Showing posts with label M. R. James. Show all posts
Showing posts with label M. R. James. Show all posts
Sunday, 24 December 2017
Friday, 27 December 2013
Mark Gatiss - M. R. James' The Tractate Middoth and M. R. James: Ghost Writer
The Tractate Middoth: A Ghost Story for Christmas
The chilling story of Dr Rant, whose wicked streak continues from beyond the grave. Based on the festive ghost story by MR James.
When a relative comes to find a particular book at the university library, young student Garrett is drawn into a family feud over a will and its legacy - with terrifying consequences.
Mark Gatiss steps into the mind of MR James, the enigmatic English master of the supernatural story. How did this donnish Victorian bachelor, conservative by nature and a devout Anglican, come to create tales that continue to chill readers more than a century on?
Mark attempts to uncover the secrets of James's inspiration, taking an atmospheric journey from James's childhood home in Suffolk to Eton, Cambridge and France, venturing into ancient churches, dark cloisters and echoing libraries along the way.
M R James: Ghost Writer (2013)
by Roger Edwards
MR James: Ghost Writer is a sixty minute documentary written and presented by Mark Gatiss, exploring the life of Britain’s foremost ghost story writer. Gatiss, a long time admirer of James, delves in to the life of the author from his devout Anglican upbringing and close knit family life, through to his ascent to the summit of academia at King’s college, Cambridge. The program seeks to discover what motivated this scholarly bachelor to create some of the most iconic and chilling ghost stories in English literature. By following in James’s footsteps, the documentary attempts to gain a greater insight in to the enigmatic author.
MR James: Ghost Writer explores in some depth the legacy of Mr James, emphasising his early life in Suffolk and the religious nature of his family. His academic prowess and near obsession with Medieval text and apocrypha clearly had an impact upon his writing, with much of the visual imagery from his writings being directly lifted from manuscripts hew worked with on a daily basis. Only being familiar withJames’s work from a literary standing, I was greatly surprised by the great academic achievements of his life. His written treatise on illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts still remains an unparalleled achievement along with his rise to the office of provost and directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Despite the dry and formal nature of Victorian life, James was a surprising gregarious animal, taking an active part in college social life. Although he certainly reflected facets of the antiquarian characters that so often populated his stories, he was also a man of immense passion. His personal friendships were deep and of great importance to him, as correspondence with his inner circle demonstrate. His relationship with ex-pupil and illustrator James McBryde, succinctly demonstrates a profound platonic friendship of a type seldom seen these days. The documentary also addressed the impact of the “Great war” upon both James and the college and the subsequent way it influenced his later writing.
Perhaps the best aspect of Mark Gatiss’s exploration of all things Jamesian, is the honest and fair way the subject of his “personal life” is explored. There is a trend in contemporary analysis to sometimes over zealously look for evidence modern schools of thought in those from prior eras. Several revisionist scholars seem to seize upon “examples” of a sexual subtext in the author’s work and are then happy to extrapolate this in to theory’s of suppressed homosexuality. Mr. Gatiss does not shy away from such notions but neither does he make any definitive conclusions. His interview with a former pupil of James whose father was also a close personal friend, perhaps sheds the most light on the matter.
The visual and editing style of MR James: Ghost Writer is very compelling and follows a broadly linear narrative path, with many a tangential aside to explore illustrative points. Being a BBC commission project there a lot of use of footage from previous adaptations in referencing James’s literary work. The documentary effectively makes use of actor Robert Lloyd Parry, who recreates James celebrated readings of his stories at Christmas, to his fellow members of the “ Chit Chat Club”. Parry specialises in one man performances of the work of M R James and provides some excellent readings from such stories as Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook and A warning to the Curious.
Although it is a impossible task to definitively encapsulate a writer such as M R James in a single sixty minute documentary, MR James: Ghost Writer certainly provides an interesting overview. Mark Gatiss has an obvious passion for the man and clearly identifies with him on many levels. However, this is far from an unobjective eulogy and depicts James as a man of his time with not particularly progressive attitudes on sexual equality or modernisation. MR James: Ghost Writer is to be shown on the BBC in the UK over the Christmas period along with the newly commissioned adaptation of The Tractate Middoth, also written by Mark Gatiss. I whole heartedly recommend both shows to not only established M R James fans but to wider scholars of the ghost stories who wish to learn more about one of the genres finest authors.
The chilling story of Dr Rant, whose wicked streak continues from beyond the grave. Based on the festive ghost story by MR James.
When a relative comes to find a particular book at the university library, young student Garrett is drawn into a family feud over a will and its legacy - with terrifying consequences.
M. R. James: Ghost Writer
Mark attempts to uncover the secrets of James's inspiration, taking an atmospheric journey from James's childhood home in Suffolk to Eton, Cambridge and France, venturing into ancient churches, dark cloisters and echoing libraries along the way.
M R James: Ghost Writer (2013)
by Roger Edwards
MR James: Ghost Writer is a sixty minute documentary written and presented by Mark Gatiss, exploring the life of Britain’s foremost ghost story writer. Gatiss, a long time admirer of James, delves in to the life of the author from his devout Anglican upbringing and close knit family life, through to his ascent to the summit of academia at King’s college, Cambridge. The program seeks to discover what motivated this scholarly bachelor to create some of the most iconic and chilling ghost stories in English literature. By following in James’s footsteps, the documentary attempts to gain a greater insight in to the enigmatic author.
MR James: Ghost Writer explores in some depth the legacy of Mr James, emphasising his early life in Suffolk and the religious nature of his family. His academic prowess and near obsession with Medieval text and apocrypha clearly had an impact upon his writing, with much of the visual imagery from his writings being directly lifted from manuscripts hew worked with on a daily basis. Only being familiar withJames’s work from a literary standing, I was greatly surprised by the great academic achievements of his life. His written treatise on illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts still remains an unparalleled achievement along with his rise to the office of provost and directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Despite the dry and formal nature of Victorian life, James was a surprising gregarious animal, taking an active part in college social life. Although he certainly reflected facets of the antiquarian characters that so often populated his stories, he was also a man of immense passion. His personal friendships were deep and of great importance to him, as correspondence with his inner circle demonstrate. His relationship with ex-pupil and illustrator James McBryde, succinctly demonstrates a profound platonic friendship of a type seldom seen these days. The documentary also addressed the impact of the “Great war” upon both James and the college and the subsequent way it influenced his later writing.
