Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet around a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders and blood. (Jerome K. Jerome: Told After Supper. London, The Leadenhall Press, 1891)
Scripted by Ealing stalwart Angus MacPhail and directed by Cavalcanti, ‘Christmas Party’ is the only Dead of Night story to be based on actual recorded events, specifically the Constance Kent case of 1865 which saw the teenage Constance convicted, wrongly in many minds, of the murder of her half-brother Francis five years earlier at the Kent family home in the Somerset village of Road.9 ‘The case caused much press excitement and public gossip in its day and was reawakened by the Kate Summerscale book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House published by Bloomsbury in 2009, later dramatised for television. Despite not naming the country house setting of her tale Sally O’Hara, played by the then-fifteen-year-old Sally Ann Howes, locates it accurately in her introduction – ‘We were spending Christmas down in Somerset’ – and the murder case is explicitly referred to during the story.10 While the case has no direct association with Christmas the blood-curdling nature of the crime lends itself nicely to the festive tradition of frequently gruesome fireside storytelling.
The association of Christmas in the shared English cultural memory with the telling, as well as the setting, of ghost stories is a relatively modern development. Much like our present day concept of Christmas, this spinning of ghostly yuletide yarns is largely an invention of the Victorian era, though the roots of wintertime ghost stories do go back much further. That Jerome K. Jerome was able to poke fun at it in the introduction to his short story collection Told After Supper is an indication as to how prevalent the phenomenon had become by its publication in 1891. M.R. James concocted his famously chilling tales to entertain friends and students over Christmas Eve fireside gatherings in his rooms at Kings College, Cambridge. Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, about a house disturbed by restless malevolent spirits haunting the young children who live there begins as a tale told at Christmas to assembled guests in a country residence.
As discussed earlier, the author most commonly associated with ghostly tales for the Christmas period, and for much of our shared cultural conception of the Victorian era, is Charles Dickens. His most famous ghost story, A Christmas Carol, contains a variety of hauntings and ghostly visions of past, present and future. The encounters in these tales bear some resemblance to Sally’s own experience which is less the vision of a ghostly apparition than a transportation to another time and place, much like Scrooge’s encounters in the book. Unlike Scrooge, however, Sally can interact with the ghost of the young Francis Kent. Whilst Dickens’ famous Christmas tale is ultimately comforting and has been increasingly sentimentalised through its various screen adaptations, it is worth noting that the idea of the death of a child is central to the effectiveness of the story. Also noteworthy is that Dickens followed the story of the murder of Francis Kent closely, indeed was one of the more vocal doubters of Constance Kent’s guilt at the time of her trial, and based the character of Sergeant Cuff in his final unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood on Jack Whicher, the chief investigating officer on the Kent case. Wilkie Collins also utilised parts of the case in his 1868 novel The Moonstone.
The nineteenth-century winters described by Dickens and his contemporaries have given us much of the common iconography of Christmas time, particularly of deep snow and long bitterly cold evenings. There is a striking meteorological connection between Dickens and a famous house party that took place in 1816 at the Villa Diodati, a mansion by the shores of Lake Geneva, alluded to by Roger Clarke in his book A Natural History of Ghosts (2012). The gathering at the villa took place in the ‘year without summer’ brought about by the eruption of Mount Tambora in the East Indies the previous year. Those assembled at the villa included Mary Shelley and Dr. John William Polidori who joined the other guests in retreating from the foul weather brought on by the atmospheric change and told each other ghost stories to pass the time. As a consequence Shelley and Polidori went on to write Frankenstein and The Vampyr respectively. The climatic trauma which caused their enforced seclusion and provided the spark for an explosion in Gothic fiction was also to trigger the decades-long series of cold winters which Dickens and other Victorian writers were to so memorably describe in their own fictions.
