Notes On 'Night Of The Demon'

001 Director Jacques Tourneur is something of a hero of mine, having directed a number of film noir and horror films which rank amongst my favourites. Nothing in ‘Cat People’ or ‘Out Of The Past’ can prepare you for ‘Night Of The Demon’, however. Whereas Tourneur normally gets his effects through subtlety and suggestion, shapes in the shadows, here the producer rode roughshod over his tendency to ambiguity and inserted a stop motion demon. Tourneur hated it, but I rather like the way it sets out the stall and lets you know immediately that black magic is real, monsters are real, Satan is real, Hell is a real place and, if you’re not very careful, you’re going there.

002 There’s something very persuasive about fictional worlds where witchcraft and magic are real, everyday things. In ‘Night Of The Eagle’ (1961), for instance, Peter Wyngarde finds that his academic career has been furthered by his wife’s mystical interventions, then finds out that all the faculty wives are doing the same. In ‘Cast A Deadly Spell’ (1991), magic is a mundane affair and people live alongside zombies, demons and other assorted monsters as if it were the most natural thing in the world (Fred Ward plays a private investigator called Philip Lovecraft, by the way. It’s an interesting film, check it out). In ‘Night Of The Demon’ a children’s party can instantly turn into a black magic battleground, just as the good old, cosy old British Library can become a weird, hallucogenic place of great psychic danger.

003 With regard to the demon whose night it is, it may not seem particularly scary now (in fact its face could best be described as ‘goofy’, it’s execution as ‘clunky’) but it is a real demon, not a mental suggestion, a will o’the wisp or trick of the light. The demon may resemble a hairy cousin of the animated monster from the old ‘Chewits’ advert (“He ate the Taj Mahal…”), but he is a supernatural creature who snatches up people and stomps them to death, a stone cold killer, an occult hit man from beyond our ken.

004 I’m all for scientific scepticism, but how long does it take Dana Andrews to cotton on that he is dealing with fanatics not fakers? That his soul really is in the balance? How much proof does he need? Like Brian Donleavy in the ‘Quatermass’ films, Andrews was supposed to have been drunk in pretty much every scene, but it’s hard to tell. What a trouper. The film has a great cast: Andrews, Maurice Denham, Peggy ‘Gun Crazy’ Cummins, Brian ‘Mr. Barraclough’ Wilde, Niall McGinnes, Reginald Beckwith…I’d like to think they were all drunk in pretty much every scene.

005 There is a séance scene in which medium Reginald Beckwith speaks with the voice of a small, dead girl. I have become somewhat hardened to horror over the years, i.e. repeat use has left me difficult to scare. However, all of that means nothing in the face of a middle aged man speaking in the voice of a small, dead girl, which, for some reason, I find terrifying. I would also find a small girl speaking like a middle aged bloke scary. I suppose I just don’t do disembodied voices very well, especially if they sound rather plaintive and confused.

006 The scenes with or about Rand Hobart have a sickly, oppressive feel, the sensation of dreaming that you are caught in quicksand. Tourneur draws a picture of unspeakable depravity with the merest of suggestions, a brilliant counterpoint to the explicit horror of rampaging Chewit monsters.

007 I will be presenting ‘Night Of The Demon’ at The Showroom Cinema on November 2nd at 7pm in the company of my friend Matt Cheeseman from The University Of Sheffield . The screening will be followed by a DJ set from Adrian Flanagan, one of the electronic warlocks behind the excellent Eccentronic Research Council, whose Pendle Witch obsessed album ‘1612 Underture’ I should have recommended a long time ago. If you do come, come and say hello. I promise not to stomp you to death. More HERE.

People Apart

'People Apart' is a 1957 documentary film which attempts to demystify that most mysterious and terrifying of illnesses, epilepsy. It's aims are succinctly summed up by the above title card.

Here, an actor completely commits himself to demonstrating some of the physical symptoms of an attack.

These may look like snapshots from a torture chamber with a hair salon attached, but they actually depict an attempt to help and understand - albeit one that involves diodes and induces an epileptic seizure.

Fascinating, frightening stuff, brilliantly and sensitively realised.

Travelator

The London Underground is one of the greatest engineering achievements in British history. If, like me, you sometimes take it for granted, then lovely little films like 'The Travelators' (1961) help remind you of the scale and sheer amount of graft that go into its maintenance and constant updating, let alone the original construction.

The film details the building of two travelators at the Bank station. These were the first in Europe, and a huge shaft had to be sunk under the road in one of the busiest parts of London. Scale models were used extensively in the planning and building process. I like scale models very much. If I had to write an episode of 'The Twilight Zone' it would be about a lonely modelling enthusiast who finds a way to live in a scale model, and ends up enjoying it much more than life in the big world. 

