Dead of Night

England loves its ghost stories, but its movie industry all but banned horror fantasy after sampling Hollywood’s terrors in the pre-Code era. Gothic horror didn’t return until  1957’s Hammer breakthrough, and even those movies would be tamed somewhat after prolonged battles with the censor.

But back in 1945, London’s most civilized film company Ealing Studios made history with the portmanteau feature  Dead of Night, a collection of 5 chillingly elegant ghost stories. Made with Ealing’s impeccable taste, by a conclave of its most creative writers and directors, it is a genuine (whisper) horror masterpiece.

There had been previous fantastic films in an omnibus format, most particularly the German Expressionist silents  Destiny by Fritz Lang and  Waxworks by Paul Leni. Dead of Night is brilliantly structured — a series of stories are told within a ‘wraparound’ story set in an innocuous gathering in a rural house. It’s the kind of quaint English tea party where lovers of ghost stories happily relate their private experiences. The filmmakers were compelled to include a comedy sequence, but it does no harm … this movie casts a spell that grows stronger as night falls, and nightmares come true.

That spell begins right in the title sequence, backgrounded by an abstract drawing of … a troubled sleeper in the dead of night?  Composer Georges Auric’s main title music promises both creepy sensations and big scares — it’s one of the best-ever music scores for a horror film.

Although no warning is given, Dead of Night plays games with the viewer right from its very first shot. Architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) shows up at the country cottage of potential client Eliot Foley (Roland Culver) only to experience a major case of deja vu: he’s convinced that the house, the people in it, and the words they speak are all part of a recurring dream he’s been having. The other houseguests encourage (or humor) him with uncanny tales of their own. The friendly visiting psychiatrist Dr. van Straaten (Frederick Valk) insists that paranormal fantasies don’t exist. But little bits of Walter Craig’s ‘predictions’ keep coming true …

This omnibus film not only works, its wraparound ‘linking narrative’ is more chilling than the best individual segment. That’s not something one can say about the next omnibus revival, initiated by  Amicus Films in 1964. Almost any book on classic horror films will yield an admiring analysis of Dead of Night. Our favorite appreciation is in Ivan Butler’s  The Horror Film … in a movie about dreams, Butler uses cinematic logic to isolate one shot that he says proves that Walter Craig’s nightmare is about to become real.

Where do half-remembered dreams go? 

More than a few ghost stories suggest that the future may be governed by an immutable fate. Mervyn Johns’ nervous milquetoast Craig is certain that both he and the rest of his companions are puppets enacting a predetermined sequence of events. His recurring dream is a blurred memory from which details spring up only fitfully. Eliot Foley’s houseguests laugh off Craig’s first predictions as coincidences. But the accumulation of alignments soon convinces all present that there’s something to the little man’s story.

(almost all a spoiler from here forward, so, sorry … this review-essay may be better if read after seeing the film.)

The afternoon tea sees Eliot Foley’s guests eager to embrace the fun of a good old-fashioned ghost experience. The dotty lady of the house has the best deadpan zinger deadpan dialogue: “Could you repeat that again, and this time in words of one syllable or less?” The verbal humor centers around Craig’s dreams, creating a warm atmosphere as several stories are told, either to tease the skeptical Dr. van Straaten, or to give Craig courage.

The Hearse Driver by Basil Dearden

The first two stories are brief ‘uncanny happenings’ such as to be found in straightforward paranormal fiction. The experience of a race car driver (Anthony Baird) is timed impeccably, with a perfect use of music, the ticking of a clock, and silence. There’s good suspense in a hospital when Baird walks to see what’s beyond a window curtain, only to find something both unexpected and disturbing. The episode communicates a sense of disorientation we have all experienced. Have you ever awakened from an afternoon nap, thinking for a second that it is the next morning?  The episode also provides an iconic / comic / sinister moment for the unique filmic personality Miles Malleson.  ^*

The Christmas Party by Alberto Cavalcanti

The second story lays out a simple case of the ‘unexplainable’ at a children’s party, the kind of irrational, unprovable occurrence dramatized every week on the TV show One Step Beyond. The leading player is a teenaged Sally Ann Howes, 23 years before her starring role in the children’s epic  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Miss Howes and several other teens act younger than their ages, playing a game of hide & seek in a mansion full of creepy old rooms. The ‘Gothic’ setting provides some good atmosphere for a tame surprise. The actress’s contribution is better felt in the wraparound story.

