Why I like M R James
When I was a child, my parents would let out our house in Cornwall to holidaymakers. During the summer, we lived in a large caravan at the other end of the garden and late-night TV featured black-and-white horror stories on the Saturday night. My sister and I would watch these in our beds in the dining area of the caravan. Most of these were more entertaining than terrifying but there was one that had a genuine hide under the bed clothes moment. This was a film called "Night of the Demon". The Demon was really just a man in a rubber suit but you could see him coming a mile off and he was huge, preceded by a terrible whistling up of the wind. And if you are the last person to have touched a piece of paper upon which was written certain runes, then you would surely die at the hands of this monstrous Demon. MR James had provided the inspiration for this story many years before. It translated pretty well to the 1950s setting of "Night of the Demon", which either sho...