Perhaps the best aspect of Mark Gatiss’s exploration of all things Jamesian, is the honest and fair way the subject of his “personal life” is explored. There is a trend in contemporary analysis to sometimes over zealously look for evidence modern schools of thought in those from prior eras. Several revisionist scholars seem to seize upon “examples” of a sexual subtext in the author’s work and are then happy to extrapolate this in to theory’s of suppressed homosexuality. Mr. Gatiss does not shy away from such notions but neither does he make any definitive conclusions. His interview with a former pupil of James whose father was also a close personal friend, perhaps sheds the most light on the matter.
The visual and editing style of MR James: Ghost Writer is very compelling and follows a broadly linear narrative path, with many a tangential aside to explore illustrative points. Being a BBC commission project there a lot of use of footage from previous adaptations in referencing James’s literary work. The documentary effectively makes use of actor Robert Lloyd Parry, who recreates James celebrated readings of his stories at Christmas, to his fellow members of the “ Chit Chat Club”. Parry specialises in one man performances of the work of M R James and provides some excellent readings from such stories as Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook and A warning to the Curious.
Although it is a impossible task to definitively encapsulate a writer such as M R James in a single sixty minute documentary, MR James: Ghost Writer certainly provides an interesting overview. Mark Gatiss has an obvious passion for the man and clearly identifies with him on many levels. However, this is far from an unobjective eulogy and depicts James as a man of his time with not particularly progressive attitudes on sexual equality or modernisation. MR James: Ghost Writer is to be shown on the BBC in the UK over the Christmas period along with the newly commissioned adaptation of The Tractate Middoth, also written by Mark Gatiss. I whole heartedly recommend both shows to not only established M R James fans but to wider scholars of the ghost stories who wish to learn more about one of the genres finest authors.
Mark Gatiss: The Tractate Middoth Q & A
Thursday, 26 December 2013
Monday, 23 December 2013
The Victorian Ghost Story - just for Christmas...
Illustration from Charles Dickens' The Signalman
Ghost stories: why the Victorians were so spookily good at themChristmas Eve was traditionally the time to tell scary stories round the hearth. And 19th-century writers were fearsomely adept at exploiting a world of creaking floorboards, creepy servants … and gas lamps that caused hallucinations
The Guardian
Monday 23 December 2013
Curl up by the fire and I'll tell you a ghost story. Don't be alarmed by the creak of the floorboards, the murmurs in the basement, the shrill ululations of a distant dog. Try not to be perturbed by the flickering candle, the fleeting shadows, the horned, hairy hand that appears at your elbow. Something moved? There's a face in the brickwork? A murderer, long ago, was buried in the cellar? Stay calm. Breathe deeply. The ghosts of Christmases past are gathering.
It was the Victorian era, of course, when ghosts proliferated most obviously in fiction – as well as on stage, in photographs and in drawing room seances. Before the start of Victoria's reign in 1837, the health of the genre was thought to be failing. But by 1887, when Mary Louise Molesworth wrote The Story of the Rippling Train, her character Mrs Snowdon was bemoaning ghosts' prevalence. "One hears nothing else nowadays," she said, and in the pages that followed, she would hear yet another, about the phantom of a beautiful woman who had appeared after being terribly burnt in a fire.
What had raised all these apparitions from the dead? The most straightforward explanation is the rise of the periodical press, says Ruth Robbins, professor of English literature at Leeds Metropolitan University. Ghost stories had traditionally been an oral form, but publishers suddenly needed a mass of content, and ghost stories fitted the bill – short, cheap, generic, repetitive, able to be cut quite easily to length.
Ever one to spot a commercial opportunity, she says, Charles Dickens produced his own highly successful ghost story, A Christmas Carol, in serial form just before Christmas 1843. This was the same year the first commercially produced Christmas card was sent, and Dickens's story both reflected and influenced a growing trend for marking Christmas with secular celebrations. Dr Andrew Smith, author of The Ghost Story 1840-1920, says: "People like Dickens wanted to revive some notion of community invested within that idea of Christmas. What's interesting about his version of Christmas is that it's not particularly Christian. It's about the family, helping the poor, a moment where you might pause and reflect on your life." It's about Ebenezer Scrooge realising, through the counsel of ghosts, that he must embrace his family, look after his good-natured clerk, and become the embodiment of generosity.
Curl up by the fire and I'll tell you a ghost story. Don't be alarmed by the creak of the floorboards, the murmurs in the basement, the shrill ululations of a distant dog. Try not to be perturbed by the flickering candle, the fleeting shadows, the horned, hairy hand that appears at your elbow. Something moved? There's a face in the brickwork? A murderer, long ago, was buried in the cellar? Stay calm. Breathe deeply. The ghosts of Christmases past are gathering.
It was the Victorian era, of course, when ghosts proliferated most obviously in fiction – as well as on stage, in photographs and in drawing room seances. Before the start of Victoria's reign in 1837, the health of the genre was thought to be failing. But by 1887, when Mary Louise Molesworth wrote The Story of the Rippling Train, her character Mrs Snowdon was bemoaning ghosts' prevalence. "One hears nothing else nowadays," she said, and in the pages that followed, she would hear yet another, about the phantom of a beautiful woman who had appeared after being terribly burnt in a fire.
What had raised all these apparitions from the dead? The most straightforward explanation is the rise of the periodical press, says Ruth Robbins, professor of English literature at Leeds Metropolitan University. Ghost stories had traditionally been an oral form, but publishers suddenly needed a mass of content, and ghost stories fitted the bill – short, cheap, generic, repetitive, able to be cut quite easily to length.
Ever one to spot a commercial opportunity, she says, Charles Dickens produced his own highly successful ghost story, A Christmas Carol, in serial form just before Christmas 1843. This was the same year the first commercially produced Christmas card was sent, and Dickens's story both reflected and influenced a growing trend for marking Christmas with secular celebrations. Dr Andrew Smith, author of The Ghost Story 1840-1920, says: "People like Dickens wanted to revive some notion of community invested within that idea of Christmas. What's interesting about his version of Christmas is that it's not particularly Christian. It's about the family, helping the poor, a moment where you might pause and reflect on your life." It's about Ebenezer Scrooge realising, through the counsel of ghosts, that he must embrace his family, look after his good-natured clerk, and become the embodiment of generosity.
