‘You see, everybody in this room is part of my dream.’
I suppose because we felt we were at the beginning of a new era after the war we were inclined to try out our talents on different sorts of films – things we had never done before. We decided, for instance, that it would be a good idea to make a series of ghost stories, joined by a suitable central story thread which would display the all-round talents of the creative teams we had built up, and it was from this decision that Dead of Night was made. (Sir Michael Balcon: Michael Balcon presents…a Lifetime of Films. Hutchinson 1969)
In the spirit of the film’s temporal trajectory, and before moving on to the discussion of its constituent parts, it is appropriate to consider some past, present and future context. If there is one phrase that repeatedly crops up when today’s writers attempt to define Dead of Night in their retrospective reviews and appraisals of the film, it would be ‘ahead of its time’. The term has become rather commonplace at the populist end of the film journalism spectrum, but in the case of Dead of Night the phrase is certainly apposite if one considers its anticipation of post-war British horror cinema. However for all its reputation as a pioneering work of the genre the film is just as much ‘of its time’ as it is ahead of it.
Later chapters will discuss the element of psychoanalysis found in the film in greater depth, but for now let’s just say that 1945 was a big year for Freudianism in film. In some respects it was the point at which film and psychoanalytic theory culminated. In their modern, definable, recognised forms both came into being around 1895, so by the time of Dead of Night both had enjoyed parallel fifty-year histories. The leading academic Laura Marcus, in her introductory chapter to Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: New interdisciplinary essays, observed: ‘Psychoanalysis and cinema emerged in tandem at the end of the nineteenth century – twin sciences or technologies of fantasy, dream, virtual reality and screen memory.’ (Marcus 1999: 34) A few short weeks after Dead of Night’s September 1945 release cinema audiences found themselves once again on the psychiatrist’s couch; following Frederick Valk’s mid-European bespectacled Sigmund schtick as the film’s sceptical psychiatrist Dr. Van Straaten, both Herbert Lom’s Dr. Larsen in The Seventh Veil directed by Compton Bennett and, especially, Michael Chekhov’s Dr. Brulov in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) – a film that shares a writer credit with Dead of Night in the shape of Angus MacPhail — channelled the founding father of psychoanalysis for their inspiration.
It is important to interrogate that phrase ‘ahead of its time’ a little further. In many respects Dead of Night was more a cinematic pinnacle of a storytelling tradition than a forebear of a new form. It has plenty of antecedents, both literary and cinematic. Fundamentally the frame narrative is a device that dates back to some of the earliest known examples of recorded storytelling, which were frequently collections of even earlier tales originating in oral storytelling cultures. The ancient Egyptian text now known as ‘the Westcar Papyrus’ has been dated back to around 1800 BC and consists of five tales of magic and miracles. Several Sanskrit epics and fable stories emerged from India in subsequent centuries, including Baital Pachisi which was adapted and translated by Sir Richard Francis Burton and published in 1870 for an English readership as Vikram and the Vampire. Burton is more renowned for his translation of One Thousand and One Nights, one of the most well-known collections of folk tales and, in the form of Scheherazade’s nightly storytelling efforts designed to spare her from death by order of the Persian king Shahryar, another early example of the use of a frame narrative.
The form survived and thrived through other literary cultures; The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s sprawling collection of novellas from the mid-fourteenth century was shaped by a narrative set in a deserted Tuscan villa where ten people seek refuge from the outbreak of the plague in Florence and pass the time telling tales. Boccaccio’s work proved to be a major influence on Geoffrey Chaucer whose Middle English masterpiece The Canterbury Tales is a succession of stories shared by pilgrims en route to the shrine of Saint Thomas a Becket. It’s no accident that the prime location for the gathering of the storytelling house guests in Dead of Night is called ‘Pilgrim’s Farm’. Another work of Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, consists of nine linked sections, and, whilst told from the same single narrator perspective unlike the multi-teller form of The Canterbury Tales, is regarded as an example of the dream vision or visio literary device. Centuries before Freud, the Middle Ages was a period that saw great interest in ‘oneiromancy’ or dream lore, with many written works delving into the attempted interpretation of dreams.
