‘Quarter to ten. Long past your bedtime.’
‘To realise that all your life – you know, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain – it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams there’s a monster at the end of it.’ (Detective Rust Cohle [Matthew McConaughey], True Detective: The Locked Room [# 1.3] HBO 2014)
Whereas ‘Linking Narrative’ bore a passing resemblance to E.F. Benson’s The Room in the Tower’, ‘Hearse Driver’, the first and shortest of Dead of Night’s nested stories, is very closely based on another of Benson’s supernatural tales, specifically ‘The Bus-Conductor’, first published in Pall Mall Magazine in 1906. The path from Benson’s tale of premonition, embodied by a dream-like vision of a Victorian hearse, to Basil Dearden’s interpretation for the screen passes through a time at the turn of the century when the stubborn residue of Victorian death culture coincided and collided with the emerging scrutiny of the unconscious with its emphasis on the interpretation of dreams.
The generational pall of mourning that descended upon the nation during the decades of lamentation practiced by Queen Victoria after the passing of her Prince Consort provided a dark breeding ground for the widespread morbid fear of death, in particular the fear of premature burial. The historical evidence points to an obsession bordering on mania. Take, for example, the concept of the Safety Coffin; various similar patents were registered during the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century but the device attributed to Dr. Johann Gottfried Taberger proved popular with the Victorians. Taberger’s Safety Coffin featured a mechanism comprised of a piece of string that threaded up from the resting place of the deceased and through the regulation six feet of earth to ground level where it was attached to a bell, the idea being that if the person buried should happen to regain consciousness they would have access to an alarm system that could instigate their disinterment. In case you’re wondering, the origins of the term ‘saved by the bell’ rest here and not in the boxing ring. There are no records to suggest that mechanisms such as Taberger’s invention ever resulted in the unearthing of anyone inadvertently buried alive.
This dread of death combined with the development of psychoanalytic theory at the tail-end of the Victorian era places the macabre and illusory ‘Bus-Conductor’ at something of a cultural intersection. While Freud’s landmark 1900 work ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ set down the blueprint for the analysis of our nocturnal narratives, his 1914 article ‘Erinnern, Weiderholen und Durcharbeiten’ (trans. ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’) in which he introduced and first defined the psychological phenomenon of ‘repetition compulsion’ is especially pertinent to ‘Hearse Driver’ and by extension to the whole of Dead of Night. Freud would go on to develop this notion further in his 1920 essay ‘Jenseits des Lustprinzips’ (trans. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’), in which, when describing the aspects of repetitive behaviour, he noted ‘dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident’ (Freud 1920: 13).
Dashing racer and crash survivor Hugh Grainger’s spooky experience is particularly solitary when compared to the later stories in the film. It is centred around an illusory post-traumatic visitation that serves almost as a lap marker along his own life’s track, providing fair warning that, having cheated death once by surviving a race accident, an unpleasant fate awaits him at this point on his next circuit of the track. Followers of modern screen horror might wish to reflect upon just how much these same ideas have influenced the various crash survival scenarios and eventual failures to cheat death that run through every single Final Destination film.
To return to the source of ‘Hearse Driver’, a likely precursor to Benson’s tale concerns Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. A deeply apocryphal story, it tells of an alleged incident dating back to 1879 when Lord Dufferin was on holiday at a friend’s manor house in the County Offaly town of Tullamore. Waking at the dead of night he was compelled to look out of his bedroom window whereupon he saw below a man walking across the grounds carrying a coffin on his back. The experience was explained away as nothing more than a bad dream, but years later, during his time as British Ambassador to France, Dufferin found himself in a queue for the elevator in the Grand Hotel in Paris. Just before entering he recognised the elevator attendant as the same man he had seen carrying the coffin in Tullamore, and as a result stepped back and let the elevator car leave without him. It duly plummeted to the bottom of the shaft killing all inside.
