Jacques Tourneur (1904-1977)
Jacques Tourneur is the director of my favourite feature film: Night of the Demon (1957) – based on a terrifying short story by Montague James. It’s chilling because Tourneur plays on the imaginations of his audience. The story goes that some of the film’s producers insisted Tourneur include direct shots of a demon. Tourneur preferred to leave those in the minds of his audience. Creatures of the id will always be more impressive than apparent creatures of the screen.
Other films to Tourneur’s to see: Cat People (1942) is a masterpiece. See also I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
Night of the Demon (1957)
There’s a revealing cinematic analysis of Night of the Demon in Chris Fujiwara’s book Jacques Tourneur – The Cinema of Nightfall (John Hopkins University Press, 1998. pp242-255) and in Raymond Bellour’s Believing in the Cinema translated by Dana Polan; in Psychoanalysis & Cinema edited by E. Kaplan pp98-109. New York: Routledge, 1990. English translation of Croire au cinéma.
