恶魔之夜

简介：American psychologist John Holden arrives in London to participate in a symposium aimed at exposing witchcraft and devil-worship as a fraud. The focus is on a cult run by Julian Karswell, with whom he has some history. When he disembarks his plane, he learns that the symposium leader, Henry Harrington, has suddenly died and is now in charge of the event. What only the audience knows is that Harrington was killed by a demon, apparently summoned by Karswell to avenge his persecution. Despite both threatening and cajoling behavior by Karswell, Holden decides to proceed, though the only cult member willing to talk about his experiences is in a prison psychiatric ward, catatonic after allegedly killing yet another cult member. However, Harrington's niece, Joanna, believes, based on her uncle's notes, that Karswell may indeed have some satanic powers derived from an ancient tome in an obscure language which he has been able to translate, and attempts to warn the skeptic Holden. Karswell's mother also attempts to warn Holden off. However, the thing that begins to most get to Holden are the occasional, but mounting, sensory and mental disturbances he begins experiencing after an encounter with Karswell. He also discovers that during this encounter, Karswell secretly slipped a slip of parchment with a curse in runic symbols on it into Holden's belongings, a parchment identical to one Harrington recorded having had passed to him in a similar manner shortly before his death. [N.B. Holden at no point stays at the Karswell estate].……