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Between 1939 and 1945, no horror movies were shown on the island of Great Britain. Horror movies had always had a tough slog in England – some of the horror movies that weren’t banned outright were often edited beyond recognition. Horror movies that were banned in England outright included The Island of Lost Souls (1933), Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and Freaks (1932). In fact, Freaks remained unseen in England until forty years after its release. So it’s no surprise that the British Board of Film Censors would ban horror movies en masse during the war years. Britain produced relatively few horror movies during the Golden Age of 1930’s horror to begin with. That began to change when the war ended.

Dead of Night (1945) was the first British horror movie to be produced following the war, and as such, it is a landmark of sorts. It is also the prototype for the anthology film, in which a number of short films are gathered together under a single heading. Dead of Night ties its various stories together with a framing sequence. The anthology movie would later become a specialty of British horror filmmaking under the aegis of Amicus studios, among other fly-by-night operations. Dead of Night’s studio pedigree is a bit more rarified. It was produced by Ealing Studios and directed by several of the studio’s top hands in Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton, and Basil Dearden. Ealing is best known for the comedies it produced in the following decade and the directors of Dead of Night went on to make such droll films as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). At least one segment of Dead of Night--the golfing story--prefigures the great Ealing comedies, but otherwise, the film couldn’t be more different. The uniformity of the film’s various segments and their integration into an organic whole suggests that the guiding hand behind the picture was producer Michael Balcon, who, of course, signed his name to all of those great Ealing films.

As with all anthology movies, the quality of the stories varies. Two of the stories – the first two – are barely more than anecdotes. They are the sort of brushes with the uncanny that people relate at second hand, though the culmination of the “hearse story,” with its cheerful driver declaring that there’s “room for one more inside,” sticks in the memory, and the weeping child in the “Christmas” story provides a certain amount of creepiness. The third segment is a full-on horror story about a haunted mirror that reflects a dark reality in the minds of the couple who gaze into it. This segment, directed by Robert Hamer, is a model of filmmaking control as the stately photography that opens the story gives way to wild invention as it climaxes. The oblique approach to horror on display in this segment plays with the audience’s perceptions and demonstrates the ever-widening influence of the Val Lewton movies from earlier in the decade.

The golfing story, contributed by H. G. Wells of all people, acts as comedy relief and as set-up for the film’s final blaze of glory. This story is the one that most fans of the film dislike the most, in part because it breaks the spell of the previous segment, but also because it seems a bit too genteel. The plot finds a pair of golfers breaking their friendship over a woman, but it’s the fact that one golfer cheats on the links that causes the other to haunt him from beyond the grave. While this story is generally disliked, it performs a function within the overall movie of tempering the horror of the preceding story while providing a stark contrast with the next. More than that, though, it’s emblematic of the kinds of ghost stories to which audiences of the day were accustomed. It’s only a short step from this story to Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in Topper (1937) or Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in The Time of Their Lives (1946). Ghost stories that were intended as horror stories were relatively rare in the 1940’s.

The final story, in which Michael Redgrave plays a tormented ventriloquist whose dummy wants to move on to greener pastures, is the segment that everyone who sees the film remembers. Unlike the other stories, there is only a small breath of other worlds in this segment. It is more a psychological tale than a ghost story – its narrator is a psychologist, no less – and is more dependent on its central performance than the other stories. In this, the movie is fortunate, because Redgrave is superb. As a portrait of psychological disintegration, his performance is wonderfully nuanced. That all said, the story suggests a supernatural world at a couple of points, and here, the segment’s reticence pays dividends. Those hints manage to tickle the hindbrain. What is most striking about this segment beyond its own elements is the way it prefigures Psycho (1960). The elements are all in place: the split personality, the psychological exegesis at the end, and – most importantly – the final shot of our imprisoned lunatic, grinning a hideous grin at the camera. Hitchcock wasn’t above swiping things – he appropriated the pet store sequence from Lewton’s Cat People for The Birds, for example – so it’s not a stretch to suggest that Hitch swiped this, too.

Unlike most anthology movies, where the framing sequences are often the weak link regardless of the relative excellence of the stories, Dead of Night’s framing sequence is integral to the success of the film. The various stories are told to one Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns), an architect who has been summoned to a country house, by the assembled guests. Craig has a sense of deja vu about the whole thing, as if he has dreamed the events of his visit. Ominously, he knows that horror lurks at the end of his visit. The climax of Craig’s visit finds him moving through a nightmare world composed of bits and pieces of the stories he has heard. And then he wakes up.

“And then he wakes up,” is usually a cop out in horror movies. It is the crutch of timid filmmakers who refuse to stare for long into the abyss, or of screenwriters who have written themselves into a corner. Dead of Night certainly teeters on the brink of both possibilities, but virtually alone among films that use this device, it makes something of it beyond the dissipation of its unease. At the very least, the ending of Dead of Night is a case study in film theory. The very end of the movie is composed of the same shots that open the film. The filmmakers have changed but a single element--the score--but the context framed by the rest of the film dramatically changes the meaning of these shots. This is cinematic sleight of hand of the first order, the sort of thing that the Russians pioneered in the 1920s when they placed an identical shot of an actor in juxtaposition with a bowl of food, a casket, and a baby, and saw the audience’s perception of the actor’s _expression change with each new juxtaposition. At the end of Dead of Night, the music has changed from the airy tones that opened the film to ominous strains that underline the notion that we are now privy to Craig’s deja vu, having dreamed his dream with him. Thus, the film becomes a kind of cinematic möbius strip, in which time turns back on itself and we are presented with a world without end. Horror movies rarely suggest cosmologies, but the framers of the “Steady State” model of the universe (a rival to the “Big Bang” theory) cite Dead of Night as their inspiration. Is Dead of Night the world’s first topological horror movie? It might be.

10/2/06.