‘Night of the Demon’: the B-movie sampled in a classic Kate Bush song
“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” will be words familiar to any Kate Bush fan. They open the titular track from her fifth studio record, Hounds of Love, preempting the love-sick soundscape that follows, but they were first uttered decades earlier in a B-movie turned horror classic titled Night of the Demon.
Directed by Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon featured all the horror essentials – demons, satanic cults and sèances. In a scene featuring the latter, medium Mr Meek, played by Reginald Beckwith, apparently channels Maurice Denham’s Professor Harrington, a character who died earlier in the film fleeing from a demon. He mouths the words, “It’s in the trees, it’s coming,” as Denham vocalises them.
In the film, his fearful words seem to refer to the mammoth presence of the demon, but when Bush took them on to open ‘Hounds of Love’, their meaning changed. In the song, Bush is not being pursued by a demon, nor is she at the hands of a satanic cult or literally being hunted down by hounds. It’s love that’s lurking in the trees and love that evokes that same fear in her.
After the sample sets up the song’s eerie tone, Bush enhances it with pounding percussion and unsettled cellos, her lyrics echoing the fear presented in the opening moments. “It’s coming for me through the trees,” she begs, “Oh, help me, someone, help me, please.” There’s a desperation to her words, a real sense of threat that seeps in as she hides in the dark and throws her shoes in the lake.
As the track reaches its conclusion, that sense of threat seems to have dissipated somewhat. Bush seems to have acknowledged that love isn’t quite the demonic figure she once thought it to be. Rather, it’s something she needs to let in. “Do you know what I really need?” she repeats in the song’s final moments, “Love, love, love, love, love, yeah.” Her words breathe in a newfound airiness, and the cellos soar a little higher.
Even without the context of its opening sample, ‘Hounds of Love’ already curates the same atmosphere as a B-movie horror. Bush has always infused her music with a cinematic element. The imagery of running through the trees in pursuit is an essential element of the genre, while the song’s final resolution provides catharsis and release from that terror.
The use of the Night of the Demon line only serves to intensify that atmosphere, to enhance that apparently demonic threat of love. It’s an expertly crafted sample that remains iconic decades later.
Watch the scene from Night of the Demon below.