Illustration from M. R. James' The Ash Tree
Christmas has long been associated with ghosts, says Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof. Just before Christmas 1642, for instance, shepherds were said to have seen ghostly civil war soldiers battling in the skies. This connection continued in the Victorian era through Dickens's story, and through the ghost stories he later published at Christmas in his periodical All the Year Round, with contributors including Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. It would also continue in the tradition started by MR James, the provost of King's College, Cambridge, who would invite a select few students and friends to his rooms each year on Christmas Eve, where he'd read one of the ghost stories he had written, which are still popular today. They include Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book (1895), in which an ancient holy book brings forth a demonic presence, first announced by a hand covered in "coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny and wrinkled".
The popularity of ghost stories was strongly related to economic changes. The industrial revolution had led people to migrate from rural villages into towns and cities, and created a new middle class. They moved into houses that often had servants, says Clarke, many taken on around October or November, when the nights were drawing in early – and new staff found themselves "in a completely foreign house, seeing things everywhere, jumping at every creak". Robbins says servants were "expected to be seen and not heard – actually, probably not even seen, to be honest. If you go to a stately home like Harewood House, you see the concealed doorways and servant's corridors. You would actually have people popping in and out without you really knowing they were there, which could be quite a freaky experience. You've got these ghostly figures who actually inhabit the house."
Lighting was often provided by gas lamps, which have also been implicated in the rise of the ghost story; the carbon monoxide they emitted could provoke hallucinations. And there was a preponderance of people encountering ghosts in their daily life come the middle of the century. In 1848, the young Fox sisters of New York heard a series of tappings, a spirit apparently communicating with them through code, and their story spread quickly. The vogue for spiritualism was under way. Spiritualists believed spirits residing in the afterlife were potentially able to commune with the living, and they set up seances to enable this.
Peter Lamont, author of Extraordinary Beliefs, says these gatherings started off quite simply, "and the phenomenon gets more and more impressive. There are floating tables, floating musical instruments, and at some point you get full-form materialisation of ghosts, dressed in white. Occasionally, the [apparition] would get grabbed at a seance and it was discovered that it was actually the medium."
This interest in the supernatural might seem at odds with the growing body of scientific and technological knowledge, but many argue they were intimately connected. In the 19th century, people were increasingly able to communicate at a distance, in disembodied fashion. The telegraph allowed messages to be tapped out in code over long distances – not so unlike the Fox sisters' purported ghost – and the ability to communicate first with other cities, then countries, eventually to transmit messages across the Atlantic, was brilliant and alarming. "If you can have people communicating from 3,000 miles away," says Robbins, "words coming across the ocean, tapped out in Morse code, it may actually be quite a small leap of the imagination to say, 'There's a dead person who I used to know quite well who is talking to me through Morse code.'"
Christmas has long been associated with ghosts, says Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof. Just before Christmas 1642, for instance, shepherds were said to have seen ghostly civil war soldiers battling in the skies. This connection continued in the Victorian era through Dickens's story, and through the ghost stories he later published at Christmas in his periodical All the Year Round, with contributors including Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. It would also continue in the tradition started by MR James, the provost of King's College, Cambridge, who would invite a select few students and friends to his rooms each year on Christmas Eve, where he'd read one of the ghost stories he had written, which are still popular today. They include Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book (1895), in which an ancient holy book brings forth a demonic presence, first announced by a hand covered in "coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny and wrinkled".
The popularity of ghost stories was strongly related to economic changes. The industrial revolution had led people to migrate from rural villages into towns and cities, and created a new middle class. They moved into houses that often had servants, says Clarke, many taken on around October or November, when the nights were drawing in early – and new staff found themselves "in a completely foreign house, seeing things everywhere, jumping at every creak". Robbins says servants were "expected to be seen and not heard – actually, probably not even seen, to be honest. If you go to a stately home like Harewood House, you see the concealed doorways and servant's corridors. You would actually have people popping in and out without you really knowing they were there, which could be quite a freaky experience. You've got these ghostly figures who actually inhabit the house."
Lighting was often provided by gas lamps, which have also been implicated in the rise of the ghost story; the carbon monoxide they emitted could provoke hallucinations. And there was a preponderance of people encountering ghosts in their daily life come the middle of the century. In 1848, the young Fox sisters of New York heard a series of tappings, a spirit apparently communicating with them through code, and their story spread quickly. The vogue for spiritualism was under way. Spiritualists believed spirits residing in the afterlife were potentially able to commune with the living, and they set up seances to enable this.
Peter Lamont, author of Extraordinary Beliefs, says these gatherings started off quite simply, "and the phenomenon gets more and more impressive. There are floating tables, floating musical instruments, and at some point you get full-form materialisation of ghosts, dressed in white. Occasionally, the [apparition] would get grabbed at a seance and it was discovered that it was actually the medium."
This interest in the supernatural might seem at odds with the growing body of scientific and technological knowledge, but many argue they were intimately connected. In the 19th century, people were increasingly able to communicate at a distance, in disembodied fashion. The telegraph allowed messages to be tapped out in code over long distances – not so unlike the Fox sisters' purported ghost – and the ability to communicate first with other cities, then countries, eventually to transmit messages across the Atlantic, was brilliant and alarming. "If you can have people communicating from 3,000 miles away," says Robbins, "words coming across the ocean, tapped out in Morse code, it may actually be quite a small leap of the imagination to say, 'There's a dead person who I used to know quite well who is talking to me through Morse code.'"
'Ghost' photograph from the 1860s
The growth of photography brought the advent of spirit photography – there were people who charged enormous fees, and used various tricks, to picture sitters with ghostly images of dead loved ones. William Mumler, for instance, who created a famous image of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghostly hands of her dead husband, Abraham Lincoln, resting on her shoulders. Then came film and radio. Ghostly disembodied voices and images poured out of the screen and over the airwaves.