A haunted house and childhood games; burgeoning adolescence and ghostly activity; Christmas fires and tales of uncanny happenings. All these serve to make ‘Christmas Party’ the most notionally traditional of the tales presented in the film. Sally, the youngest of the guests at Pilgrim Farm, is an adolescent girl full of excitement at the arrival of Walter Craig with his fascinating claims of déjà vu. She is eager to join the adults in their drawing room conversations, but is still possessed of a childlike enthusiasm and attendant lack of tact. The story is from a time before the idea of the teenager as a modern entity existed with any significant cultural weight of its own. It was an uncomfortable time of transition when adult clothing was worn awkwardly and a youthful yearning to be taken seriously whilst being patronised by grown-ups awaited the phenomenon of youth culture that would explode a decade later. Gauche and inexperienced though she might appear in the farmhouse with the worldly adults, Sally is nonetheless coming into maturity and her experiences at the Christmas party are significant in that light. Dead of Night was remarkably anticipatory of several future film tropes, and one might venture to consider ‘Christmas Party’ as a contender for the first example of ‘teen horror’, the sub-genre that would emerge in the cinema of subsequent decades once the spending power and marketing potential of the new ‘teenager’ culture had been realised. A stretch perhaps, but we know that teen horror cinema is routinely defined by its themes of sexual maturation and rite of passage, so we can say that the subtext of Sally’s story is consistent with this.
Sally’s emerging sexual maturity is presented through her confident and untroubled rejection of the advances of the more sexually immature character of Jimmy Watson who, as the only adolescent male party guest of comparable age, displays a keen interest in Sally. We first see her at the party, playing ‘it’ in a game of blind man’s buff where she teasingly identifies Jimmy through his ‘silly nose’: a phallic analogue emphasised by the much more prominent and erect nose on the mask which he has pushed back from his face. While most of the other children at the party are wearing more typically childish fancy dress costumes, Jimmy wears the costume of Harlequin and Sally’s resembles that of Columbina, the love interest of Harlequin from the Italian tradition of Commedia dell’arte. The character of Columbina is traditionally the most sensible of the supporting cast of characters whilst capable of flirtation and impertinence, in keeping with Sally’s burgeoning maturity and sexual confidence. This is in contrast with Jimmy’s more playful but overbearing and attention-seeking behaviour. The costumes have a more adult and sexualised interpretation than the childish costumes worn by the other party guests.
Despite the role of Columbina as Harlequin’s mistress, Jimmy is doomed to remain unrequited in his advances to Sally, his childish enthusiasm for party games placing him on the wrong side of Sally’s incipient adulthood. Jimmy teases her with the graphic details of the murder of Francis Kent, informing her that it took place in the house some eighty years earlier. This attempt to impress Sally with his access to dark secrets does not have the desired effect, and his first awkward attempt at physical intimacy is effortlessly brushed aside. However, she willingly takes his hand when he promises to show her a better hiding place up the spiral staircase to the attic. She also flirts with him by engaging in the acting out of ghostly manifestation in the dusty attic, including a playful scream, but roundly rejects his clumsy attempt to kiss her. Jimmy’s pantomime of a haunting is all effect and cliché, whereas Sally speculates as to the guilt of a haunting spirit, her more mature empathetic outlook again contrasting with Jimmy’s limited emotional development.
‘Believe it or not, this house is haunted.’
After having his advances in the attic rejected by Sally, who pulls a dusty rag over his head causing him to sneeze, Jimmy assumes Sally has gone to join the rest of the children at the party and runs downstairs to rejoin the world of childish games. Poor Jimmy’s uncontrolled sneeze is an involuntary loss of physical control common to teenage boys upon first physical encounter with a girl in somewhat more intimate situations. Sally ignores the exit of her disappointing suitor and remains in the dark attic with its shadowy forms and faded memories, exploring, opening doors long closed and forgotten. The attic is a place of darker knowledge and hidden meaning with secrets to be unlocked. The door at the back of the attic room leads her to a decrepit and dingy corridor, apparently long abandoned. As a party guest and a stranger to the house, the attic reaches are literally as well as metaphorically unexplored territory for Sally, but she proceeds with no great sense of foreboding, instead she remains curious to explore and is not inordinately alarmed or surprised to find herself in a well-decorated nursery room at the end of the corridor or by the sound of a weeping child which leads her to it. The game of Sardines, and with it the realm of childish pastimes, is forgotten when she comes upon the little boy in obvious distress. It is an encounter which requires a more mature aspect of Sally to come to the fore.