It has become clear that Dufferin himself told and retold the anecdote during his lifetime with evermore embroidered elaboration, and that over time, after his death in 1902, it has become a fairly widely circulated urban myth. Its most recognised first print manifestation came in 1921, in the form of a letter attributed to a French psychologist, Monsieur R. de Maratray, and published in Camille Flammarion’s book Death and its Mystery, although recent research suggests that it was first recorded as early as 1892 through an anonymous second hand account published in the pages of the weekly spiritualist paper Light: A Journal Devoted to the Higher Interests of Humanity: Here and Hereafter. Benson was not alone in taking the Dufferin tale and weaving it into his fiction. Eleven years before the publication of ‘The Bus-Conductor’ Robert W. Chambers referenced it in one of the short stories that comprised his totemic 1895 collection of weird tales The King in Yellow, known anew to devotees of the HBO series True Detective, the first season of which wove its narrative around aspects of Chambers’ novel. One of the stories, ‘The Yellow Sign’, concerning an artist and his model who are menaced by a peculiar gravedigger, clearly draws on Dufferin. It is worth reproducing a passage from that story in order to illustrate the lineage that led up to what finally became ‘Hearse Driver’ in Dead of Night:
“One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight because I don’t remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out. Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be afraid; everything outside seemed so—so black and uncomfortable. Then the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and looked straight at me. When awoke I was standing by the open window shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was soaked.”
“But where did I come into the dream?” I asked.
“You—you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.”
“In the coffin?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know? Could you see me?”
“No; I only knew you were there.” (Chambers 1895: 66)
At little more than six minutes in length, ‘Hearse Driver’ is the shortest segment of Dead of Night, but for all its brevity it serves a crucial purpose. The first nine minutes of the film are occupied with introducing us to Walter Craig, the guests at Pilgrim’s Farm and the curious feeling that the house and those assembled in it seem to be provoking in Craig. While his experience is conveyed as rather peculiar the sense is that he has entered a safe environment and is ‘amongst friends’, Dr. Van Straaten’s dismissive rational scepticism notwithstanding. We are being eased into the film, through the introduction of its cast of characters who, save for Craig, are relaxed and welcoming. It is broad daylight, tea is poured, cigarettes are lit, the company is convivial, on the evidence presented to us we are still in the relatively secure world of the real despite Craig’s lurking unease. ‘Hearse Driver’ puts a stop to that comfortable reality and sets the tone for the frightening moments that will come in the following stories. Put simply, it provides viewers with their first real ‘goose bump moment’.
The teller of the tale, Hugh Grainger, seems very happy to kick off the attempts to refute the rationalist assertions of Van Straaten and corroborate Craig’s feelings of déjà vu with a recollection designed to challenge the psychiatrist’s certainty. Addressing Van Straaten he cheerfully counters ‘When it comes to seeing the future, something once happened to me that knocks your theories into a cocked hat. Something I’ll not forget to my dying day. As a matter of fact it very nearly was my dying day.’ In some respects Grainger’s story is a souped up and compressed version of Craig’s. Both stories begin with the protagonist at the wheel of a vehicle, in Grainger’s case driving his racing car at the moment of impact that results in his hospitalisation. Like Craig, Grainger finds himself dazed and confused in a room within which he experiences unexplainable phenomena that echoes the past and predicts the future. The difference between the two is that Grainger’s fate is not inexorable; thanks to the curious premonition he is able to act decisively and intervene in the apparently predestined events that would otherwise result in his death. It seems reasonable to consider that, aside from attempting to back up Craig’s belief that something very odd is happening to him, Grainger is also seeking through the telling of his tale to reassure Craig that the terrible events he predicts for his own future are not inevitable.