Beyond these early ancestral highpoints of the frame story form there are more direct forerunners to Dead of Night to be found in nineteenth-century literature. Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, written during the time of the Napoleonic Wars, took the device of a frame tale encompassing separate nested stories to the level of puzzle box complexity. There’s a 1965 Polish film adaptation of the book, The Saragossa Manuscript (Polish: Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie) directed by Wojciech Has that is worth seeking out. Potocki’s tale is a literary example of mise en abyme, translated literally as ‘placed into abyss’, a term originating in heraldry to denote a small shield appearing at the centre of a bigger shield. In literature it denotes the accretion of stories within stories, in the case of Saragossa, a convoluted miscellany of Gothic, supernatural and occasionally erotic recollections, the ‘Russian doll’ embedding of tales that can take the reader several stages within its frame story. The Ventriloquist’s Dummy episode in Dead of Night features the film’s only instance of second stage story nesting; after starting out by recalling his first encounter with Maxwell Frere, Van Straaten proceeds to read Sylvester Kee’s witness statement which then becomes the vehicle for the story that unfolds. Incidentally a purely visual instance of mise en abyme is known as the Droste effect, a fine example of which can be found in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941) when towards the end of the film an aging Kane passes between two facing mirrors and we are treated to a never-ending multiplicity of reflected Kanes. We will come on to infinite loops and mirrors later.
Victorian Gothic literature displayed a preoccupation with supernatural events and madness; this was a period that saw the rise of both spiritualism and the early stages of psychoanalysis, which led to a distinct tendency towards morbid eeriness in the fiction of the times. The influence of the work of Edgar Allan Poe throughout the 1840s cannot be understated, and writers such as Sheridan le Fanu, whose 1872 publication In a Glass Darkly featured five stories presented as the posthumous papers of an occult detective, lent weight to the genre and led to its embrace by more mainstream authors in the second half of the century. The theory of dreams was an abiding interest of the foremost writer of the age, Charles Dickens. Although ‘psychology’ as a recognised term defining a field of study was not in use during Dickens’ own lifetime, his ideas concerning dreams expressed through his correspondence as well as his fictional work are at times remarkably anticipatory of the findings of Freud. A letter that he wrote to a Dr. Thomas Stone on 2 February 1851, not published until 1938, sets out some of his own theories on the nature of dreams, and in so doing gives clues as to the writer’s own use of dreams in his fiction. In the letter he appears convinced of the relative commonality of dreams, which suggests that as a literary device he regarded them as a unifying experience among his readership. When charting this democracy of dreams he gives among his examples a delicious little foretaste of Craig’s dream in Dead of Night:
Are dreams so very various and different, as you suppose? Or is there, taking into consideration our vast differences in point of mental and physical constitution, a remarkable sameness to them?…And how many dreams are common to us all…we all say ‘this must be a dream, because I was in this strange, low-roofed, beam-obstructed place, once before, and it turned out to be a dream’. (Dickens 1851)
It is tempting to regard Dead of Night as the great grandchild of The Haunted House, an 1859 portmanteau collection of spooky short stories, ‘conducted’ by Dickens and originally published in the weekly periodical All The Year Round, with contributions from, among others, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. Dickens’ tradition of Christmas ghost stories began in 1843 with A Christmas Carol, a well-loved tale laden with troubled sleep, spectral visitants and a past/present/future temporal journey for its central character, and a succession of spooky festive novellas followed throughout the 1840s. By the 1850s Dickens’ role as managing editor of the journal Household Words, superseded by All The Year Round, led to further ‘framed tales for Christmas’, including what became known collectively as The Haunted House. Dickens was responsible for the first and last chapters and established the story narrator, a man determined to take up occupancy of a deserted house and spend Christmas there with a group of friends. Each encapsulated tale told from the perspective of his house guests centres on the peculiar happenings within a different room in the house. The very beginning of the opening chapter is quite reminiscent of Craig’s approach to Pilgrim’s Farm in Dead of Night:
Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect. More than that: I had come to it direct from a railway station: it was not more than a mile distant from the railway station; and, as I stood outside the house, looking back upon the way I had come, I could see the goods train running smoothly along the embankment in the valley. I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly commonplace people – and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take it on myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it, any fine autumn morning. (Dickens 1859: 1)
Dickens’ embrace of the supernatural paved the way for the fin de siècle Gothic revival of the 1880s and the publication of the late Victorian Gothic novels everybody knows; The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson 1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde 1891), Dracula (Bram Stoker 1897), The Turn of the Screw (Henry James 1898) and others defined the prevailing mood of social and ethical decline. An honourable mention should also go to Jerome K. Jerome, who provided a parody of the Dickensian Christmas ghost story anthology with his short 1891 collection Told After Supper.
