31 Days of Horror - Day 6: Curse of the Demon

Tonight we go back to Britain for a film I consider a must see in the horror canon, Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon (1957) aka Night of the Demon. Based on the story "Casting of the Runes" by M.R. James which had previously been adapted into a radio play for the program "Escape" (you can listen to it here at the Internet Archives). Tourneur had already proven himself as a master of "less is more" horror with I Walked with a Zombie and Cat People and had originally planned to shoot the movie without directly showing the monster, but the studio pressured him to add it for commercial reasons towards the end of filming. It was released in the U.S. as the lower half of a double bill with Hammer's The Revenge of Frankenstein.

Trivia tidbits from the IMDB:

• This is the movie that the line "It's in the trees! It's coming!" was sampled from for the opening of Kate Bush song "The Hounds of Love".

• This film was mentioned in the opening song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show ("Science Fiction Double Feature"): "Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes, but passing them used lots of skill".