Her interaction with Francis assumes a sisterly, even maternal tone from the outset; Francis observes that his own sister Constance, Sally’s dark alter ego, is the same age as Sally, ‘grown up’ as he puts it. Sally responds with a hint of regret, that the other girls at the party seem ‘much younger’ than her, as if noticing this for the first time and recognising her own growing distance from childhood. She asks Francis if he will accompany her to join the rest of the children downstairs where it is warmer; although Francis’ bedroom is clean and well decorated, there is no fire in the hearth; there might be the suggestion of embers, but they do not crackle or glow, suggesting a place frozen in time. Sally is focussed on comforting the child and she assumes an adult role, singing Francis a lullaby, adapting to this motherly aspect of herself with ease. In keeping with the other female roles in the film, her strength is called upon in aid of a damaged male psyche and given unquestioningly, though unlike Joan Cortland in ‘Haunted Mirror’ there is no sense in which she can actually save Francis. More chilling for the audience, in light of what is to be revealed to Sally, is the realisation that she is actually leaving him to his fate at the hands of his sister.
On taking her leave of the now calmed and comforted Francis tucked up in his bed, she does not register his ‘goodbye’ in response to her ‘goodnight’ and is greeted as soon as she opens the door by the cries of the children who are beckoning her back to the realm of childish concerns. Welcomed back to the group, she explains where she has been, and ignores Jimmy’s impotent demands for her attention. Sally might not yet be aware of what she has experienced, but she has no need of Jimmy and what he thinks he knows. Upon rejoining the party in the brightly lit spaces downstairs, Sally walks through the excited throng of children and discusses her experience with her hostess Mrs. Watson, their relatively serious and adult conversation at odds with the boisterousness of the crowd of children at the party.
As the closing scene of the sequence, Sally’s reaction to the knowledge that the child she had encountered was the ghost of the dead Francis Kent can be viewed as a slight mis-step. The delivery of the lines ‘I’m not frightened…I’m not frightened…’ before collapsing into Mrs. Watson’s arms begging to be comforted seems awkward and Sally Ann Howes’ delivery somewhat uncertain and stilted. However the context here is important. Sally has passed a threshold through which she cannot return: her encounter with Francis is a loss of innocence, a journey which she undertook willingly up and through the dark places at the top of the house. On hearing the deeply unsettling news of the nature of her encounter, she attempts a retreat into a place where an adult touch will comfort her in the way she comforted the dead Francis. Unfortunately for Sally this is not possible; she seeks the comfort due a child when presented with horrors real or imagined, but for her it is too late for this kind of consolation. She is an adult now, marked by darker experiences of life which cannot be unlearned, forced by these experiences to grow up quickly as so many children were during the war years.
Sally’s journey from cheery playfulness to dark seriousness via a traumatic, innocence-depriving threshold is entirely in keeping with Brazilian director Cavalcanti’s outsider view of the British during and after the Second World War. In his BBC blog discussion of the pantomime of British national character since the war, the journalist Adam Curtis makes extensive use of Dead of Night and the approach taken by its makers to illustrate his point. He contends that:
Cavalcanti thought that the British had a dangerously false vision of themselves – a twee artifice of forced jollity…for Cavalcanti and many of his generation who experienced the Second World War, post-war Britain was possessed by a false and shallow cheerfulness. (Curtis 2012)
‘Whistling winds…clanking chains…bloodcurdling screams…’
This view of the national psyche was especially in evidence in Cavalcanti’s 1942 film Went the Day Well?, a propaganda feature that managed to double as a darkly transgressive piece, and one that in its latter stages also featured a country house full of children who are forced ahead of time to come to terms with the harsh grown up realities of life during wartime. After ‘Golfing Story’, ‘Christmas Party’ has tended to be the Dead of Night story least admired by critics, but taken as an adjunct to Cavalcanti’s dissection of strangulated Britishness found in Went the Day Well? it is a potent vignette worthy of merit. By fashioning Sally and Jimmy as Columbina and Harlequin the director introduced the foreign origin and pushed it through the quintessentials of the traditional English Christmas ghost story, via a passage of adolescent awakening, in an attempt to prise open that part of the British character he considered to be ordinarily brushed under the carpet and suppressed.
The little pantomime of ghostly rattles and screams which Jimmy and Sally enact in invoking the concept of a stereotypical haunting is very different from Sally’s actual encounter with the ghost of Francis Kent. In his taxonomy of hauntings and ghostly manifestations, all of which have been richly mined in literature and cinema, Roger Clarke categorises the experience Sally has in the nursery room as a time-slip. The nature of time-slip haunting is that rather than an encounter with a restless or vengeful soul, the person who experiences the haunting finds him or herself stepping into an environment seemingly from an earlier era, where they see people from that time going about their business, either interacting with the visitor or seemingly oblivious to their presence. In reported claims of time-slip encounters some kind of liminal space is crossed into the environment, and in Sally’s case it is the corridor from the attic to Francis Kent’s bedroom. The idea of a time-slip ghost story had already been used by Ealing in The Halfway House, directed by Basil Dearden and an un-credited Cavalcanti, and scripted by ‘Christmas Party’ writer Angus McPhail. The house itself in The Halfway House may be a phantom but is preserved in time and the travellers interact freely with their hosts unaware of the subtle clues around them, being so wrapped up in their own lives and past mistakes. The Halfway House is not a horror story, but its influence on Dead of Night in shaping the type of encounter experienced by Sally is palpable.