Despite beginning with fast-paced footage of the motor racing crash that lands Grainger in hospital, and the rapid telling of his story, ‘Hearse Driver’ contains the film’s first moment of true stillness. There will be more in the subsequent stories, and these are all important elements in the film’s scary effectiveness, but the kernel of Grainger’s story begins when he settles down in his bed with a good book after Nurse Joyce wishes him goodnight. The soundtrack to a slow, subtle tracking shot that approaches the recumbent Grainger consists of his leafing through the pages of the book, a song playing on the radio in a room beyond and the quiet ticking of his bedside clock. The ticking alone indicates that time is passing as it should – Joyce informs Grainger that the time is a quarter to ten, ‘long past your bedtime’, before leaving the room – but when the music stops abruptly mid-song Grainger glances at his clock. The ticking has ceased and the stopped clock now reads a quarter past four.
Placing Grainger in bed at night also deposits the audience in the one place they will already associate with their own nightmares. In a film that is all about a recurring bad dream it comes as no surprise to find the vehicle of our nightmares, the bed, featuring repeatedly throughout. From the outset we learn from Foley’s greeting that Craig has been hired to extend Pilgrim’s Farm by ‘at least two more bedrooms’. After Grainger’s story centred around his hospital bed we see a succession of beds in the following stories; Sally puts the ghostly Francis Kent to bed and sings him a lullaby in her story; the mirror in Joan’s story is fixed to the walls of the bedrooms in both old and new apartments with the ornate four-poster a constant presence in ‘the other room’; the golfing story culminates in a scene involving the wedding night bed; and the ventriloquist’s dummy story includes several different beds, those in Frere’s and Kee’s hotel rooms, the prison cell bed where Frere has his final conversation with Hugo the dummy and the sanatorium bed where Frere lies possessed of Hugo’s voice and personality. Not forgetting the bed at home in London where we see Craig wake’ from his dream at the film’s end.
The bed, our stationary carriage of birth, sex, dreams, sickness and death in which we sleep off a third of our lives, has long been a primary staple environment for scares throughout supernatural literature and cinema. Horror writers and film-makers have succeeded if their work inspires a fear of the place of sleep among their audience. Cinematic illustrations of bed-bound dreams and nightmares started out in a quite comical vein. Georges Méliès’ brief but playful 1896 film The Nightmare showed a sleeper beneath his bedroom window haunted by a woman, a pierrot and a minstrel before an amusingly surreal interaction with a full moon. In more recent decades beds have featured in some of the more horrific and frightening scenes in horror cinema. Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) drifts off into a drugged oblivion and is transported on her bed through a series of dreams before being impregnated by Satan in Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski 1968). The possessed Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) spends a good deal of time lying in, tethered to or hovering above her bed in The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973). Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp) is eviscerated and reduced to a liquid torrent of gore spouting up from the centre of his bed in A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven 1984). As part of her analysis of the Wes Craven Elm Street films in the special issue of The Luminary entitled ‘Sleep(less) Beds: Awakening, Journey, Movement, Stasis’, Katharina Rein suggests that in those films especially ‘the bed is turned into a symbol of horror and is established as a possible portal into the world of deadly nightmares…beds constitute [a] central motif [and] function as an entry point to a different reality’. (Rein 2013: 15)
The strange temporal stasis that Grainger experiences is cleverly accentuated by the film’s soundtrack; indeed the near-silence that accompanies the stopping of the clock suggests that he/we have entered a vacuum of sorts. Most of us will recall the classroom science experiment that proves the inability of sound to travel in a vacuum, usually taking the form of a ringing bell contained within a glass vessel gradually silenced as the air is pumped out. When the sounds of the ticking clock and the song playing on the radio are sucked out of Grainger’s room we become more acutely aware that we have entered a suspended state. The removal of lively music and the introduction of deathly quiet is used twice more elsewhere in the film; the hostess’s piano playing in the large open plan ground floor space in ‘Christmas Party’ shrinks to near-silence when Sally ascends the stairs to the upper reaches of the country house, and in Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ Elizabeth Welch’s rendition of the song The Hullalooba’ on the stage of Chez Beulah dissipates once Sylvester Kee goes backstage and enters Maxwell Frere’s dressing room.8
This void is subtly signalled when Joyce removes a vase of cut flowers as she bids Grainger goodnight and leaves the room. Her action recalls a belief, still fairly entrenched at the time of the film’s making, that flowers in a hospital room are bad for the patient because they suck oxygen out of the air. There’s little science to back this up, although it is true that while plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen during the day, the process changes at night. During the hours of darkness they absorb more oxygen than they produce, and they emit carbon dioxide. In truth however this is very unlikely to have any negative impact on a recovering patient but it was, perhaps still is in some quarters, an old wives’ tale that persisted. Perhaps by removing the flowers Joyce, the woman who Grainger will eventually marry, is unconsciously helping him to survive the coming shortage of air in the room. The withdrawal of the vase could also suggest that Joyce is sparing her husband-to-be the portent of a graveside floral tribute.
