“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” And about time too, I hear you say, as we celebrate – at long, long last – the UK DVD release of Night of the Demon, quite possibly the greatest film of super­natural horror ever made in Britain. Adapted from MR James’s story “Casting the Runes”, writer Charles Bennett and director Jacques Tourneur’s superb 1957 updating is as much Henry as Montague Rhodes James, pitting a brash, no-nonsense American psych­ologist against the lurking fears and shadowy surfaces of an old world whose wafer-thin modern­ity only just masks a mediæval mindset and demonic horrors as old as Stonehenge – used to good effect, along with Clifton Parker’s superbly eerie music, in the film’s title sequence. 

John Holden (Dana Andrews) has crossed the pond to use his psychological expertise in exposing a supposed ‘black magician’ as a fraud and his deluded followers as a bunch of superstitious dupes. There would be no point in offering Dr Julian Karswell a Randi-style million to prove he’s the real deal – Karswell already enjoys the fruits of Satanic succ­ess in the charming country pile he shares with his dear old mum. And anyway, Karswell is the real deal – as Niall McGinnis’s subtle, riveting performance soon convinces us, if not Holden – who quickly finds his pat explanations woefully inadequate and his time running out. 

There’s plenty here to engage forteans new to this classic film – mysterious runic symbols and indecipherable magical manuscripts, a back-street séance, the notion that the ‘old religion’ has never died out, sceptics versus believers, and the ambiguity of phenomena that seem to exist as much in the mind as in external reality. 

Of course, such ambiguity was bread and butter to director Tourneur, who’d previously helped RKO’s Val Lewton redefine horror for the film noir age with classics like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. Thematically and visually – thanks to Ted Scaife’s wonderfully atmospheric black and white visuals – Night of the Demon is another exercise in cinematic and philosophical chiaroscuro, in which John Holden’s daylight world is under constant threat of eclipse from the night terrors conjured up by his Satanic antagonist. Certain sequences retain a genuinely eerie power – clown-faced Karswell conjuring up a storm at a children’s tea party, or Holden pursued through the woods by giant, burning footprints and a fireball that might resolve itself at any moment into a “fire demon from Hell” – while the film as a whole is a perfectly paced and impeccably constructed example of old-school horror. 

Whether or not you think producer Hal Chester jumped the shark with the inserted demon money shots will depend entirely on whether your approach to screen horror is of the less-is-more or more-is-more variety. Whichever way you incline, Night of the Demon is a genre masterpiece and has never looked better than in this complete widescreen print. 

The only extra on the disc is the oft-screened American cut – the truncated and retitled Curse of the Demon – but the excellent viewing notes almost make up for this.