelligent hero whom the audience could trust to make the correct decisions in spite of his wily, witty villains. With these conventions in mind, nothing prepares us for the platitudinous, unimaginative Dr. Holden in Night of the Demon. Most protagonists in horror films must maintain a certain skepticism in order to remain believable; but in Dr. John Holden, skepticism is heightened to a nearly pathological pitch until the audience, rather than experiencing sympathy for his plight, is coerced into feeling a certain impatience instead. Conventionally handsome, well-educated, and American, his character’s presence in a film set in England with a British-heavy cast stands as the mascot of straightforward, scientific, rationalist, modern America – and the portrayal is hardly flattering.

 

Dr. John Holden: Joanna, let me tell you something about myself. When I was a kid, I used to walk down the street with the other kids and when we came to a ladder they'd all walk around it. I'd walk under it, just to see if anything would happen. Nothing ever did. When they'd see a black cat they'd run the other way to keep it from crossing their path. But I didn't. And all this ever did for me is make me wonder why – why people get so panicky about absolutely nothing at all. I've made a career studying it. Maybe just to prove one thing. That I'm not a superstitious sucker like ninety per cent of humanity.

 

Conversely, Karswell is portrayed as the exact antithesis of Holden in almost every way imaginable. Older, British, and (unsurprisingly) more supernaturally inclined, Karswell confesses at one point that he worked at one point as a stage-show magician: a most inauspicious beginning in comparison to Holden’s professorship. He is the living symbol of Old World, old-fashioned, “backward”-thinking. Yet, perversely, the film’s cinematography and screenplay – as well as the plot itself – force the audience to acknowledge Karswell as the wiser of the two: whilst Holden’s face in a number of shots is filmed in shadow, giving a visual emphasis to his doubts and uncertainties regarding his environment, Karswell is nearly always filmed in either broad daylight or in the clear, unbroken light of a parlor or drawing room. Likewise, while Holden merely parrots his tired arguments, Karswell’s dialogue is appropriately ambiguous and yet redolent of a certain secret knowledge:

 

Dr. Julian Karswell: Do I believe in witchcraft? What kind of witchcraft? The legendary witch that rides on the imaginary broom? The hex that tortures the thoughts of the victim? The pin stuck in the image that wastes away the mind and the body?

Dr. John Holden: Also imaginary.

Dr. Julian Karswell: But where does imagination end and reality begin? What is this twilight, this half world of the mind that you profess to know so much about? How can we differentiate between the powers of darkness and the powers of the mind?

 

The casting of Niall MacGinnis as the sinister conjuror was yet another stroke of calculated genius. Four years after playing Martin Luther in the eponymous film, MacGinnis maintains many of the mannerisms of the wise, knowledgeable visionary whilst subtly imbuing them with an added quality of underlying ruthlessness. Karswell is a man who at one moment may be innocuously hosting a Halloween party for the village children and the next moment setting a demon against one of his enemies. One has only to watch the scenes in which he calmly and pleasantly reminds Holden of Holden’s forthcoming curse-induced death, in order to witness Bennett’s fine screenwriting capabilities and the sadly underrated talents of one of England’s finest thespians.

The one scene in which science attempts to take some degree of control occurs towards the end of the film when Holden and his colleagues hypnotize one of Karswell’s cultists with the purpose of gaining some knowledge of the inner-workings of the cult. Ironically, this scientific triumph concludes in a further proof of the existence of the supernatural. When Professor O’Brien asks the man what the true “believer” in Karswell’s teachings must adhere to, the cultist replies that it is those “who blaspheme and desecrate. In the joy of sin will mankind that is lost, find itself again.” To Holden, who has been constantly avowing his disbelief in any sort of supernatural source for evil, this testimony is ridiculous. However, in the context of Tourneur’s cinematic nightmare, it is a terrifying and logical fact.

Indeed, the film’s conclusion magnificently encapsulates the collision of ancient, supernatural evil with modern materialism. As the demon descends to destroy Karswell, a train rushes past in the opposite direction so that the train and the monster seem to head towards each other at opposite ends of the horizon. The effect creates a visual parallel and visual contrast between the smoking train and the fiery demon – one an inhabitant of the so-called primitive shadowland of myth and the other the result of human technology. Unsettlingly, this parallel both asks and answers the question of which one of the two is the more powerful.

Though films such as The Exorcist are given well-deserved credit for portraying the encroachment of the supernatural into the world of ordinary, modern society, it may be argued after this general overview that Tourneur’s Night of the Demon is something of an earlier, drawing-room version of the same concept – a concept that has been propounded and explored by supernatural horror authors since the advent of the Gothic novel. Tourneur, with his brilliant casting decisions and faithfulness to M.R. James’ original concept, created a work of art out of this familiar idea that is certainly worth watching and studying for both its qualities as an excellent film and its achievements as a genuinely unsettling horror movie.