The Haunted Mirror by Robert Hamer

The second-best episode comes next, a cleverly worked-out possession story involving a diabolical artifact. Preparing for her upcoming wedding, Googie Withers  (Night and the City) finds her fiancée Ralph Michael falling under the influence of an hallucination, a strange old room that he sometimes sees in an antique mirror. Precise editing makes all the difference. Georges Auric’s crashing chords raise hackles all by themselves. Discerning direction chooses when to let us see the ‘haunted room’ that Michael sees, keeping us nervous about what we will see in the mirror.

The haunted window episode is as close to perfect as a mini-ghost story can get, not a second too long or too short. We become uneasy looking for clues in the brief cuts of the mystery room. It is slightly different each time it appears. Is there someone sleeping in the bed, just out of our view?  Michael’s initial ability to ‘shake off’ the illusion is a very dreamlike detail. We can feel him falling under the mirror’s influence — when he loses his grip on reality our sense of security sinks right along with him. The conclusion is great cinema, with shock cuts that reveal new information both to us and the terrified Ms. Withers.

The Golfer’s Story by Charles Crichton

We don’t know if the inclusion of a comedy segment was something to placate the censors, or if Ealing’s Michael Balcon thought that the scary stories needed to be lightened for public consumption. It’s important to remember that out-and-out horror pictures had been all but banned in England around 1936. The censors were very down on supernatural horror — although that doesn’t explain the welcome given the many horror-adjacent thrillers of  Todd Slaughter.

Written by none other than H.G. Wells, this silly spoof of obsessed golfers stars the popular duo of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne  (The Lady Vanishes,  Night Train to Munich). It’s an okay skit but not much more. The comedy may not be first-rate, but it serves its purpose. The interruption of the dark mood puts us off-guard, ready to be jolted again.

We’re told that the Sally Ann Howes segment and the Golf tale were dropped from many theatrical prints, and might not have been in the general release version initially shown in America. The U.S. release is indeed listed here and there as being a full 26 minutes shorter!

The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy by Alberto Cavalcanti

Dead of Night’s enduring reputation as one of the finest horror films ever rests on the achievement of the final story. The diabolical tale of Hugo the ventriloquist’s dummy also shows actor Michael Redgrave giving one of the 3 or 4 best horror performances of all time. The segment’s sophisticated concept rivets the attention no matter how many times one sees the picture. Redgrave’s reactions and detailed facial movements only become more fascinating.

It is also the most lavishly produced segment, with several clever sets. Our favorite is a simple nightclub hallway visible only for a few seconds, with a skylight through which we see the club’s animated sign. This episode is the one told by Frederick Valk’s psychologist, a skeptic who finally admits that he too has witnessed eerie events that he cannot explain.

Is this a kind of thematic plagiarism, once removed? 

Here’s where things become critically strange, as many writers have pointed out the resemblance of the ventriloquism episode to Alfred Hitchcock’s  Paycho, made fifteen years later. Both involve psychological possession. A living person is dominated by a non-living one – a murdered mother, an inanimate dummy. By dividing his personality, each madman has allowed a dark Other Half to take command. The stage show dummy is so well performed that some characters pretend that he’s alive. That aligns with the confusion in Psycho, when people argue whether there is or isn’t an old Mrs. Bates up in the old house. Does she really exist?

Other details are too close to be coincidental. Both stories have a ‘psychiatrist’ finale in which asylum guards carefully bring significant objects (the dummy Hugo, a blanket) into a padded cell. Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates and Redgrave’s Maxwell Frere are both reduced to mute catatonic states. Each offers a smug, demented grin of self-congratulation for carrying out a successful deception … everybody is fooled. Nearly identical dialogue crops up as well: “I didn’t get the story from Norman, I got it from his Mother.”

