
It’s in the trees, it’s coming!
You’re an academic from the United States and you’re in England to visit a few of your collaborators. You’ve organized a small conference about the work of a fellow academic who leads a Satanic cult. He’s a fraud and you’re going to expose him. When you arrive in London you find out that one of your collaborators died in a freak accident the night before. There are strange clues in his notes. You visit the British Museum and the arcane work mentioned in the notes is missing. While you’re at the museum the cult leader visits you and after a conversation that is at turns fascinating and disturbing, he informs you that you have three days to live.
Night of the Demon features modern, skeptical people who do not believe in spiritual evil encountering people who not only do believe in that evil but know for a fact that it exists. This is distinct from the original Wicker Man or Midsommar; the pagans in those films believe, but neither film provides evidence for the fact of their belief. Night of the Demon, made in 1957, walks a similar path to The Devil Rides Out, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and The Exorcist. The execution, however, has some distinct features.