Night of the Demon. 1957. UK/USA. Jacques Tourneur. Screenplay by Charles Bennett, Hal E. Chester, based on a story by M.R. James. With Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis, Maurice Denham. 95 min.
Jacques Tourneur's masterpiece of supernatural terror exemplifies the director's unique, unemphatic style and delicate lighting---qualities that distinguished his earlier RKO classics like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. The film follows American psychologist Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews) as he arrives in England to debunk a satanic cult led by the urbane yet menacing Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis, delivering a performance of gracious malevolence). When Karswell slips Holden a runic parchment, undefinable cosmic forces begin to collect around him.
Tourneur's resistance to explicit horror--- a taste he shared with his RKO producer, Val Lewton---is evident in his meticulous construction of psychological suspense. Through suggestion rather than statement, ordinary English settings---country estates, woodland paths, train corridors---become spaces of mounting unease under Ted Scaife's silvery black-and-white photography.