Night Of The Demon
1957
Jacques Tourneur
M.R. James, Charles Bennett, Hal E. Chester
Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis, Maurice Denham, Athene Seyler, Liam Redmond, Reginald Beckwith, Ewan Roberts, Peter Elliott, Rosamund Greenwood, Brian Wilde, Richard Leech, Lloyd Lamble, Peter Hobbes, Charles Lloyd Pack
Dr. John Holden ventures to London to attend a paranormal psychology symposium with the intention to expose devil cult leader, Julian Karswell. Holden is a skeptic and does not believe in Karswell's power. Nonetheless, he accepts an invitation to stay at Karswell's estate, along with Joanna Harrington, niece of Holden's confidant who was electrocuted in a bizarre automobile accident. Karswell secretly slips a parchment into Holden's papers that might possibly be a death curse. Recurring strange events finally strike fear into Holden, who believes that his only hope is to pass the parchment back to Karswell to break the demonic curse. ------- Psychologist Dr. John Holden travels to London to attend a conference on the paranormal. He's actually going there to debunk these activities but finds on arrival that his collaborator, Professor Henry Harrington, has died in a strange accident. Harrington's niece Joanna isn't so quick to dismiss paranormal activity and believes that the subject of their investigation, Dr. Julian Karswell, had placed a Runic curse on her uncle. Unable to get certain book from the British Museum, Holden accepts Karswell's offer to visit him and borrow his own copy. There he learns that Karswell was once a magician, which fits in well with his view that paranormal activity is just so much hocus pocus. Soon after he and Joanna return to London, he finds that Karswell has place a similar curse among his own papers. Slowly, Holden comes to realize that the dangers are very real and he must find a way to rid himself of the death sentence that has been placed on him. ------- The skeptical Dr. John Holden travels to London to meet his friend Professor Harrington and investigate Dr. Julian Karswell, who is the leader of a sect that worships the devil, to expose him as a charlatan. Holden learns that Professor Harrington has just died in a car accident and the goes to the library to read a rare book about the occult that his friend wanted to show him; however the book is missing. Karswell is in the library and offers to lend the book from his private collection and gives his address to Holden. He also secretly hides a parchment into Holden's document. Soon Holden meets Harrington's niece Joanna Harrington that warns him how dangerous Karswell is based on her uncle's diary. Further they discover that Holden is doomed to die in a couple of days and his only chance to break the curse is returning the parchment to Karswell. ------- American psychologist John Holden arrives in London to participate in a symposium aiming to expose witchcraft and devil-worship as a fraud, with attention centered on a cult run by a Julian Karswell. Debarking his plane, Holden learns that the symposium leader, Henry Harrington, has suddenly died and he is now in charge. What only the audience knows is that Harrington was clearly killed by a demon, apparently summoned by Karswell to avenge his persecution. Despite both threatening and cajoling behavior by Karswell, Holden determines to proceed, though the only cult member willing to talk about his experiences is in a prison psychiatric ward, catatonic after allegedly killing yet another cult member. However, Harrington's niece, Joanna, believes, based on her uncle's notes, that Karswell may indeed have some satanic powers derived from an ancient tome in an obscure language which he has been able to translate, and attempts to warn the skeptic Holden. Karswell's mother also attempts to warn Holden off. However, the thing which begins to most get to Holden are the occasional, but mounting, sensory and mental disturbances he begins experiencing after an encounter with Karswell, and the discovery that, during this encounter, Karswell secretly slipped a slip of parchment with a curse in runic symbols on it into Holden's belongings, a parchment identical to one Harrington recorded having had passed to him in a similar manner shortly before his death... [N.B. Holden at no point stays at the Karswell estate].
82 minutes (at 23.98 frames per second)
700 MB
MPEG-4 Visual - resolution: 640x400