Thursday
I entirely forgot to mention this, but recently we ate at popular Monterrey restaurant Los Arcos. The place is famous for its grilled Tacos Gobernador, which are filled with cheese and shrimp. It's infamous for an all-out gunfight between narcos that once happened there. Tough: I finally went to the location of an actual shootout and about halfway through dinner realized that I was sitting with my back to the door. About halfway through last night's after-midnight-thon movie, Night of the Demon*, Dana Andrews tells fellow scientists about a song stuck in his head. I had sympathy for him since the lyrics of the Rocky Horror Picture Show theme song were looping continuously through mine:
Dana Andrews said prunes/ Gave him the runes/ And passing them used lots of skills... *
Night of the Demon starts as a man drives haphazardly along a pitch-dark tree-lined road. He is on his way to reconcile with the neighborhood black magician. The man is a scientist and skeptic who had planned to participate in an upcoming joint debunking of the magician's dubious abilities. Recent developments, however, have prompted newfound credulity, and tonight he's begging the devil worshipper to call off his dogs. But it's too late: a devil comes from the trees and rips him to shreds. Oops. Meanwhile, on a prop-plane over the Atlantic, Dana Andrews tries to sleep before the upcoming joint debunking in England. Night of the Demon is a great movie, filled with the kind of brooding quasi-historical witchiness and armchair psychoanalyzing that makes the best science vs. nature fright films. I think the film is doubly notable for arriving in 1957, when science was more often cast as the badguy when pitted against nature on the silver screen. Directed with weighty fatalism by master Jacques Tourneur. [Cavin]
Dana Andrews said prunes/ Gave him the runes/ And passing them used lots of skills... *
Night of the Demon starts as a man drives haphazardly along a pitch-dark tree-lined road. He is on his way to reconcile with the neighborhood black magician. The man is a scientist and skeptic who had planned to participate in an upcoming joint debunking of the magician's dubious abilities. Recent developments, however, have prompted newfound credulity, and tonight he's begging the devil worshipper to call off his dogs. But it's too late: a devil comes from the trees and rips him to shreds. Oops. Meanwhile, on a prop-plane over the Atlantic, Dana Andrews tries to sleep before the upcoming joint debunking in England. Night of the Demon is a great movie, filled with the kind of brooding quasi-historical witchiness and armchair psychoanalyzing that makes the best science vs. nature fright films. I think the film is doubly notable for arriving in 1957, when science was more often cast as the badguy when pitted against nature on the silver screen. Directed with weighty fatalism by master Jacques Tourneur. [Cavin]
this had happened to Mr. Cavin by 11:11:00 AM
Then, a 2 sided conversation ensued...
I saw this movie long ago when it was still "Curse of the Demon" and was shown on the Late Movie or the Late Late Movie. A kid, shut up in a dark room in a dark house at 3 a.m., afraid to turn on lights which might wake my parents and trying to watch the television and over my shoulder at the same time. Oh, speaking of song loops? "I'm a wild and an untamed thing. I'm a bee with a ..." Thanks a lot.
Oh, yeah. I remember that well. When I’d do that, the cat would sit on top of the TV and stare at a place out the window above my head until I had to look. Creepy little bastards. Also, some interesting history about this: Curse of the Demon is the US re-titling of the movie, released the following year (1958), truncated by thirteen minutes and otherwise slightly re-edited. The British version clocks in at 95 minutes. It came under criticism at the time for blatantly showing off the titular Demon. Is that crazy or what? It was an excellently glowing, smoky, surreal apparition of those sort of fourteenth century devil woodcuts, well realized and damn well terrifying.
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