My notes on Night of the Eagle.

 These are my notes on Night of the Eagle, which I presented at Thhe Harrison Hotel as part of the Chambers Films series on 26th August 2025. 

I didn't actually use any of the notes in the end. I freestyled. 

NIGHT OF THE EAGLE (1962)

Dir: Sidney Hayers, who directed Circus of Horrors and, latterly, every 80’s TV action show you can think of: Knight Rider, Magnum P.I., The A Team, Remington Steele, T.J. Hooker, Cover Up (models are spies!) and fucking Manimal!

Based on the 1943 novel “Conjure Wife!” by Fritz Lieber.

The story had been filmed before as “Weird Woman” in 1944, starring Lon Chaney Jnr as a sociology professor. Rather than a werewolf or a Native American, which were his his go to gigs. 

It would be filmed again, this time as a comedy in 1980, as “Witch’s Brew” or “Which Witch is Which?” Starring Teri Garr and Richard Benjamin. It was Lana Turner’s last film.

I've not seen this film. A rare oversight. 

“Night of the Eagle” was known as “Burn, Witch, Burn!” in America, which isn’t great either, but at least it turns up in the dialogue.

Night of the Eagle is, I suspect named for Night of the Demon, Jacques Tourneur’s film from five years before, itself based on M. R. James’ “Casting the Runes”. Night of the Demon too, sees a bone-headed, incurably smug rationalist having his arse handed to him by supernatural forces beyond his ken. It’s famous for the “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” sample at the start of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. Maurice Denham, who said it, didn’t die until 2002, so there is every chance he heard the song, though history doesn’t record what he made of it. Obviously, I did research this, but he never said anything publicly about it.

Written by Charles Beaumont, George Baxt and Richard Matheson. 

Beaumont wrote several episodes of the Twilight Zone, and also The 7 Faces of Dr Lao, which gave me nightmares for weeks when I was a kid. 

George Baxt, had written The City of the Dead and Circus of Horrors for Sidney Hayers.

Richard Matheson also wrote a ton of Twilight Zones, plus I Am Legend, the Roger Corman Edgar Allen Poe films and Duel for Stephen Spielberg. As far as writing goes, Night of the Eagle has an incredible pedigree.

As far as everything goes really.

 

Starring: Peter Wyngarde (Cyril Goldbert) a man of mystery, he made up his life, claiming to not even know how old he was. He was in the same Japanese internment camp as J G Ballard during the WW2. Ballard remembers him hogging the lead roles in the camp drama club. Though he’d appeared the previous year in The Innocents as a leering Quint, Night of the Eagle was his only leading role in a film. His major success was in television culminating in his role as dandified hippy private eye Jason King.

I have his album: “When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head”. You probably shouldn’t listen to that.

Janet Blair: weird casting, but there is a something, sharp and nervy about Janet Blair. She’d been a big band singer in the 40’s and drifted into films, but ahead of Night of the Eagle she’d only made one film in the previous 14 years. But she was in Won Ton Ton the Dog that Saved Hollywood (1976) and I wasn’t, so who’s the real winner here?

Her vocalisation of the word “Insane?” is every bit as odd and strange as Wyngarde’s “Vile and filthy!”

Margaret Johnston, was an Australian actress whose stated intention was to “move to Europe, learn her craft and lose her Australian accent.” Despite being brilliant in this film – she’s my favourite thing in it – she hated the film. She also hated her penultimate film, called The Psychopath. I’ve never seen it but it was produced by Amicus, directed by Freddie Francis and written by Robert Bloch, which very much makes me want to. The fact that Johnston is described as “over-playing to the point of burlesque” does nothing to put me off.

 

This film is part of a weird lineage of films where women are suddenly strange and unknowable, mapping itself fairly closely to the social revolutions of the sixties and seventies, and a sort of wobbly, masculine panic: here women are witches, in the following year’s “Unearthly Stranger” all women are aliens – not sure how that works – it reaches an artistic apotheosis in “Rosemary’s Baby”, where everyone in the building is a Satanist (but really all you’re thinking about is Ruth Gordon) and reaches as sort of conclusion in “The Stepford Wives” (1975) where women are finally replaced by robots and therefore masculine panic is over forever. Phew. Next stop “The Handmaid’s Tale”. 

Which is where we find ourselves.

 

 Next month: Les Diaboliques!