There were ghosts in the ether, under the bed, and more and more, in people's heads. "Throughout the 19th century," says Smith, "there is a progressive internalisation of horror, the idea that the monsters are not out there, but to be found within. That obviously culminates with Freud. With the ghost story there's a sense that instead of being able to lock yourself away in your home, to leave the monster outside, the monster lives with you, and has a kind of intimacy."
Merry Christmas – and sleep soundly.
There were ghosts in the ether, under the bed, and more and more, in people's heads. "Throughout the 19th century," says Smith, "there is a progressive internalisation of horror, the idea that the monsters are not out there, but to be found within. That obviously culminates with Freud. With the ghost story there's a sense that instead of being able to lock yourself away in your home, to leave the monster outside, the monster lives with you, and has a kind of intimacy."
Merry Christmas – and sleep soundly.
Tuesday, 1 January 2013
Robert Powell reads M. R. James' The Mezzotint
A ghost story for New Year's night:
Happy New Year from all the Friday Night Boys!
Monday, 31 December 2012
Ruth Rendell reads M. R. James' Canon Alberic's Scrapbook
Ruth Rendell reads 'Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook' by MR James
Ruth Rendell doesn't believe in ghosts, of course, but MR James's stories, like 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook', frighten her nonetheless
guardian.co.uk
Ruth Rendell doesn't believe in ghosts, of course, but MR James's stories, like 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook', frighten her nonetheless
guardian.co.uk
Monday 24 December 2012
I chose a ghost story partly because I thought no one else would; and also because the Victorians wrote the best stories and MR James the best of all. I edited a collection of his, so I know them very well. I don't, of course, believe in ghosts, yet reading one MR James story when I'm alone in the house still terrifies me. I hope it will frighten you but make you want to read more – "Casting the Runes" and "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas", as well as this one, the chilling tale of poor Mr Dennistoun and the demon.
I chose a ghost story partly because I thought no one else would; and also because the Victorians wrote the best stories and MR James the best of all. I edited a collection of his, so I know them very well. I don't, of course, believe in ghosts, yet reading one MR James story when I'm alone in the house still terrifies me. I hope it will frighten you but make you want to read more – "Casting the Runes" and "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas", as well as this one, the chilling tale of poor Mr Dennistoun and the demon.
Tuesday, 25 December 2012
Christopher Lee reads M. R. James' A Warning to the Curious
A ghost story for Christmas night.
Merry Christmas from the Friday Night Boys!
Sunday, 23 December 2012
M. R. James at Christmas...
Christmas with Monte
Colin Fleming
The Paris Review
13 December 2012
Up until the early spring of this year, I considered myself an absolute Christmas fiend. Not in the Grinch sense of breaking out the Boris Karloff accent and green grease paint and plotting how I might swipe presents, but rather trying to figure out, as early as possible, how best to immerse myself in a holiday that I loved like no other, in a typically over-the-top fashion. You know that person you read about, who bops his head along to Christmas songs on the oldies station—yes, Brenda Lee, you rock around that tree indeed!—the day after Thanksgiving, who insists on seeing Rudolph “live,” every year, because it’s just more real on TV than Blu-ray? I was that guy. Before I had occasion to become a different guy. And before I decided to spend this holiday season with M. R. James.
Christmas has always been a bit dark. Sure, we’re all accustomed to bromides about how the holidays can be hard and what not, but when life goes belly up, as mine did, you find that you become—to steal an idea from Rudolph—a Christmas orphan of a sort. The latest airing of whatever movie version of A Christmas Carol is not going to do it for you. Not that first orphaned Christmas, anyway. You start to pick up on things you had never picked up on before. Like, man, It’s a Wonderful Life is super dark—Jimmy Stewart really wants to off himself bad. And what on earth is the Devil doing in “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen?” True, the Heat Miser from Year without a Santa Claus was pretty devil-y, but when you really poke around, you can see that Christmas, or Christmas in its old-time artistic trappings, can get a bit, well, grim.
Enter then my man M. R. James. If you know M. R. James, you probably know him because of his ghost stories. Still, he doesn’t have the notoriety of H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, or even Algernon Blackwood, although I think in the case of the latter, the name itself goes a long way in establishing macabre cred. But I’d argue that none of them can creep you out with a proper ghost story better than Montague Rhodes James, whose penchant was doing so, interestingly enough, at Christmas. A scholar and antiquarian at King’s College and later Eton, in the first third of the twentieth century, James, at the urging of his friends, would pen one of his patented bleak narratives, and then bid you to his room, where you’d gather, as everyone else went a-wassailing or whatever, to listen to him read and scare the piss out of you.
The stories endured—in Britain, anyway—and even came to factor into the mores of the season, quite beyond the walls of James’s room, and long after the man himself passed away in 1936. The best of the stories, like “Casting the Runes” (which was worked into the ’57 Jaques Tourneur classic, Curse of the Demon). “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” “The Mezzotint,” and “Number 13” featured a standard Jamesian set-up: someone, usually a professor, leaves the city behind for a stay by some weald or copse—the type of place you’d imagine John Keats strolling about, composing rustic verse in his head—and discovers a book, or a snatch of paper, or musty relic that brings the supernatural, and various hellish things, into his life. These stories often feature an inn of the type that you would like to spend a week at yourself, with firelight, port, and normally a personable companion or two who becomes a fast friend. And just when you’re thinking, hmmm, this is nice, I wish I lived back then, James positively has at you, and it is difficult not to at least entertain the notion that just as man has a dual nature, so too does Christmas, something I suspect someone like Linus—going by that blanket-in-hand speech of his—knew all along, but which dear old Monte positively rams home. Christmas done got the blues in the world of M. R. James. Fiery blues, though. Which has the weird effect of making these ostensibly glum stories galvanizing in a way, with this feeling that though they’re sort of on your side, your mates, when you’re down, you’d like to read them when they’re more up, if only to be more scared and less immersed. But that’s James’s big writerly talent: he makes terror an enticing companion, something you move toward, rather than away from.
Someone at the BBC had the idea of making short film versions of a handful of James’s ghost stories and airing them at Christmastime, starting with The Stalls of Barchester, in 1971. The British Film Institute has recently issued a box set of these offerings, along with choice nuggets like a production of Dickens’s “The Signal-Man,” from the series that was appropriately titled A Ghost Story for Christmas. The box includes a 1968 mounting of “Whistle,” and if you’ve had enough of Scrooge and redemption, try this one on sometime as you’re sipping your mulled cider. For sheer TV horror gravitas, I’d put it a peg ahead of that wonderful version of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Ambrose Bierce strikes me as a guy who would enjoy an M. R. Jamesian Christmas) that aired during the last season of The Twilight Zone.
