Dead of Night (1945)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Dead of Night (1945) – A. Cavalcanti, C. Crichton, B. Dearden, & R. Hamer

My favourite of all horror anthologies and from Ealing Studios no less (famous for their delightful comedies:  The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers, Kind Hearts & Coronets, among them).  Four directors cover five tales (and a further linking narrative) that manage to capture that elusive spooky feeling that I remember so well from children’s books, the kind of books that told of lonely young people meeting and befriending new acquaintances in deserted locales (and of course, these new friends always turn out to be ghosts, long dead).  Perhaps Lafcadio Hearn’s spooky Japanese folktales (retold in Kaidan/Kwaidan by Kobayashi) also capture this feeling – is it what we call the “uncanny”?  Dead of Night manages to evoke this feeling in a number of different ways beginning with the linking story that shows an architect arrive at a house full of houseguests with the strong sense that he has been there before in a dream – indeed, he ominously begins to predict what will happen next.  This leads each guest to tell a spooky story from their own past, including a race car driver who is given a mysterious warning to avoid his own death, a young girl who meets a ghostly child when playing hide-and-seek, a wife who accidentally gives her husband a haunted mirror, the host telling a comic story of two golfers in love with same woman (featuring Basil Radford & Naunton Wayne, from Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes), and finally and most famously, a psychiatrist telling of his encounter with a ventriloquist who has a strained relationship with his dummy.  As anthologies go, this one is less uneven than most (although the golfing episode was dropped for the US release) and the four directors are equally strong (Cavalcanti, Crichton, Dearden, & Hamer).  The spooky feeling may stick with you for days!