Alberto Cavalcanti ... (segments "Christmas Party", "The Ventriloquist's Dummy") (as Cavalcanti)
Charles Crichton ... (segment "Golfing Story")
Basil Dearden ... (segments "Hearse Driver", "Linking Narrative")
Robert Hamer ... (segment "The Haunted Mirror")
Writers: John Baines & Angus MacPhail, from an original story by H.G. Wells, E.F. Benson, John Baines, and MacPhail. Additional dialogue by T.E.B. Clarke.
Starring: Mervyn Johns, Roland Culver, Mary Merrall, Googie Withers, Frederick Valk, Anthony Baird, and Sally Ann Howes
Dead of Night is a British horror anthology from the ‘40s, and while it isn’t the first such film, it’s widely considered one of the greatest. What really piqued my interest was its inclusion in several “scariest movies of all time” lists, where it usually ended up ranking high; if there is a more surefire way to get me to want to see a movie, I’m not aware of it. I’m always looking for that rare movie to frighten me; I figure it has an even greater chance if it’s a smaller, more obscure movie, rather than one where all the secrets have been divulged to me before I even see it (i.e. The Exorcist, The Shining, etc.)
The set-up for Dead of Night is rather smart, especially for a film of its time: rather than falling back on the more typical set-up of merely having a set of people tell stories, the main story serves as a framing device, which links all of the tales together. It’s a pretty fascinating way for everything to unfold, and ensures there’s not an ounce of wasted film time…every moment is part of a full narrative that features a resolution, with the ending bringing everything we have seen together with a kind of cool effectiveness.
It all begins with Walter Craig, an architect, arriving at a farmhouse. He is there hoping to get some work, but right from the outset something is terribly wrong. Even though he has never met any of the six other people gathered in the house, he already knows who they are. He even knows there will be a seventh person arriving, a brunette woman, who will make a comment about how she is broke, an event that comes true.
His eerie premonition inspires other guests to describe their eeriest, unexplained moments. After each story, Dr. Van Straaten, a part of the group, attempts to analyze their stories, and put to rest their confusion by explaining away the mystery using science, circa 1945. But even he has a story that defies all logic…
The stories range from just a couple of minutes long, to around twenty minutes, or so, with the final tale seeming to take the longest amount of time, aside from the main story (I didn’t time them, so it’s pure speculation on my part). In the first, as told by Hugh Grainger, a man has an eerie premonition of a mysterious hearse driver; in the second, as told by young’n Sally O’Hara, a girl playing hide and seek at a Christmas party stumbles upon a young crying child that none of her friends are familiar with; the third finds a woman surprising her husband with a mirror, only to find that it may be cursed from a previous owner; the fourth, which is the only one that doesn’t involve a character from the farmhouse, is a tale told about two golfers, and close friends, who settle their feud over a woman with a round of golf; and the fifth, and perhaps most well-known of the bunch, finds a ventriloquist who might be controlled by his own dummy.
The quality of each piece varies wildly, with the golfing story focusing more on humor, and feeling totally out of place here (especially considering it doesn’t feature any of the characters in it; it’s merely an account of a story told by someone who heard about it). There’s also the small little problem that none of them are even remotely scary, though the ventriloquist’s tale does manage some effective eeriness that’s sorely missing from the rest. It doesn’t help that the narratives in here have been copied so many times (either as a direct result from this film, or just from literature in general) that all of them are predictable, pretty much right from the onset.
The end of the main story, and framing device, should have been painfully obvious to me (and will be to some), but I thought it did a good job of tying everything together. I also have to give some major props to the ending of the ventriloquist piece, which clearly had a direct influence on the ending of the “Drop of Water” sequence in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, which in my opinion is far and away the best horror anthology film ever made, and one of the best horror films of all time, period. Somehow, I missed this connection the first time I saw this, but all the pieces are obviously there.
I also feel the need to give the film a little extra credit for helping to kickstart the anthology film. Many others that followed owe their inspiration to Dead of Night in one way or another, and the use of a framing device to tie all of the separate stories together was a nice little touch. Unfortunately, time has not been kind to the individual stories, leaving Dead of Night to be a rather dull sludge overall.
RECAP: It’s technically well made, and was probably a lot more effective in the ‘40s, but time has not been kind to Dead of Night, which is a collection of six mostly horror-themed tales (aside from the lighthearted and misplaced “golfer story”) and all enveloped by the main story, which ties everything together. Frequently cited as one of the scariest movies of all time (appearing on Martin Scorsese’s list of such films, no less), I thought it was rather dull and meandering, with many of the stories utterly predictable and straightforward. It does have a solid ending, though upon inflection it should have been pretty obvious the whole way. But its main endearing quality, at least as far as I’m concerned, is for visually influencing the classic segment “Drop of Water” in Black Sabbath, Mario Bava’s infinitely better horror anthology that would be made almost exactly twenty years later.
RATING: 4.5/10
OLD MAN FROM TCM TALKS ABOUT DEAD OF NIGHT
(Cannot find a single trailer for this movie.)
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