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, from ’74, is nearly as good, with its stained-glass window ciphers and one menacing culvert, and you have to wonder about the nature of the fellowship between James and his in-person audience on those December nights. By rights, those gatherings should have been woozily eldritch, and then some, and yet, by all accounts, they were not. Personally, I picture a kind of lonely hearts club of the season, where terror serves to bond, rather than fracture. That’s exactly what it does in the sublime BBC production of Dickens’s “The Signalman,” where the title character is comforted by a wandering tourist in his cabin in some desolate railway cutting. The best scenes, the scenes so suggestive of Christmas, both as it is and as we would like it to be, feature our duo hearthside talking through problems. Granted, said problems center on apparitions, but it is not difficult to shift the paradigm, somewhat, and allow that apparitions take all forms, both in terms of the world of the living, and the world of the dead. There’s something very human about being haunted. And if Christmas is, by some standard, the most human and humane of seasons, I suppose it would also have to be the season of ghosts and M. R. James, with a dash of Dickens. As for you, Frosty, and you, Charlie Brown: I shall endeavor to see both of you next year.
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/12/13/christmas-with-monte/
Sunday, 18 November 2012
M. R. James' Mr Humphrey's and his Inheritance...
The full text of the story is here, if you're too cheap to buy one of the many James' collections readily available: http://www.thin-ghost.org/items/show/146
For those who want to dig deeper, an analysis of the story can be found here: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GSNews1.html
* The infinitely better film version, Night of the Demon (1957) is discussed here: http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/night-of-demon.html
Saturday, 24 September 2011
M. R. James - by Susan Hill
M. R. James died at peace with himself and the world. We can be reasonably confident in claiming that after reading about his last weeks, during which he was ill, tired, weak and bored but probably not in pain, and even more on learning what his sister Grace said of his final days. During the tedious weeks of illness a group of Monty’s closest friends had made him the present of ‘a radio- gramophone of the latest type’ and he had taken to it immediately. Grace wrote:
The radiogram proved such a pleasure to him and I can see him now after dinner … listening so intently, with his pipe in his mouth and matches strewn around.
If you could have seen him afterwards you would have rejoiced, every line gone and looking like a young man again and a most beautiful profile ... and strangely enough … a great likeness to my mother appeared. I feel sure he looks like that in Paradise.
Montague Rhodes James is now best remembered for his two collections of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, which were — or so he would have had everyone believe — mere light-hearted attempts to entertain friends at Christmas, first at King’s College, where he was Dean and then Provost, and later at Eton, where he was also Provost.
But James, although somewhat unhappily in charge of King’s, was one of the best Provosts Eton ever had and he was also a scholar of distinction, packing more solid achievement into his lifetime than most men who did not have any sort of administrative work to occupy them.
He had studied classics at Cambridge, became assistant in classical archaeology at the Fitzwilliam Museum and later, as a Fellow, then Dean, of King’s, lectured in divinity. He was a bibliographer, palaeographer and antiquarian, and catalogued every medieval manuscript in the Cambridge colleges, a massive work of patience and dedication. His enthusiasm for everything he did carried him on. He had a passionate interest in the Apocrypha and his translation of the Apocryphal New Testament is still a standard work. He was a naturally brilliant linguist and even taught himself Danish and Swedish in order to read writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and the Sagas in the originals.
He travelled extensively in Europe, generally by bicycle, and reckoned to have visited all but two of the cathedrals of France. He did not marry but he had many friends and when he returned to Eton as Provost, with relief, he delighted in the post, was happy and comfortable with staff and boys, down to the smallest and youngest, to whom he was often found chatting happily at the edge of the playing fields on pleasant afternoons.
Here then surely is a man altogether at peace with himself and the world, living a calm and orderly life, working steadily and hard, enjoying his leisure.
We may even decide that the ghost stories are of a piece with his character.
I wrote [them] at long intervals and most of them were read to patient friends, usually at the season of Christmas … they do not make any very exalted claim. If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, then my purpose in writing them will have been attained.
That sort of story frightens delightfully, giving us a not unpleasant shiver as we glance over our shoulders.
So what are we to make of these extracts?
The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long coarse hairs and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils … Imagine one of the awful, bird-catching spiders of South America and endowed with intelligence just less than human.
He put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow. Only it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of any human being.
These and even more vile creatures in M. R. James’s stories are not ghosts, as we know them, transparent figures in softly rustling garments or even headless horsemen. These are beings from the pit of hell and their purpose is always malevolent; they bring a terror that sends men out of their minds and hastens their deaths and are not the merely unnerving sheeted figures of a benign scholar’s invention.
James’s victims usually cause these dreadful creatures to emerge into the light of common day by chance. They commit no sin, though they sometimes make the mistake of being over-curious, as when Professor Parkin, in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll come to you, My Lad’ blows an ancient whistle he has dug up, to see what will happen. Otherwise, as the James scholar Michael Cox pointed out, people may be guilty of nothing more than ‘a chance word, an unthinking action or simply being in the wrong place at the right time’, in order to spring the trap.
Malevolent beings are disturbed when an old post is dug up, a burial mound investigated, a tree is felled or some item of church furnishing removed. Is James’s message that the status quo is almost always better left alone and if so, can we apply the lesson to a man’s subconscious, which is best left uninvestigated, and are we referring to the subconscious of the author?
His friend Shane Leslie, also an aficionado of ghost stories, believed that below the surface, Monty James struggled with demons. It was Sheridan Le Fanu, Leslie says, who, ‘set the style Monty needed for his own ghost stories if he was to release his mind’s own mystical complex’, for he was bored by the scholarly investigation of classical ruins, ‘far more interested in investigating graveyards and psychical possibilities at home’.
