Opiniões dos críticos

Tourneur’s great, late film Night of the Demon (1957), starring his friend and fellow toper Dana Andrews, may be the finest motion picture ever made by two knee-walking drunks.

Although Tourneur was frustrated by having to show the demon in literal form, the way the film handles its appearance still stands, 60 years later, as perhaps the best and worthiest ever use of a special effect in a horror film, a ne plus ultra in genre spectacle – the strange apparition appearing vaguely in the distance, wreathed in smoke and fire..., and then a great, looming close-up of the demon's snarling visage and terrible clawed paw splayed to grip its prey and prize.

In Night of the Demon, superstition is rational, reason foolhardy. The film unsettles because it never flips that paradox back around—the world remains topsy-turvy to the bleak, sinister end.

The movie's got a lot to offer besides Tourneur's head games ("a rational apprehension of the irrational," per Dave Kehr); it's potent "weird fiction" stuff, steeped in creepy atmosphere. Despite the cheesy-looking rubber monster (added by the producer against Tourneur's wishes), it's still the greatest horror film of the 1950s.