It is 25 October. There are 6 days until Halloween.

One of the pleasures of horror is the “I told you so!” moment. This is the scene in just about every short story, novel, and movie when the scales fall from the skeptical main character’s eyes, and they come face-to-face with the horrifying truth of their situation. It’s always fun to see some know-it-all get his/her comeuppance.

Obviously, the reader or viewer has known the truth all along. I don’t think there is a horror junkie alive who goes into a story or movie with an attitude of “Well, let’s wait until all the facts are in.” We know that the house is haunted; we know what lurks out in the moors. The pleasure is in watching the stuffy, obtuse main character’s rational worldview come crashing down around their ears.

Montague Rhodes James wrote stories filled to overflowing with such prissy, unbelieving characters. They are college professors and scholars and antiquarians, people more comfortable reading about things than actually experiencing them. Men (and they are always men) who wouldn’t believe the sun rose every day in the east unless they read about it in a properly researched and footnoted article in a peer-reviewed journal. The existence of curses, ghosts, and demons? Forget about it!

In Escape’s adaptation of M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes,” John Dunning is our skeptic du jour who is forced to reconsider his view of the universe. Snidely dismissing the work of a certain Mr. Karswell, Dunning soon finds himself the victim of a curse. Given only a few months to live, Dunning must put aside his skepticism and discover a way to escape his fate.

This episode of Escape was broadcast on November 19, 1947. It stars one of the greatest radio actors of all time, Sheriff Dillon from Gunsmoke, William Conrad.

There is also an adaptation from the CBS Mystery Theater in 1974 under the title “This Will Kill You.”

You can read James’s original story as you listen to Edward E. French reading it here.

Last but not least, there is Night of the Demon (a.k.a. Curse of the Demon), the excellent film adaptation made in 1957 by Jacques Tourneur. It stars Dana Andrews as skeptic John Holden and Niall MacGinnis as Karswell. Eagle eye viewers may recognize Peggy Cummins from the wonderful noir Gun Crazy (1950). The role of Joanna Harrington in Night of the Demon is quite different from the femme fatale, Annie Laurie Starr.