He had lost too many people to death, especially via the scythe which cut through a generation of young Eton and King’s men in the Great War and by the accidental premature deaths of some especially close friends. Monty became darkly obsessed with death and every possibility it opened up, and Shane Leslie is stark in his assessment of Monty’s inner turmoil:
Far from being the issue of a side- hobby, the ghost stories were his relief from a secret madness in his inner soul — the obsession that in spite of all the art and beauty of the world and the unfailing friendships which met him at every corner … the malevolent and diabolical survived around him in the invisible. His friends wished he would believe in fairies instead of the curses, runes and appalling catastrophes he distributed to the innocent victims of his tales.
Yet in spite of it, Shane Leslie believes that James was essentially a happy man. Well, many happy people are conscious of darkness beneath the surface. Perhaps James was able to save his sanity by turning it to good use in his stories which, read aloud at Christmas though they were — and still are — are not successful only because they provoke an innocent and delightful shiver. They are better than mere entertainment, and models for any writer, whether of ghost stories or any other fiction, of elegant, measured English prose, perfectly paced and balanced. How to turn the screw, how to keep the reader on the edge of his seat, how to conjure up a sense of unease by a throwaway reference, a chance observation — M. R. James is a master of it all.
His supernatural creatures have a purpose which is never benign and in the everlasting battle between good and evil James often appears to let evil win out. The dreadful agents which are unleashed are doomed to remain in the hells of their own making and obtain their revenge and satisfaction by dragging the innocent down with them. It does not bear too close an analysis.
But we cannot ignore the verdict of Monty James’s own sister, who lived with him after she was widowed and was close to him all his life. To her he did not end his days in turmoil or torment, inner or outer; to her he was content and at peace, and after death looked like a young man again. By confronting them and writing about them, Monty had surely exorcised his demons and in doing so not only managed to entertain his readers but teach us a rather important lesson.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/6542943/m-r-jamess-dark-world.thtml
"We have worked a miracle and produced a book in three weeks from idea to finished copy and I am feeling very pleased.
I discovered by chance that the BBC are showing a new dramatisation of the classic M.R James ghost story O WHISTLE, AND I`LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD.
It so happened that I was writing a piece about James for the Christmas issue of The Spectator and saw that the story was only available in some general ghost story anthologies, or a rather cheap mass produced paperback of some MRJ.
But people might just want to read the one story, before or after seeing the TV version. So I set to and we have made it happen.
Long Barn Books is very fortunate – we work with terrific people who are always up for a challenge. Julie Martin, our designer, set the story onto the page in the handsome Venetian font. Andy English was about to take a trip to the East Anglian coast where the story is set, so produced a wonderfully dark brooding illustration which is also embossed on the cover. The JF Printing found a small store of hand made Italian paper left over from a previous special order which is perfect for just the right number of copies. We have a heavy card in a creamy white for the cover. And it’s done.
But – there almost always is one -mainly because of the special paper, this is a short print run. It’s a super book and a marvellous story, and would make a fine Christmas present, (though please don’t bend and fold it to try and squeeze it into a stocking!)."
See http://www.susan-hill.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=154&Itemid=127
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
M. R. James
In praise of… MR JamesThere are few who can hold a guttering candle to the marrow-chilling narratives of Montague Rhodes James
Editorial
The Guardian
Wednesday 29 December 2010
Pull up a chair. For now, the dark axis of the year, is traditionally the time for telling ghost stories and there are few who can hold a guttering candle to the marrow-chilling narratives of Montague Rhodes James. MR James had little time for benign spirits with sympathetic inclinations. His tales of the supernatural inhabit an altogether more sinister realm – of vengeful phantoms and, in one ingenious instance, a spectral room. Fittingly, given his association with King's College, Cambridge – first as a student, eventually as provost – James gave the first reading of his ghost stories at the Cambridge Chitchat Society in 1893. The story he chose – Canon Alberic's Scrapbook – trod the distinctive Jamesian path of a tale founded in historical fact and a glimpsed but never fully revealed horror lurking just out of sight. James's skilful hinting at fears buried in the awful unconscious is what makes his stories so compellingly unsettling. His talent at teasing the imagination is what makes even the most rational reader glance nervously beneath the bed at the conclusion of Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You. Occasionally, James's own fears surface – as in The Ash Tree, which could only have been written by an arachnophobe. The thread of sly humour that runs lightly through the best of his stories only further increases the sense of foreboding. So, pick up a copy of A Warning to the Curious, curl up by the fire and enter the clever and disturbing world of MR James. And that creaking door? Well, it's only the wind…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/29/mr-james-in-praise-of
Oh, Whistle And I'll Come to You, My Lad: http://www.fadl12200.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/owhis.html
See also: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GS.html
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Night of the Demon and the BBFC
As atmospheric and genuinely suspenseful as Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon is, the horror is largely psychological and the apdearance of the demon itself, even bearing in mind that this was the era of movie monsters like Them! and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, comes across as awkward rather than terrifying; however, during the production stages, there were several conflicts with the British Board of Film Classification.
The first version of the script was called The Bewitched and was written by Charles Bennett, who had collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on a number of films. An early draft of the script was submitted by producer Marcel Hellman to the BBFC (at the time known as the British Board of Film Censors) in January 1955 in the hope of getting an A certificate to attract a teenage audience.
The anonymous examiner (known only by the initials AAA) returned a long list of concerns, at the root of which lay the fact that no rational explanation was given for events in the story – in other words, the “goings-on are clearly intended to be supernatural.”She said, “I cannot suggest any way of making this story ‘A’. Even for ‘X’, we do not want the picture (which hangs in Karswell’s room) of the Black Mass, or any references to it. I am not sure whether we want the séance or not [because it is not exposed as fake]…” A number of scenes were objected to, including:
The pursuit of Harrington by the Thing (with the sound of its panting)
Harrington’s notes about the Thing
Karswell’s tricks at the party – bringing a snake from his hat and frightening the children
Woodcut of ‘dinosaur’ accompanied by thunder and lightning
The séance
Supernatural cat
Karswell’s terror-stricken flight and death
The fear was that teenagers would be able to suspend disbelief more than adults…
Another fear was the Americanisation of the picture – presumably a reference to the type of horror in the film. Bear in mind that educationalists, religious and political figures in the country were also objecting the way American horror comics of the time were ‘corrupting’ the youth of Britain.
