Review: Ealing’s Dead of Night Horror Anthology on Kino Lorber Blu-ray

This lasting work of existential horror has been given an audio commentary that serves as a veritable seminar on British cinema.

Dead of NightEaling Studios’s 1945 production Dead of Night helped popularize the horror-themed anthology film. Many such films feel like short story collections, with disconnected narratives of varying quality and often negligible framing devices. Meanwhile, Dead of Night feels more like a confident concept album, as it’s all of a disturbing piece, its framing narrative setting the stage for an inquiry into the fragility of reality that’s bolstered in various subtle fashions by the subsequent stories. The film is influential not only to its own genre, but to surrealists and to practitioners of suspense narratives with “twist” endings. The Phantom of the Liberty, Psycho, EC Comics, Twin Peaks and everything all these landmarks touched might’ve been enabled in part by Dead of Night.

The film doesn’t come on strong, as it’s often more interested in plumbing the uncanny—the slight “wrongness” of everyday life that can reveal unmooring fissures into our sense of setting and self—than in springing overt shocks, though there are a few of those too. It opens with a man already disconnected from reality, an architect named William Craig (Mervyn Johns) who’s summoned to a country home for a weekend. The details of this weekend are vague, and we first see William already in motion, approaching the estate in his car. As he’s escorted into the home, William claims that he’s dreamed of this place before, many times, and that he knows this visit with a motley collection of people will become a nightmare. Dr. Van Straaten (Frederick Vaalk) is the resident cynic, and his resistance to William’s claim inspires the other guests to tell stories of their brush with the supernatural.

Advertisement

Dead of Night’s framing story, directed by Basil Deardon, has the elegance of a British drawing-room drama, with attractive and well-dressed characters initially discussing spooks as they might the day’s cricket tournament. And this rarefication lowers our guard, though William’s escalating nervousness foreshadows, say, the astonishing intensity of Michael Redgraves’s wiry, sexually neurotic performance in the film’s fifth and most famous story, “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” in which Redgraves plays a performer eaten up with jealousy over the professional betrayal of his dummy. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, the segment abounds in eerie touches that distinguish it from all the stories centered around evil dolls that it would inspire. For instance, we’re allowed to notice that Redgraves’s Maxwell Frere has a framed picture of his possessed ventriloquist dummy—a bizarre, almost obscene detail that Cavalcanti allows us to feel as if we’re discovering for ourselves.

The film abounds in such intimate and insane textures. In “The Haunted Mirror,” directed by Robert Hamer, a man’s gradual possession is represented by an opulent bedroom with an elaborate fireplace and bedframe, which can only be seen through a mirror he received as a gift from his fiancée. We see no ghosts, only this magic bedroom as it contrasts with the plain and sterile room the mirror actually inhabits. As Peter (Ralph Michael) continues to look into the mirror, gazing at this lurid room, he becomes convinced that Joan (Googie Withers), now his wife, is cheating on him, and the story becomes a metaphor for the fears of the concessions required of marriage. Michael expertly dramatizes Peter’s escalating instability, and the room in the mirror remains an unnervingly ambiguous image of discontent and violation, especially given the cockeyed images that emphasize the mirror as an instrument of fracture.

Advertisement

There’s an emphasis in Dead of Night on rooms within rooms and passageways within passageways, suggesting nesting forms of consciousness and existence. In “The Christmas Party,” directed by Cavalcanti, a young girl, Sally (Sally Ann Howes), discovers a hidden chamber she believes to be a nursery housing a small boy, and while the punchline is familiar, its notion of a murder chamber hiding in plain sight remains haunting. In “The Hearse Driver,” directed by Dearden, a man glimpses a death prophecy through the curtains of his hospital room, which are so heavy and velvety they suggest the curtains of a movie theater. Even “The Golfer’s Story,” directed by Charles Crichton as a comic palette cleanser between the intense “The Haunted Mirror” and “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” features at least one lasting image that suggests the intertwining of multiple worlds. When a jilted golfer named Larry (Naunton Wayne) commits suicide, he does so by merely walking into the lake on a golf course.

Dead of Night is a snake eating its own tail, a story of the dream of a potential madman that branches off into other dreams, which branch off into yet others. Many of these dreams are presumed to have an exit, until it’s revealed that William’s circular reality is the potential “god” of all these other lives. This idea, endlessly explored by surrealists, scientists, and philosophers alike, is almost too unnerving to contemplate at length, though Dead of Night gives it a febrile sense of possibility. The passageways aren’t the most memorable images of the film; those would be the many close-ups of faces twisting in agony and loneliness.

Advertisement

Image/Sound

This transfer has a luscious sense of darkness, according cinematographers Stanley Pavey and Douglas Slocombe’s shadows a rich and foreboding prominence. Facial close-ups are also vividly detailed, with white light that’s bright and strong without being shrill. In fact, visual textures are vibrant throughout, illuminating striking details of the sets and clothing. The soundtrack can be fuzzy at times, especially the dialogue in Dead of Night’s first 10 minutes, but Georges Auric’s score has been rendered with a strong and menacing body, and small supporting sound effects are also quite vibrant.

Extras

The audio commentary by critic Tim Lucas is a characteristically detailed and erudite examination of how Dead of Night arose out of the British film industry, and its lasting influence. Lucas provides elaborate biographies of all the players, and discusses how the film’s then-unusual structure was a response to productions like Grand Hotel and The Halfway House. Along the way, we hear choice bits about Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and many others, and Lucas is also a shrewd observer of symbolism—he catches the curtains in the hospital, and offers many lovely comments on the framing of the haunted mirror. A feature-length remembrance of Dead of Night complements Lucas’s commentary, rounding out a slim but dense supplements package.

Overall

This lasting work of existential horror has been given a beautiful transfer, and an audio commentary that serves as a veritable seminar on British cinema.

Score: 
 Cast: Mervyn Johns, Anthony Baird, Roland Culver, Sally Ann Howes, Renée Gadd, Barbara Leake, Mary Merrall, Frederick Valk, Googie Withers, Judy Kelly, Miles Malleson, Michael Allan, Barbara Leake, Ralph Michael, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Peggy Bryan, Michael Redgrave, Hartley Power, Allan Jeayes  Director: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer  Screenwriter: John Baines, Angus MacPhail, T.E.B. Clarke  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1945  Release Date: July 9, 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.