Another of Joyce’s actions before leaving the room, the drawing of the curtains, is more in tune with those Victorian beliefs concerning the marking of the moment of death, and as such could also be seen as a warning signifier of Grainger’s possible fate. Furthermore, when she tells Grainger that it is long past his bedtime she picks up the bedside clock in order to tell him that it is a quarter to ten, and in so doing is the last to touch the clock before it moves to a quarter past four and stops at the beginning of Grainger’s bizarre premonition. Another Victorian tradition was to ensure that when a person passed away the clocks in the room in which they died were stopped. Perhaps Joyce’s intervention with Grainger’s bedside clock is a further unconscious attempt to forewarn of or hold back the spectre of death. Although this collection of signifiers may be incidental and unintended on the part of the film-makers Joyce is conspicuously industrious in her actions before leaving Grainger in the room alone, suggesting a pattern of pre-warnings, and given that we will learn later of the subsequent marriage to her patient, it is tempting to regard Joyce the nurse as fulfilling a white-clad protective guardian angel role in opposition to the black-clad hearse driving harbinger of doom that Grainger will go on to witness below his window.
Grainger’s vacuum of stillness remains practically silent from the point when the radio music cuts out and the clock stops ticking up to the pale twittering of birdsong that serenades the incongruous daylight outside of the window and the discordant sting of music courtesy of Georges Auric’s score that announces the presence of the hearse. Just about the only audible sound between these points can be detected when Grainger, still in bed, glances across to the drawn curtains at his window. During a six-second shot of the gently fluttering curtains the sound of a passing car can be heard.
In his deeply penetrative and insightful article about Dead of Night in a 2010 issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, which you will find referred to several times in this book, Leon Balter suggests that the car sound is not simply traffic passing below his window. Indeed when Grainger opens the curtains (and presupposing that the entirety of his view from the window – grounds, buildings and all – is not a vision) we will see that his room looks out onto the quiet internal courtyard of the nursing home rather than the road outside the front of the building. Balter infers that the sound of the passing motor vehicle relates back to the crash that put Grainger in hospital, and links into the guilt that he is suffering, expressed as delirious ramblings in the story’s initial post-crash hospital scene, provoked by the concern that he may have been responsible for the death of another driver involved in the crash (Balter 2010). On this basis Grainger is haunted by the worry that he has cheated death possibly at the expense of another. All of which taps in neatly to Freud’s ideas of trauma and guilt associated with that notion of ‘repetition compulsion’. Dr. Albury (Robert Wyndham), Grainger’s treating physician at the clinic, explains the vision to his recovering patient in relative layman’s terms – ‘that apparition of death was what we call the psychological crisis’ – to reassure Grainger that he isn’t ‘going crackers’. Albury’s attempt to reassure Grainger with a dash of common sense does indeed help the convalescence process, but when Grainger subsequently leaves Albury’s care and approaches the double-decker bus that pulls up to the stop outside the nursing home, collecting passengers at his quarter past four ‘time of death’, he comes face to face with the bus conductor who is the spitting image of the hearse driver from his vision and capitulates to his sixth sense feeling that it would not be wise to board the bus.
‘That hearse driver was sent to me as a warning.’