The most venerated exponent of supernatural fiction from the first decades of the twentieth century, M. R. James, began having his ghostly short stories published as early as 1895, National Review carrying ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’ and Pall Mall Magazine publishing ‘Lost Hearts’ in the same year. James, by turns scholar, Fellow, Dean, Tutor and Provost at King’s College, Cambridge, read these two stories aloud for the first time on 28th October 1893 at one of the weekly gatherings of King’s select Chit-Chat Club. Present at this first reading was one E.F. Benson, who would go on to carve out a reputation as one of the leading purveyors of supernatural short fiction of his time, and upon whose work two of the stories to feature in Dead of Night were based. At one stage in the planning of the film some thought went into making James the sole source of the stories that were to be dramatised, and although this didn’t happen the combination of old and new source material that would eventually be used bore many of the qualities of his work.
These nineteenth century roots can be spotted on several occasions in Dead of Night; they are there in the previous renovation work to Pilgrim’s Farm that Craig has been called in to work on, the period horse-drawn hearse present in Grainger’s story, the reference to the 1865 Constance Kent murder case in Sally O’Hara’s story and the ‘curious history’ of the mirror in Joan Cortland’s story which the antique dealer Mr. Rutherford (Esme Percy) dates back to 1836. The room that Joan’s husband Peter sees in the mirror is both recollective and predictive. At the level of the story it recalls the dark and opulent Gothic interior from which the murderous force that seeks to claim Peter emanates. More than that, it is reminiscent of the sets found in the numerous costume melodramas released in the 1940s by Gainsborough Pictures, Ealing’s British production studio competitor. Andrew Spicer, in his book Typical Men, considered this keyhole view of Gainsborough’s popular brooding eroticism to be symbolic of ‘Ealing’s fear and fascination with its own ‘other” (Spicer 2001: 175). It also offers a glimpse of the Gothic-infused and heavily sexually charged horror that would come to define the output of Hammer Film Productions a dozen years after the release of Dead of Night. When Joan invites Peter to tell her exactly what he sees in the mirror his description could almost have come from the set design notes of Hammer’s leading production designer Bernard Robinson:
It’s just as it always is. Instead of my bed there’s the other bed. I can see it quite clearly. The posts have vine leaves twisted round, with bunches of grapes at the top. The hangings are dark red silk. The walls are panelled. There’s a log fire burning in the grate.
Perhaps the earliest example of the anthology format in cinema would be D.W. Griffith’s 1916 silent masterpiece Intolerance, although an alternative school of thought would consider this a ‘composite film’ rather than an anthology insofar as the linking theme of the film’s title simply defines the individual stories and does not represent a frame narrative in and of itself. However it demonstrated an appetite among audiences for the segmentation of feature length films, and proved influential among European film-makers. The earliest horror anthology film is generally recognised to be Unheimliche Geschichten (trans. ‘Uncanny Tales’) directed by Richard Oswald in 1919, which consisted of five stories, including adaptations of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ and Stevenson’s ‘The Suicide Club’, embedded in a framing narrative set in a book shop. German Expressionist cinema is rightly regarded as the cradle of the horror film genre; The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Robert Wiene 1920), The Golem (Carl Boese, Paul Wegener 1920) and Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau 1922) are the landmark productions from the early twenties, but there were other notable German-made anthologies released in this period. Fritz Lang’s Der müde Tod (trans. ‘Weary Death’, English language title: Destiny 1921) and Leo Birinsky and Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (English language title: Waxworks 1924) both weave their linking narratives around three tales.
