Dead of Night: the conversation is part of the haunting

An anthology should earn its interruptions. Dead of Night earns them by making a return to the sitting room feel less reassuring each time. Ealing's 1945 film contains five supernatural stories inside a country-house gathering, where architect Walter Craig recognizes people from his recurring nightmare. The guests have uncanny accounts of their own. What matters is how telling those stories changes the room they are sitting in.

A room full of explanations

Dr. Van Straaten supplies the skeptical resistance. A psychiatrist's explanation can make an alarming experience manageable: perhaps the witness misunderstood it; perhaps the mind supplied something that was never there. That conversational structure gives the film an extra source of suspense. A strange event has to survive being described to somebody who expects an ordinary answer.

The viewer gets to occupy both positions. During a tale, you can share its predicament. Back among the guests, you can consider how persuasive it sounds when reduced to an anecdote. Those are different experiences. An account that sounds flimsy over conversation can still leave an image behind that refuses to behave. The linking story keeps that disagreement alive.

Let the golfing ghost stay

The comic golfing episode tests the arrangement. It interrupts the accumulation of dread, and viewers who want a steadily tightening film have a fair complaint. Yet an anthology can gain something from an awkward change of temperature. A ghost becomes available for a joke; the supernatural briefly belongs to social entertainment. That makes the return to more threatening material feel like a change in what the gathering is prepared to accommodate.

This does not make every minute of the detour essential. Comic relief can feel like somebody opened a window in the middle of a carefully heated nightmare. But removing every tonal wobble would also make the film more predictable. The interesting question is whether the pause changes your attention when the next story begins. Here, the unevenness gives the evening a slightly treacherous rhythm.

A face that declines to cooperate

The haunted mirror and the ventriloquist's dummy offer two especially useful objects for this structure. A mirror promises reliable correspondence. A dummy is supposed to depend on its performer. Both objects already contain a relationship that horror can disturb. The film does not need to invent an elaborate mythology before we understand why a failure of either arrangement would be unpleasant.

Michael Redgrave's ventriloquist, Maxwell Frere, makes Hugo's fixed smile particularly effective. Put a changing human performance beside an expression that stays put, and the imbalance starts doing work. For a drawing, that is a useful alternative to adding more threatening features. Keep the object simple. Change the person responding to it. A face that will not adjust to the room can become more troubling than an obviously monstrous one.

Choose Dead of Night for that interaction between an eerie image and the people trying to explain it. Expect black-and-white photography, conversational pauses, and shifts in tone rather than uninterrupted terror. For a different anthology rhythm, our Kwaidan review considers stories whose deliberately constructed visual worlds invite a more ceremonial kind of attention. Dead of Night keeps bringing its tales back into company, where apparently reasonable conversation becomes another uncomfortable thing to sit through.

Questions from the crypt

Sources & further reading

• BFI Southbank: Dead of Night programme notes and full credits
• Rialto Pictures: Dead of Night distributor catalogue
• Tamasa: Dead of Night restoration press kit (French, PDF)

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