Which brings us to the phrase that dominates Grainger’s story; after struggling to process the unexpected switch from the darkness of 9.45pm to the sunlit brightness of 4.15pm that greets his gaze out of the window during his hospital room premonition, Grainger glances down to behold a Victorian black horse-drawn hearse, the driver of which cranes his neck to make eye contact and exclaims ‘Just room for one inside, sir’, with a jerk of his head to indicate that he is talking about the empty carriage behind him. We will hear this exact same line again spoken by the look-alike bus conductor at the end of Grainger’s story, and once again with a small but important variation at the bitter end of Walter Craig’s nightmare. Regarding this phrase, Leon Balter makes another interesting observation in his Psychoanalytic Quarterly article by suggesting that in one form or another it echoes through every subsequent story in the film. In ‘Christmas Party’ there is arguably only room for one person in the alcove hiding place that Sally finds during the game of Sardines. In ‘Haunted Mirror’ Peter only sees himself reflected in the room in the mirror, there is seemingly no room for his wife Joan even when they both stand in front of it. In ‘Golfing Story’ there is only room for one man in the relationship that George Parratt has formed with his new bride Mary (Peggy Bryan), in fact by striving to exclude his golfing partner Larry Potter from the liaison the phrase could be construed to take on a more overtly sexual aspect. The same can be said of ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’; there is only room for one ventriloquist’s hand pulling the strings inside Hugo but in the bizarre love triangle between Frere, Kee and the dummy the proprietary rights of access to Hugo’s innards may extend beyond hands.
The phrase rebounds around Grainger’s story; it is more than just the verbal augury heard during his vision that will find a matching echo in the words of the bus conductor when Grainger leaves hospital, thereby enabling him to take a step back from the bus and cheat death a second time. There is also just room for him inside first racing car, then hospital bed before he is witness to the vision of his potential fate, alone inside a coffin. His capsule story is his carriage within which, through the advent of a fateful vision that he cannot pass off as a purely neurological aberration, he is able to intervene and draw back from his apparently predestined demise.
Along with serving as a compression of Craig’s narrative and a first container of the film’s recurrent tropes, ‘Hearse Driver’ is a distilled reverberation of the fear of conscious disbelief, a fear that is not only at the heart of every element of the film but also in the hearts and minds of its intended audience. Grainger appears to experience a waking dream, he is not shown closing his eyes and lapsing into sleep before he ‘sees’ the hearse. Instead he is sitting up in bed reading when his experience begins. So he is convinced that his experience is real, however frighteningly unbelievable. ‘It couldn’t have been a dream, I hadn’t had time to fall asleep’, he explains to Dr. Albury subsequently. Only upon returning to his bed after seeing the hearse does he put his hands up to his head in an effort to ‘wake up’ and make sense of what he has just witnessed. At the very end of his story, as he watches the double-decker bus crash off the side of the bridge, Grainger closes his eyes in an effort to deny the appalling reality, and as he lowers his head the brim of his hat acts almost as an eyelid, lowering over our view of his face in a masterful dissolve back to the scene at Pilgrim’s Farm.
We find instances of the closing, covering, rubbing and repeated blinking of eyes, usually as an attempt to determine reality from dream, deposited throughout the film. Craig’s first sight of Pilgrim’s Farm elicits a quizzical blink, and is followed moments later by an exaggerated opening and closing of his eyelids in a very evident effort to clear his head once inside the house – ‘So it isn’t a dream this time.’ Sally is ‘it’ in a game of Blind Man’s Buff at the opening of her story and has her eyes covered by a blindfold. She will blink hard and bury her face into the comforting embrace of Jimmy Watson’s mother when she realises that she has just encountered a ghost. Jimmy’s eyes are covered at the beginning of the game of Sardines, as are the eyes of all of the partygoers when Craig attempts to hide during his final nightmare. In the early stages of his interaction with the mirror Peter keeps closing and reopening his eyes in the hope that the other room will have disappeared and been replaced by the familiarity of his own bedroom. Larry Potter’s ghost hides his eyes from George Parratt’s wedding night smooch with new wife Mary. The movements of Hugo the dummy’s eyelids suggest malevolent life blinking into being, especially at the point of his appearance in Craig’s final nightmare. His glasses broken, Van Straaten sends Grainger off to find his spare pair – ‘I’m lost without them’ – as he accepts Craig’s dream towards the end of the film, sitting down to listen to and psychoanalyse the dreamer while rubbing his tired eyes in the process.