The European film-makers and actors who graced the classic Hollywood period of the 1930s and 1940s contributed to several early English language ‘omnibus’ talkies; in 1932 alone Greta Garbo was the star of Edward Goulding’s episodic Grand Hotel, Josef von Sternberg directed and Marlene Dietrich starred in the picaresque Shanghai Express and Ernst Lubitsch was among the directors to contribute one of the eight tales that constituted If I Had a Million. A decade later Julien Duvuvier directed two anthology films in close succession: Tales of Manhattan in 1942 and Flesh and Fantasy the following year. The latter, a trio of supernatural tales – including one based on Oscar Wilde’s short story ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ – with a link story set in a gentlemen’s club, is the more significant forerunner to Dead of Night, both structurally and tonally.
Despite overt discouragement from government and censor during the years of the Second World War regarding the making and showing of horror films in Britain, a thin strand of supernatural dramas crept through the 1940s and Ealing Studios contributed to this before it came to make Dead of Night. The popular 1941 screen version of Arnold Ridley’s play The Ghost Train, directed by Walter Forde for Gainsborough Pictures and starring Arthur Askey and Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch was not the first attempt to bring the story to the screen; during his pre-Ealing association with Gainsborough Michael Balcon co-produced two film versions of the play. The first of these, a 1927 silent film directed by Géza von Bolváry, was made in conjunction with UFA, the German studio synonymous with Expressionist cinema and production base for directors such as Lang and Murnau. Both this and the second version, a 1931 talkie also directed by Forde and featuring Angus MacPhail among its small team of writers, ramped up the scares in Ridley’s play compared with the relatively comic interpretation of the later Askey version which most people remember.
The Boulting brothers’ 1942 film Thunder Rock, while not an Ealing production, featured several actors who would go on to appear in Dead of Night, specifically Miles Malleson, Frederick Valk and Michael Redgrave who, in his portrayal of David Charleston, a cynical journalist in self-imposed exile at a Lake Michigan lighthouse, displays the levels of sanity-questioning intensity that would come to be associated with his interpretation of the ventriloquist Maxwell Frere. Thunder Rock, also based on a stage play, was constructed in large part of flashback episodes detailing the lives of the various ghosts that haunt the lighthouse, the cumulative effect of which serves to convince Charleston of the folly of his isolationist thinking.
The most directly significant predecessor to Dead of Night displayed Ealing’s understanding of the part that subtle supernatural fantasy could play in pursuit of, if you will, the raising of home front spirits during the war years. The Halfway House, released in 1944, was a production that drew together many of the talents at Ealing that would subsequently contribute to the making of Dead of Night; the two films share Mervyn Johns and Sally Ann Howes in front of the camera and seventeen crew behind it, including director Basil Dearden, writers Angus MacPhail and T.E.B. Clarke, art director Michael Relph and editor Charles Hasse. The main setting for the film is also reminiscent of Pilgrim’s Farm, and while the house of the title is located in the Welsh rather than the Kentish countryside, the two interiors share an ineluctable claustrophobia. Both films are deeply defined by their respective temporal anomalies and disruptions; in The Halfway House the characters who gather at the small hotel of the title come to realise that they have been transported back in time by exactly one year to the point when the place was destroyed by German bombing. The apparent time slip presents them with an opportunity to reflect upon their previous choices and current circumstances, enabling them to face their futures with renewed resolve and courage.