Work started on the Bank site in August, 1957, and was completed three years later. The travelators were opened in September, 1960 by the Lord Mayor of London, who was also the first person to officially travelate. After the dignitaries had their photograph taken, the 'moving pavements' were opened up to the general public, who seemed to really enjoy the innovation. People were easily pleased in the olden days, weren't they? I'm not knocking it, it's a good way to be. 

Note misspelling of 'travelator'

Look how clean it all is!

Look how happy they all are!

In case you were pondering the difference between a travelator and an escalator, by the way, it's the absence of steps.

Enemy From Space

Two years after ‘The Quatermass Xperiment’, Brian Donelevy was back as the nutty professor in ‘Quatermass 2’ (I have wondered if this film and the TV version that preceded it are the first examples of numbered sequels, but it’s not like I’ve looked into it or anything).  Once again, Quatermass is battling an alien invasion, this time a methane breathing mass of micro-organisms who have been coming to Earth in artificial meteor showers, latching onto human hosts and getting the resulting zombies, some of whom are in positions of authority, to do stuff for them, including building a massive, top secret base out in the country.

Shot mostly on location, the film benefits from filming at two fantastic sites: the new town of Hemel Hempstead, still under construction (more here) and the huge but lightly manned Shell refinery at Stanford-le-Hope in Essex (the facility was largely automated, which adds to the eerie atmosphere). It is at the refinery where the bulk of the horror takes place: an MP dies after snooping around a storage tank and being covered in a horrible, hot, corrosive black slime; men are murdered and their bodies shoved into pipes to stop Quatermass gassing the aliens; the metal domes are not full of synthetic food (the cover story), but with millions of individual alien life forms clinging together to make a pulsating, undulating giant pile of greasy, toxic life.  Best of all are the silent, scarred guards – mindless enforcers and killers for an alien hive mind. They are cool.

Full of conspiracy and unease, ‘Quatermass 2’ is a superbly paranoid film, brilliantly creating a world where nothing is as it seems and all the misgivings the individual has about big business, corporate secrets and government collusion turn out to be true, and the implications far worse than anyone (except perhaps David Icke) could imagine.

Donlevy is noticeably less shouty as Quatermass this time around, although he still truncates his sentences and has a fairly obvious stand in for scenes that require rapid movement. He is ably supported by a cast of smooth British character actors, including the unflappable John Longden, the suave William Franklyn and a bequiffed Bryan Forbes. Sid James is in it too, playing a drunken, wide boy journalist who dies a hero.

The script was adapted from the original teleplay by Nigel Kneale himself, and condenses three hours of TV into a tidy hour and twenty five. It’s a classic, and a huge favourite of mine.  

Quatermass 2

Pictures Of New Towns

Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire was designated a new town in 1947. Originally envisaged as 'a city in a park', the first new residents moved in to the town in 1950, although the original expansion plan was not completed until the 1980's. Hemel can boast the first multi-storey car park in the UK, constructed in 1960, as well as the infamous 'Magic Roundabout', an elaborate and mystifying circulatory where six separate roads meet.

In 1957, Hammer Studios shot part of 'Quatermass 2' in the town, cannily linking Hemel Hempstead's construction to the fictional 'Winnerden Flats' being built to house workers at the 'artificial food plant' in the story. Basically a big building site, the town proved an apt and eerie location, starting with the approach on a big empty road which abruptly terminates in the middle of nowhere.

Finding a dirt track that leads to the beginnings of a huge estate, Quatermass stops to interact with a few of the locals. The lady with a speaking role is an actress, but the ladies in the background are real residents, lucky enough to have been allocated one of the few completed houses on a project that still has years to run. There isn't even a pavement for them to push their shopping baskets along.

I believe this is the area of Hemel Hempstead known as Warner's End, although I stand to be corrected. Like all the individual estates in the new town it was designed to have its own mini civic centre: a parade of shops, a pub, a Doctor's surgery, some public art. In the film, however, all they have to look forward to is Whist on Wednesdays (cash prizes), and all there is to see are the abandoned double decker buses that brought them to this brave new world. 

Incidentally, I have been to Hemel Hempstead and it's quite nice, really, with very little evidence of alien invasion.

Shock By Incredible Shock

'The Strange World Of Planet X' ('Cosmic Monsters' in the US) is a lot of fun. When a nutty scientist (played by the superbly named Alec Mango) invents a machine which produces evil magnetic rays it not only turns the spiders and insects in the area into massive, human hungry monsters, but attracts the attention of advanced lifeforms from another planet who pop down to Earth to tell us to cut it out, stop messing around, leave it.

Sort of 'The Day The Earth Stood Still' if it had been filmed in Hertfordshire on a tenth of the budget, it's occasionally on late night terrestrial TV, and would be on more if I had anything to do with it (I don't, so please send your angry letters elsewhere).

The Strange World of Planet X