Dead of Night is a film about false waking, or perhaps more accurately the struggle to ‘come round’. Taken as an indicator of the national state of mind, British cinema audiences in 1945 were just rubbing their eyes and beginning to recover a collective consciousness in the weeks and months after the cessation of war, seeking as they were to wake up from and move beyond the living nightmare of the last six years. Grainger’s head injury and subsequent strange episode in ‘Hearse Driver’ taps into this shared desire for revival beyond survival.
There are several similarities between Grainger’s experiences and those of Squadron Leader Peter Carter (David Niven) in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), released a little over a year after Dead of Night. Both Grainger and Carter appear to suffer variations on survivor guilt. Carter himself is at a loss to explain his apparent escape from the clutches of certain death after jumping from his stricken plane without a parachute. Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey) takes a neurological line not unlike Dr. Albury in ‘Hearse Driver’ and puts Carter’s seizures down to an earlier concussion affecting the temporal lobe. When a seizure takes hold time appears to stand still around Carter; he observes Dr. Reeves and June (Kim Hunter) frozen midway through a game of table tennis and later, as June looks on anxiously outside the operating theatre where Carter is about to undergo surgery, his out-of-body experience leads him away from the static surgical team and past June who is now rooted to the spot. Just before he leaps up from the operating table, as the anaesthetic takes effect prior to his brain surgery, we are privy to Carter’s point of view and look on as a giant eyelid, not unlike the brim of Grainger’s hat in ‘Hearse Driver’, eclipses his/our view of the operating theatre ceiling. Carter survives the surgery, and upon coming round from the anaesthetic in the film’s final scene, with his head bandaged much as Grainger’s is when he is first admitted to hospital after his motor racing crash, a nurse can be seen opening the hospital room curtains to let in daylight.
It’s interesting to compare this shot of the nurse opening the curtains to the very similar shot of Joyce the nurse closing the curtains in Grainger’s hospital room. A Matter of Life and Death, after its journey through the frequently dark and uncertain terrain between life and death, looks out ultimately on to the broad, sunlit uplands promised in Churchill’s speech in 1940 anticipating the Battle of Britain. Dead of Night by comparison was still feeling its way in the dark and doing battle with fear and guilt, with defeat of these two enemies and the locating of a path to a brighter future absolutely not guaranteed. John Orr, in his 2010 book Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema, succinctly compares the two films, declaring them to be:
like day and night: one is in breathtaking Technicolor and deals in metaphysical healing, while the other is in black and white and deals in perpetual nightmare…When your country has been battered by a monstrous war, you want to savour victory and then move on. That is what A Matter of Life and Death explicitly allows, and what Dead of Night implicitly denies. (Orr 2010: 89)
Once Grainger has lowered the ‘eyelid’ brim of his hat and we dissolve back to the drawing room at Pilgrim’s Farm it’s clear that the racing driver is unwilling to believe that his vision was anything less than a warning. Sally wonders why the other passengers on the bus apparently failed to receive or heed similar warnings, which prompts Mrs. Foley, Eliot’s mother, to suggest that they were perhaps ‘doubting Thomases’ like Dr. Van Straaten. We might expand upon Sally’s thought and question why, possessed of the knowledge that the bus will crash, Grainger didn’t do the decent thing and alert the passengers that if they were to stay on board they would surely die. Perhaps by saving himself alone we are afforded a final illustration that within the confines of his warning, there really is only room for one inside.
‘Just room for one inside, sir.’