A second examiner (BBB) doubted that an X was enough, particularly scenes like Holden’s confrontation with the cat while looking for Karswell’s book and the Thing’s pursuit of Holden.Hellman tried submitting the script to the Motion Picture Association of America in the hope of getting it accepted for a younger audience. Although it received a more considered and careful opinion, objections were made to several scenes, like the séance, the depiction of the Black Mass (“should not be orgiastic”) and some of the language used (“hotter than hell” and “For God’s sake”). The Director of Production Code Administration, Geoffrey Shurlock, recommended that Hellman consider the Association’s recommendations and make changes.
Again, the script was submitted to the BBFC. This time, a different examiner was equally hostile:
“[Some] scenes are horrific, as the monstrous shape or its ‘white leprous hand’ are seen; its victims show abject terror, and the script makes it clear that terrifying effects are to be obtained from the music.”
Bizarrely, he highlighted differences between the script and the M. R. James story it is based on and noted that the depiction of the Black Mass (in a painting, remember), showing demons dressed in masks indulging in an orgy with ‘lissom, unclothed young women whose lovely faces are infinitely evil’ had to be cut. Amongst other sequences he thought had to be cut was one in which a boy pulled a cat’s tail! Dialogue considered (but not objected to this time) included, “You can take a running jump at yourself” – presumably, this was because it was euphemistically saying, “Go fuck yourself!”Like AAA, he objected to the fact that the first page of the script pointed out that the film would be a “light-heartedly dramatic excursion into what might or might not be the supernatural” – presumably because the events depicted were most certainly supernatural.
AAA weighed in with her opinion again, saying it could only be considered for an ‘X’ certificate.
Hellman made a personal phonecall to A. T. L. Watkins, Secretary of the BBFC, on 11 March 1955, and a note sent in reply later that day made his position that it should receive an ‘X’ clear: “ The supernatural element, with its steady building up of fear, and particularly the fear of darkness could not… fail to be terrifying to children.” He added that it was impossible to suggest cuts that would guarantee it an ‘A’.As the script underwent re-writes and new producers came on board (Hal. E Chester, Clive Nicholas and Frank Bevis) much of Bennett’s humour was dropped – in favour of a more adult approach to the supernatural as it became clear that the film was to be aimed at an ‘X’ audience.
Several examiners at the BBFC saw the new draft of the script and were pleased it was to be aimed at an ‘X’ audience, but concern was expressed that this should not open the door to unlimited horror and bad taste and one called for the complete omission of Hobart’s praise of Black Magic and the picture of the Black Mass, noting:
“I disliked particularly the sequence… where Karswell’s skill at conjuring before a delighted group of children is followed by a storm provoked by his malignant power so that the children are screaming with fear and running in terror.”
Secretary Watkins stressed that there limits as to what could be shown, even with a an ‘X’ certificate, noting that “great deal will depend upon treatment” and the final word rested with the examiners after they had seen the completed film. However, he still advised on a number of specific points:
Shots of the monster should not be too revolting
Harrington’s death should not be overdone and there should be no shots of him on fire or twitching in agonyThe portrayal of children’s fears calls for reasonable restraint – i.e. don’t exploit the children in the fear to emphasise the horror
There must be no description of the rites of devil worship
Hobart’s madness and jump through the window must not be depicted in detail
Restraint must be shown in the pursuit of Karswell by the beast and the sounds, including screams, should not be too excessive
An amended script was sent to the BBFC on October 23, less than a month before shooting was to begin. AAA was the examiner and she noted that there were even more references to Devil worship she didn’t think they would make too much of an impression on the audience. She noted the continued presence and wanted the removal of the Black Mass painting and the description of the true believer. A number of other sequences disturbed her, such as the death of Harrington and the appearance of the beast, the climax of the séance, Hobart’s leap to death and she specified that there should be no shot of Karswell on fire.
In the final letter from Watkins, he warned that any references to “devil worship” should be removed (and the phrase avoided); the Black Mass painting should be removed; and the points noted by AAA should be taken into consideration; however, he added that the final decision would rest with the examiners on seeing the completed film.The BBFC ordered only one cut – in Rand Hobart’s speech while under hypnosis. They said the filmmakers needed to “Reduce Hobart’s cries when he escapes for the first time into the audience,
and the close shots of Hobart’s face when he is being spoken to and interrogated by psychologists; and remove his words, “We blaspheme and desecrate … in the joy of sin will mankind find itself again.”” An X certificate was recommended and it was noted that several earlier drafts had been seen.
See Tony Earnshaw - Beating the Devil: The Making of Night of the Demon (The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television and Tomahawk Press, 2005)And let's not forget our own http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.com/2009/02/night-of-demon.html
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
Night of the Demon
“Like one upon a lonesome road he walks in fear and dread,
because he knows that close behind a frightful fiend doth tread.”
- Coleridge
Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957) is a (largely) subtle and atmospheric movie set in England and based on the M. R. James short story Casting the Runes (1911). Many critics regard it as one of the high points in the horror genre, despite the somewhat clunky, though brief, monster footage that was in keeping with the contemporary trend in horror ‘monster’ movies; think of Jack Arnold’s Creature of the Black Lagoon (1954), for example, or the giant ants in Gordon Douglas’ Them! (1954).
The plot concerns an American Professor, John Holden, flying to England and investigating a Satanic cult’ led by Julian Karswell. He had been invited there by Professor Henry Harrington, but in the interim, he has mysteriously died and his niece, Joanna, blames Karswell. Holden, of course, becomes involved with Joanna but remains sceptical of Karswell’s powers until it is almost too late.
As you’d expect from Tourneur, who had directed several unnerving classics of the genre like I Walked with a Zombie and Cat People (both 1942), as well as the seminal film noir, Out of The Past (1947), the mise-en-scène's combination of cinematography and lighting creates an atmosphere of fear – take the sequence where Holden leaves Karswell’s house and returns to Joanna Harrington through the menacing woods; the séance that starts off comical but swiftly
turns unsettling; the children’s party at Karswell’s estate when he demonstrates his powers to the sceptical Holden; or Holden alone in the dark, narrow, empty hotel corridor.
However, you will have to be charitable to the special effects involved in the demon’s two brief appearances and Holden’s fight with a stuffed ‘leopard’!
