Charles Bennett, the original screenwriter of Curse of the Demon, had this to say about his involvement in the project in Cult Movies by Danny Peary: "I bought the rights to Montague James' story, "Casting the Runes," and wrote a screenplay called "The Bewitched." It engendered a great deal of excitement out here in Hollywood...But time rolled on...and I was in England directing a TV series (ghastly)...On the very day that I was leaving...Mr. Hal E. Chester [producer] turned up and asked me to sign a little letter granting him the rights for a certain amount of money for six months, if he could set it up. Very tired and on the way to the plane, I signed the Goddam thing...but as soon as I arrived back in Hollywood I was informed that RKO (Bill Dozier in charge) had okayed the purchase of my script with me as my own director. Too late. Hal Chester held that wretched little piece of paper in England and I hadn't even received a penny in advance."

According to Bennett in an interview with Tom Weaver, several major actors in Hollywood were interested in playing the lead in Curse of the Demon: "Robert Taylor certainly wanted to do it. In fact, it was his right hand man (whose name I now forget) who had set it up in my absence with RKO. Dick Powell also was very, very interested and talked to me about it a tremendous lot. But we never got down to a contract."

Director Jacques Tourneur became involved in Curse of the Demon through Ted Richmond, the producer of Nightfall (1957), who recommended the project to him.

According to biographer Chris Fujiwara in Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, Tourneur "showed the script to his friend Dana Andrews, who agreed to play the main part. Andrews was at this point a somewhat tarnished figure, his career blighted by an alcoholism that reputedly affected his work (there is one scene in Night of the Demon, a process shot of Andrews getting out of a car in front of a hotel, in which his delivery is noticeably slurred and unsteady.)"

Andrews didn't much care for producer Hal E. Chester (he referred to him as "a real little schmuck") and recalled his interference on the set of Curse of the Demon: "He would come up and start telling Jacques how to direct the picture. Jacques would say, "Now, now, Hal," and try to be nice. But I just said, "Look, you little son-of-a-bitch! You want me to walk off this picture? I didn't come all the way over here to have the producer tell me what he thinks about directing the picture. I came because Mr. Tourneur asked me. Let the director direct the picture!""

Remembering the filming of Curse of the Demon, director Jacques Tourneur commented on the scene where Karswell conjures up a windstorm at the children's party: "I had a fight over the staging of the storm scene. We had to rent twelve aerial engines from World War I. We were on an exterior location, and these were great long trees, and if we'd had half a storm it would have been inadequate. We had truckloads and truckloads of dead leaves, and we set the radial engines whirling - cost a fortune, no one would talk to me. They said, "We'll do it with generators, electric machines," and I said, "No, it's got to be a hell of a storm, it's got to blow over the prams and the nurses in the garden, and all the chairs." So we had all these huge engines going: there was so much noise you couldn't hear anything." He also added, in a separate interview with Joel E. Siegel for Cinefantastique:, "...if we are going to have a morlock making a storm, it can't just be a wind - it's got to be a gale. So this nice kids' birthday party is destroyed. I had all of the wicker furniture painted white so that you'd see it and, when the nurses start taking the kids inside, all this furniture rolls across the screen. I'm very happy with that."

Producer Hal E. Chester, with the studio's approval, decided that Curse of the Demon would perform better at the box office if they showed the monster, an idea that Tourneur was strongly opposed to. In an interview with Films and Filming he said, "The monster was taken right out of a book on demonology -3,400-year-old prints copied exactly - and it looked great, I must say, in a drawing so I said, 'Fine, go ahead.' Then they put this thing on a man. I thought it was going to be suggested and fuzzy and drawn, in and out, appearing and disappearing, like a cartoon, animated.....The one-fourth of the film which had to do with the delineation of that monster belonged to another type of film which is the teenager horror film."

The monster didn't work for Tourneur and he said "The scenes in which you really see the demon were shot without me. All except one. I shot the sequence in the woods where Dana Andrews is chased by a sort of cloud. This technique should have been used for other sequences. The audience should never have completely seen the demon....They ruined the film by showing it [the demon] from the very beginning."

In an interview for Cinefantastique, Tourneur explained, "I wanted, at the very end, when the train goes by, to include only four frames of the monster coming up with the guy and throwing him down. Boom, boom - did I see it or didn't I? People would have to sit through it a second time to be sure of what they saw. But after I had finished [the film] and returned to the U.S., the English producer made that horrible thing [the monster], cheapened it. It was like a different film. But everything after that opening was as I had intended."

Compiled by Jeff Stafford

SOURCES:
Cult Movies by Danny Peary
Attack of the Monster Movie Makers: Interviews with 20 Genre Giants by Tom Weaver
Cinefantastique, "Tourner Remembers" by Joel E. Siegel
Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall by Chris Fujiwara
American Directors Volume 1 by Jean-Pierre Coursodon with Pierre Sauvage
Video Watchdog, "Curse of the Demon: Two Versions, Two Critics" by Bill Cooke and Kim Newman