Michael Balcon’s expressed wish during the early years of the war was for Ealing to produce as he put it ‘films of a character which will be of national use at this time’, and by inducting several leading practitioners from the sphere of documentary film-making, including GPO Film Unit acting head Alberto Cavalcanti, into the studio’s elite coterie of creatives, he injected a fine-tuned realism that lent veracity to the studio’s fictional features. This round table of talents, dubbed ‘Mr. Balcon’s Academy for Young Gentlemen’ by the studio’s ebullient publicity director Monja Danischewsky, would bring Balcon’s ethos to the screen and frequently collaborate on projects. It is from this cradle of cooperative artistry that Dead of Night emerged. Balcon pithily articulated his doctrine in his short paper ‘Realism or Tinsel’ delivered to the Workers Film Association of Brighton in early 1943. This important document set out his opposition to film as purely escapist entertainment, but more than that, it helped to define the distinction that he saw between cinematic realism and naturalism. Documentarist rigour applied to the telling of fictional stories was what he sought. So a type of poetic realism came to emerge as a characteristic of Ealing’s output, a product of the desire to move beyond the more urgently propaganda-driven films of the early 1940s.
There had been a tacit accord between the Ministry of Information, the censor and film-makers in Britain to steer clear of producing horror films during the war years.2 For all its supernatural themes, The Halfway House, being released in 1944, still came wrapped in a propaganda dust jacket, but by the time of Dead of Night no such ‘National Interest’ obligations needed to be observed, indeed as Balcon himself noted in his autobiography the prospect of the aftermath provoked a natural departure from the previous output requirements:
In the immediate post-war years there was as yet no mood for cynicism; the bloodless revolution of 1945 had taken place, but I think our first desire was to get rid of as many wartime restrictions as possible and get going. The country was tired of regulations and regimentation, and there was a mild anarchy in the air. (Balcon 1969: 159)
The comedies that Ealing would become renowned for, beginning with Hue and Cry in 1947, were without doubt a product of this ‘mild anarchy’, but the post-war, pre-comedies releases, with Dead of Night at the forefront, were the revolutionary vanguard. Not that the studio’s films in this period were runaway commercial successes; cinema trade paper Kine Weekly’s not-altogether scientific annual round-up of box office highs and lows hardly featured any Ealing films during this period, with the notable exception of Dead of Night. Despite the film’s comparative popularity, but perhaps also because of the success of the later comedies, the studio was reluctant to commit to further anthology films with any great haste. In fact it took four years and the release of the four-part fateful disaster drama Train of Events (Sidney Cole/Charles Crichton/Basil Dearden 1949) for the next Ealing portmanteau to appear. After Dead of Night Balcon’s team tended to steer clear of supernatural subject matter by and large, with the exception of The Night My Number Came Up (Leslie Norman 1955), a tale of a premonitory dream of a plane crash starring Michael Redgrave. Beyond Ealing, though, there were several other British anthology films made in the post-war years, most prominently the multi-director multi-story trilogy of W. Somerset Maugham adaptations Quartet (1948), Trio (1950) and Encore (1951).
During the decade after Dead of Night British cinema may have been dark at times – there were numerous British noir films made in that period, several of which were produced by Ealing – but it rarely delivered full-blown scares. It would take Hammer Films’ move into the horror genre for this to recommence, starting with The Quatermass Xperiment, Val Guest’s 1955 big screen adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s television series, and proceeding through and beyond that studio’s production line of renowned adaptations of Dracula, Frankenstein and other increasing gruesome and lurid source material. One non-Hammer, less-widely-seen British film of note in relation to Dead of Night, also from 1955, is Three Cases of Murder, due largely to the first and last of its three stories. The first, ‘In the Picture’ directed by one-time Jean Cocteau collaborator Wendy Toye, concerned a museum assistant (Hugh Pryse) consumed by a painting in the collection featuring a house set in a bleak landscape. A strange visitor to the museum (Alan Badel) leads him through the front door of the house to meet his fate. The third, ‘Lord Mountdrago’ directed by George More O’Ferrall with uncredited help from the segment’s star Orson Welles, was based on a Somerset Maugham short story about a politician consulting a psychoanalyst fearing that one of his adversaries is attacking him through a series of dreams.
