Friday, January 8, 2021

Dead of Night (1945)

An influential horror anthology. Architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) turns up at a country house filled with the usual 1940s British middle class stereotypes, but he feels he has met the other guests before in his dreams. Nightmares which have a deadly ending. This helps prompt a series of short horror vignettes of varying quality and horror, though i did enjoy the hide and seek story with the ghost children.

The film really gets going when psychiatrist Dr Van Straaten (Frederick Valk) recounts an odd tale of a ventriloquist and his dummy, the ventriloquist (Michael Redgrave) having been arrested for attempted murder of a rival who he claimed was trying to steal his dummy. However, who was really the one in control?

Craig now fears his nightmares will come true and he will commit a monstrous crime. The various anthology stories all come together to an amazingly creepy crescendo. The film is a bit patchy (the golf ghost story probably could have been better left out) but is well worth perceiving with. It after all created it's own sub-genre, the British horror anthology.