As a capper, both Hitchcock and the segment director Alberto Cavalcanti end with a tricky optical superimposition — the subliminal skull-face that hovers over Anthony Perkins, and Michael Redgrave’s ‘ghost eyes’ that blend subtly over the next scene.

Hitchcock’s frequent ‘borrowings’ from his perceived competition — Val Lewton, Henri-Georges Clouzot, even William Castle — either went unnoticed or were taken as a compliment. The shower scene from Lewton’s  The Seventh Victim immediately makes us think of Psycho, but Hitchcock obviously does much more with the situation.

The two films’ alignment does not seem all that debatable. Robert Bloch’s source book was based on the case of a real serial killer, but somewhere between Bloch, Joseph Stefano and the screen, Dead of Night got involved, as more than just a schematic. Psycho all but transposes the episode from the Ealing film, substituting the very Hitchcockian element of the ‘lethal mother.’

Before Dead of Night, ventriloquists’ dummies were considered cute and harmless, but the sarcastic Hugo is no Charlie McCarthy. Redgrave’s facial tics could be his professional vocal tricks — or the facial tics of a madman. With fellow ventriloquist Sylvester Kee (Hartley Power) on hand to endorse Frere’s genius, we don’t know what to think. But we agree that the disturbing situations and images are brilliantly organized. It’s a terrifying character study.

Dead of Night has four directors, whose segments offer a range of styles. Basil Dearden handles the framing story, and the race-car driver story. Robert Hamer’s mirror story is more rigid and controlled. Charles Crichton’s golf tale adopts a deadpan level of absurdity. Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti’s Sally Ann Howes segment is lively, and his Hugo episode is a masterpiece. It might be more illuminating to find out which cameraman filmed each episode. Is the later big-time lenser Douglas Slocombe responsible for the visually restrained segments or the more extravagant ones?  ^**

The overthrow of Reality. 

The fade-out of the Hugo story leaves us with the framing story of Walter Craig. As darkness falls, the storytelling ‘cinematically mutates.’  All of the characters besides Craig and the psychologist van Stratten make a quiet exit. The interior lighting becomes darker than in any of the other stories. At a certain point, all logic dissolves into a fever-dream of surreal distortions and expressionist derangement, a whirlpool of nightmare images.

The classics of German Expressionism rarely combined their weird visuals with wild editing, so the impact here is breathtaking — Caligari advances three extra steps. Viewers are startled by the sudden parade of characters from the earlier ‘unrelated’ tales. All seemingly conspire to torment Craig, like phantoms in a nightmare. If the movie hasn’t totally affected the viewer up to this point, this ending should do the trick. People already spooked, even a bit, will flip out. In my theater screenings, the finale was met with big reactions of surprise and shock.

(Ultimate Spoiler, seriously.)

But even then the thrills are not finished. We know that audiences generally resent stories that turn out ‘all to be a dream.’  Dead of Night successfully transcends that dream structure gimmick with a twist that’s truly mind-bending.

Architect Walter Craig awakens from his dream, the final image of which literally shrinks and fades away. A telephone call immediately sends him off on a new assignment — to visit a new client, Eliot Foley. The movie’s action effectively reboots: the film’s creepy title music is heard again, this time over a repeat of Craig’s arrival at Foley’s farm. The benign becomes menacing. Is the movie we saw just a dream, and now it’s happening for real, for the first time?  Or is Craig doomed to an eternally repeating circle of Hell?

We can expect that audiences will be disoriented by the ending revelation. Who expects a Luis Borges-like time-space enigma to intercede just as ‘The End’ fades up on the screen?  Our experience of watching Dead of Night is identical to that of poor Walter Craig. He too becomes a passive audience for some ghost stories. We are pulled in just as he is pulled in, only we are enjoying ourselves.

Not too many pick up on the little super-clue on which hinges all the events of the story: Craig’s coin toss. That bit at home, before his trip to the haunted farm, may be the only piece of ‘reality’ that we can be certain of. If the coin would only once come up tails instead of heads … maybe the spell would be broken. Dead of Night gives us a nightmare, that might conceivably have an exit.