Casting the Runes

"Casting the Runes"

Author	M.R. James
Country	England
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror short story

"Casting the Runes" is a short story written by the English writer M.R. James. It was first published in 1911 as the fourth story in More Ghost Stories, which was James' second collection of ghost stories.

Synopsis

Mr. Edward Dunning is a researcher for the British Museum. At the beginning of the story he has recently reviewed The Truth of Alchemy by a Mr. Karswell, an alchemist and occultist. Afterwards he begins seeing the name John Harrington displayed wherever he goes. He learns that Harrington also reviewed Karswell's work and died in a freak accident not long after. He soon learns that he has been cursed by Karswell and must find a way to reverse it.^[1]

Adaptations

The 1957 film Night of the Demon (directed by Jacques Tourneur) is an adaption of this story.^[2] In this version, the central character is called Dr John Holden (played by Dana Andrews) and he is an American parapsychologist who travels to England to attend a conference where he plans to expose the occultist Julian Karswell (played by Niall MacGinnis) as a charlatan, only to discover Karswell's powers are real and that he has put a curse on Holden.

The story has been adapted twice for British television. The first was in 1968 as an episode of the anthology series Mystery and Imagination (Season 3, episode 1, 1968) with John Fraser as Dunning and Robert Eddison as Karswell. In 1979, the story was adapted again as an episode of ITV Playhouse (Season 11, episode 9). In the 1979 version, the central protagonist is a woman, Prudence Dunning (played by Jan Francis), the producer of an investigative television programme which is critical of an occultist named Karswell (played by Iain Cuthbertson), and soon finds that Karswell has a curse put upon her. No complete copies of the 1968 version are known to exist, but the 1979 version has been released on DVD.

Casting The Runes has also been adapted several times for radio. The first was in 1947 by CBS for their radio series Escape. CBS produced a second version in 1974 for their CBS Radio Mystery Theater show. In 1981, BBC Radio 4 produced a loose adaptation called "The Hex".

References

↑ James, M.R. (1993). Collected ghost stories (Repr. ed.). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. pp. 128–145. ISBN 1853260533.
↑ Stafford, Jeff. "Curse of the Demon (1957)". TCM. Retrieved 2015-02-19.

External links

The full text of Casting the Runes at Wikisource
Full text of "Casting the Runes"
Casting the Runes public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- Alternative LibriVox reading of the story
A Podcast to the Curious: Episode 12a - Casting the Runes

Works by M. R. James

Short stories	"Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" "Lost Hearts" "The Mezzotint" "The Ash-tree" " Number 13" "Count Magnus" "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" "A School Story" " The Rose Garden" "The Tractate Middoth" "Casting the Runes" "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" "Martin's Close" "Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance" "A View from a Hill" "A Warning to the Curious"

Collections	Ghost Stories of an Antiquary More Ghost Stories A Thin Ghost and Others A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James

Adaptations	Night of the Demon A Ghost Story for Christmas

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