Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Night of the Demon!

♪I am a man who walks alone
And when I'm walking a dark road
At night or strolling through the park
When the light begins to change
I sometimes feel a little strange
A little anxious when it's dark...

Enjoyably ripped off by Sam Raimi, the original Night of the Demon is a much more atmospheric, thoughtful affair, only slightly diminished by the fact that every image of it you have ever seen shows the fucking demon in its full climactic closeup, which effectively undermines its artfully sparing usage in the film itself. In my customary three minutes' research, I read that the demon wasn't to be shown at all but that the popularity of then-recent smash hit Godzilla made giant monsters too marketable to play down. But even granting that concession to the bottom line, Night is a subtler, smarter horrorkino than we've seen in decades, even if it did give us the creepy-clown cliché long since beaten to death.

Seeing an evil monster hiding in plain sight as a children's entertainer probably was actually scary before John Wayne Gacy, Jimmy Saville and the Drag Queen Story Hour pedos rendered it merely depressing.

Someone Or Other plays Some Guy, a fedora chudjak who thinks demonology is le silly superstition and is enlightened by his own intelligence. Over the course of the kino, his blind faith in blind faithlessness is worn down from the bailey of r/atheism bluster to the more defensible motte of agnostic cope.

All hero protagonists are chudjak-coded (no-fun stick-up-the-ass types) and all villains are soyjak-coded (overly theatrical balding beardos). Joseph Campbell talks about this (probably, idk).

In this scene, the movie subtly foreshadows impending doom by having the woman drive.

A talking point that has resurfaced and been mangled into meaninglessness by overzealous boomercons in recent years is that demons are in fact real. The truth underpinning this was never really banished from our latent consciousness: we speak of struggles with mental illness, addiction and sin as "personal demons". Legion manifested as madness in their victim before Our Lord cast them out into the herd of swine. Our understanding of the archetypes was never quite improved by the secularisation of treatment language, only obfuscated to the point that truth was written off as metaphor. Has it ever occurred to you that rationalising away demons enables you to engage in denial of your "personal" ones?

The symbols of the past loom large in the collective unconscious.