Screenwriter Charles Bennett, who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock on a number of films (The Thity Nine Steps (1939), Sabotage (1936) and Foreign Correspondent (1940), among others), held the rights to the original story and wrote a script based on it under the title The Haunted. He sold the script to independent producer and former child actor Hal E. Chester, who initially planned to make a monster movie aimed at a teenage audience. However, when the script was submitted to the BBFC, they balked at a film that seemed to acknowledge the existence of demons and the successful practice of black magic and demanded a number of changes, including the removal of a scene in which a painting of a black mass was to be shown! Eventually, it was decided to go for an X certificate and an older audience, but even then, the BBFC demanded cuts, including references to what being a “true believer” entails. Bizarrely, this sequence remains in the final cut that was released in the UK.
Tourneur has since claimed that he rewrote some of the script to give it a “pseudo-honest” feel to it. He was brought in to direct under recommendation to Chester from the producer Ted Richmond; the producer of Tourneur's previous film Nightfall (1957). Arguments occurred during filming between Chester and Tourneur. One event was during the filming of the wind scene, Tourneur tried to convince him that he needed to upgrade his two electric fans to two airplane engines. When Chester hesitated, Tourneur's friend and leading actor Dana Andrews threatened to leave.
Although it’s often suggested that Chester insisted on the inclusion of the monster after most of the movie was shot, it’s now apparent that he wanted this from the start to make it more commercial and he secured the help of blacklisted Cy Enfield to intergrate the monster in the story and Enfield may even have directed the process shots involving its appearance – against the wishes of Tourneur who claimed, “The scenes where you see the demon were shot without me...the audience should never have been completely certain of having seen the demon."
Tourneur, speaking to Midi-minuit fantastique, as printed in Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins University Press), by Chris Fujiwara, claimed, “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 this sort of cloud. This technique should have been used for the other sequences. The audience should never have been completely certain of having seen the demon. They should have just unveiled it little by little, without ever really showing it. They ruined the film by showing it from the very beginning with a guy we don’t know opening his garage, who doesn’t interest us in the least.”
However, it was in the original script and its presence had been debated over before any of the film was shot, so there is no doubt Tourneur knew of it.
Bennett’s reaction to the visualisation of the demon was even angrier: "If [Chester] walked up my driveway right now, I'd shoot him dead."
An American ‘star’ was vital to help the film’s distribution in the US – a factor in the appearances of many American actors in British films of this time, whether second-grade types like Forrest Tucker in Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman (1957) or former starts like Brian Donleavy in the same studio’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957). Dana Andrews fits into this second category – a major star whose career was experiencing a downturn (not unlike Tourneur’s) and like Donleavy, it was said that his drinking hampered his performance and there are certainly scenes in Night of the Demon where he seems a little off-key.
The most striking performance is Niall McGinnis as Karswell; his affability conceals his sinister intent and while he is ruthless to others, he is aware that he's tapped into the secrets of demonology to gain power, but he also knows he is vulnerable to the forces of the demon too.
The film’s production designer was Ken Adam, later to make a name for himself on the James Bond series as well as by his work with Stanley Kubrick. A particularly fine example of his art is the set for the interior of Karswell’s house. While its columns and statues suggest a temple, the chess-board floor pattern indicates the battle of wills between Holden and Karswell and the space of the set is beautifully exploited by Tourneur’s use of deep focus when Holden breaks in and is filmed from the top of the stairs, seemingly alone until a hand dramatically grabs the top of the banister.
Chester cut thirteen minutes of the film for the American film release and the title was changed to Curse of the Demon. Some of the narration is absent from the titles, the aeroplane sequence is shorter and some of the scenes with Karswell and his mother are cut. One key scene missing is the one with Karswell's mother showing Joanna the occult book; another is Holden's visit to the Hobart farm to secure a release for his examination of Rand Hobart. Holden's experience in the hallway of the hotel is moved and the new fades and dissolves aren’t well-disguised and one cut even occurs in the middle of a previous dissolve!
Night of the Demon was released in the UK in December 1957 as part of a double bill with the American film 20 Million Miles to Earth. In the United States, as Curse of the Demon, it played drive-ins and cinemas with The True Story of Lynn Stuart and The Revenge of Frankenstein.
Credits:
Night of the Demon (1957)
Director: Jacques Tourneur Writer(s): (in credits order) M.R. James (story Casting the Runes) (as Montague R. James), Charles Bennett and Hal E. Chester
Cast: Dana Andrews - Dr. John Holden, Peggy Cummins - Joanna Harrington, Niall MacGinnis - Dr. Julian Karswell, Maurice Denham - Professor Henry Harrington, Athene Seyler - Mrs. Karswell, Liam Redmond - Professor Mark O'Brien, Reginald Beckwith - Mr. Meek, Ewan Roberts - Lloyd Williamson, Peter Elliott - Professor K.T. Kumar, Rosamund Greenwood - Mrs. Meek, Brian Wilde - Rand Hobart, Richard Leech - Inspector Mottrarn, Lloyd Lamble - Detective Simmons, Peter Hobbes - Superintendent, Charles Lloyd Pack - Chemist, John Salew - Librarian, Janet Barrow - Mrs. Hobart (deleted from US print), Percy Herbert - Farmer (deleted from US print), Lynn Tracy - Air Hostess (deleted from US print), Ballard Berkeley - 1st Reporter, Shay Gorman - Narrator, Walter Horsbrugh - Bates, the Butler, Michael Peake - 2nd Reporter, Leonard Sharp - Ticket Collector
A detailed piece on the film:
http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/2008/06/918-59-night-of-the-demon-aka-curse-of-the-demon-1957-jacques-tourneur/
A comparison between the source material and the film:
http://hollywoodgothique.com/curseofthedemon1957.html
A website dealing with M. R. James:
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GS.html
M. R. James; Casting the Runes:
http://www.fadl12200.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/castrunes2.html
A good book on the making of the film and some of the controversies around it is Tony Earnshaw's Beating the Devil: The Making of Night of the Demon (The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television and Tomahawk Press, 2005)
The title song of Kate Bush's album Hounds of Love, uses a soundbyte of dialogue from Night of the Demon: “It’s in the trees…it’s coming", a line spoken during the séance as someone has a vision of the demon’s attack.
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