Despite being a British film, the protagonist is changed to be a psychologist from America, arriving in London to speak at a skeptics conference. Our hero, Dr. Holden, discovers that the man who was supposed to meet him has died in an accident, when he inexplicably crashed his car into power lines and was electrocuted. The accident has some connection to an apparent cult headed by one Dr. Julian Karswell, a wealthy practitioner of magic that Holden and his deceased colleague had intended to debunk. Karswell is magnanimous, but informs Holden that he will die in three days.
As the three days pass, Holden begins witnessing stranger and stranger phenomena, but he continues to hold on to his skepticism. A scrap of paper with runic script on it mysteriously appears on his possession, bearing similarities to runic script on the nearby megaliths at Stonehenge. Regardless of what he believes or doesn't believe, something seems to be happening. In the end, he's able to turn things around on Karswell, but it remains ambiguous (if perhaps only to the audience) whether the events Holden experienced are magic or mundane.
This is in spite of studio interference. I'm a big believer in never being too explicit with the monster, unless being explicit with the monster is the point. You could say it's the difference between 1979's Alien, in which the titular creature is rarely seen until the film's final act, and 1986's Aliens, in which a whole nest of the things is an ongoing and obvious threat. (Though even Aliens managed to sneak a surprise reveal in the finale.) Night of the Demon was originally intended to be much more ambiguous, with whatever force that was stalking the characters remaining unseen. It's a technique Tourneur has used before, with Cat People in 1942 (another ground-breaking horror-noir that properly introduced the jumpscare as a horror device.) But the film's producers inserted demon special effects over Tourneur's objections. The irony of this is that the effects are actually quite good, and the demon is now an iconic figure in classic horror circles. There's an argument to be made that the addition, despite not being true to the film's original vision, made the film the classic it is today; while I personally disagree that it actually improved the film, who's to say whether the film would have succeeded without it or not?
I didn't know what to expect going into Night of the Demon. I'm a fan of Tourneur, one of Golden Age Hollywood's most underrated filmmakers with a talent for infusing grim noir dramas with a touch of horror, sometimes even the supernatural. Night of the Demon is usually billed as a horror classic, but the film plays out more like the noir that it actually is, the film being dialogue heavy accentuated by moments of terror. It's full of Tourneur's characteristic deep shadows and cinematographic style; how easy we forget that horror and noir have long been cousin genres! It almost seems to be doing the film a disservice to describe it solely as a horror movie, when in fact it is its very noir pedigree that makes it so effective, even with the demon scenes. I'm not sure I'd call Night of the Demon a masterpiece: it's too talky at times, Holden's relationship with the female lead isn't super interesting, and it's difficult to take Karswell seriously as a villain, but if you're at all a fan of folk horror, you owe it to yourself to see this film.
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