Twenty years after Dead of Night the horror portmanteau format was revived in Britain by Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg’s Amicus Productions. A string of anthologies were released, beginning with Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors in 1965 and continuing until From Beyond the Grave in 1974, with Subotsky producing one final effort in 1981 in the form of The Monster Club for Chips Productions, the company credited, among others, for produced the Hammer House of Horror television series around that same time. The Amicus films were enjoyable, low budget, highly derivative fare which arguably owed their existence to Dead of Night. Indeed one or two of the stories found in the Amicus output bore a close resemblance to the Ealing film, the most obvious being ‘The Gatecrasher’ episode in From Beyond the Grave in which David Warner buys an antique mirror that is home to a malevolent spirit.
Aside from the Amicus titles the 1960s also saw an international revival of the horror anthology film. Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (original title: / tre volti della paura trans. ‘The Three Faces of Fear’) released in 1963 was arguably the most significant, in part as base camp for the emerging Giallo genre of Italian erotic horror/crime films, and three decades later as a major story structure influence on Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 multi-story Pulp Fiction. Also significant was Kwaidan (trans. ‘Ghost Stories’ Masaki Kobayashi 1964) a poetic compendium of four ghostly tales that is rightly regarded as a major influence on the later development of Asian horror cinema.
The perpetual motion of Dead of Night can also be spotted repeatedly in American television output during the 1950s and 1960s; several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone bear remarkable similarities to aspects of the Ealing film. The widespread love of these series led in turn to the production of a brace of Hollywood-made horror anthology homages in the 1980s. Twilight Zone: the Movie, co-produced and co-directed by Steven Spielberg in 1983, although flawed is still the most notable example of these. Spielberg, ever striving to bridge the gap between his childhood TV and movie memories and his own output, has one way or another played his part in sustaining the Dead of Night lineage; he contributed a story to the feature length portmanteau pilot episode of Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in 1969. He would later work with Dead of Night’s cinematographer Douglas Slocombe on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the first three Indiana Jones films and also came close to directing the 1978 screen version of Magic, eventually helmed by Richard Attenborough, about a ventriloquist (Anthony Hopkins) controlled by his dummy. Despite missing out on Magic, Spielberg managed to squeeze a ventriloquist’s dummy with a subversive personality into his messy 1979 comedy 1941.
In the world of British television humour, certain comedy magpies have plundered elements of Dead of Night in recent years, invariably with a warm regard. The 2001 Steve Coogan vehicle Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible, aside from its obvious affectionately tongue-in-cheek take on the Amicus anthologies, included an episode, ‘And Now the Fearing…’, about the trapped occupants of an elevator who swap chilling dream tales before arriving at the thirteenth floor to meet their dreaded fate at the whim of the lift attendant, who signs off with ‘Room for more inside, mind the doors please!’ The quartet of writers and performers that formed the League of Gentlemen have given a nod to Dead of Night on several occasions; their 2000 Christmas Special, with its link story wrapped around three darkly funny tales, owed a great deal to the film. The Mark Gatiss-penned 2008 three-part series Crooked House bore the distinct flavour of the Ealing nightmare. Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s 2014 series Inside No. 9 featured an episode called ‘Sardines’, the name of the game played by Sally O’Hara and the other children in Dead of Night’s ‘Christmas Party’, which tells of a growing collection of party guests gradually squeezing into the confined space of a wardrobe. Shearsmith is also one of the enthusiastic talking heads to feature in the Studio Canal DVD and Blu-ray ‘Remembering Dead of Night’ featurette. The non-performing League of Gentlemen member Jeremy Dyson devoted several pages of analysis of the film to his 1997 book Bright Darkness: the Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film, and Ghost Stories, his phenomenally successful stage play co-written with Andy Nyman which premiered in 2010, demonstrated that the long dark shadows cast by Dead of Night continue to touch and inspire his creative output.
Past, present, future. Both of its time and ahead of its time. Dead of Night is much loved, frequently imitated, never bettered. These are its stories.