The decrepit state of the corridor and the dusty neglected air of the attic room do not suggest that a perfectly preserved and decorated bedroom is likely to be found off the corridor, or that this part of the house is even accessed regularly. Jimmy has already told us that no one has witnessed any ghostly activity in the house in the six months they have been there, which raises the question of why it is Sally who encounters the dead child while other members of the household have not. In terms of the story, there is no real reason for this – nor need there be – but in horror fiction the connection between female sexuality and the supernatural is well explored, particularly in the setting of the ‘Old Dark House’.
The discussion in the earlier chapter looking at ‘Linking Narrative’ considered numerous aspects of architecture and how this relates to the inducement of fear in Dead of Night, but the Watson residence in ‘Christmas Party’ is the most extensively explored building in the film and therefore should come closest to conforming to the ‘Old Dark House’ convention, on paper at least. The ‘Old Dark House’ is a long-standing staple setting of horror literature and cinema, and a cornerstone of Gothic literature in general, surviving lapses into parody to provide rich material and an enduring and surprisingly malleable stage for horrific encounters and ghostly tales. From the early days of Gothic literature, a particular strand of horror romanticism has depended on the inhabitants, properties and atmosphere of the ‘Old Dark House’. John C. Tibbets points this out in his contribution to British Horror Cinema (2002), placing the origin of this idea on the battlements of Elsinore where the ghost of Hamlet’s father haunts a royal house torn by fratricide and incest. That the dwelling must be troubled, and bear an inheritance of trauma is an essential element of the ‘Old Dark House’ as a literary and cinematic trope.
‘Christmas Party’ contains some of Michael Relph’s most ambitious set designs for the film, allowing Cavalcanti room to move his camera and frame characters in very different ways to the methods he would employ in ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’, his second Dead of Night contribution. In that story confined spaces, directional expressionist lighting and static composition are employed deliberately to create a sense of claustrophobia, reinforcing the idea of the struggle for the occupation of Maxwell Frere’s mind. ‘Christmas Party’ by contrast has the most open interior setting in all the stories, at least at the outset when the party is in full swing. Cavalcanti takes advantage of the space and grandeur for the initial impression, one that initially plays against the ‘Old Dark House’ convention. Here is an open world of childhood games which Cavalcanti shoots in a style more akin to his preferred poetic realism, framing the action naturalistically and fluidly, only becoming more tightly framed when the action narrows to Sally and Jimmy and their journey from the curtained alcove where Sally first hides during the game of Sardines to the narrow spiral staircase up to the attic. Even here, and in the dingy corridor to Francis’ room, there is no attempt to force the conventions of ‘Old Dark House’ stories; the attic and the corridor are not sinister but old and hidden or forgotten places for Sally to explore, licensed by her new maturity to leave behind the comforting, crowded bustle of childhood.
The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s acclaimed screen version of The Turn of the Screw from 1961, fully explored the theme of childhood innocence versus perverted adult sexuality, making full use of the ‘Old Dark House’ setting. Two years later The Haunting (Robert Wise 1963) set the benchmark for subtle horror in a haunted house, with the building itself becoming a character and instrument of terror in its own right. ‘Christmas Party’ sits a little awkwardly in such company as by and large it eschews the conventions these later films built and improved upon. The overall effect of Sally’s journey up through the house and into Francis Kent’s bedroom is strangely comforting; it isn’t really played for scares; what we have at most is a sense of unease, certainly the juxtaposition of stumbling upon the bedroom is less startling and contradictory compared to the daylight view from Hugh Grainger’s hospital window in the preceding ‘Hearse Driver’. The story’s real scare is delivered at its end, when Sally becomes aware of what has just happened to her. In the rush of her new-found maturity she struggles to process the shock and unsettling sadness that comes with contemplating the violent death of a child. Not only that, Sally’s upset is heightened by the thought that her care and attention for Francis was, and will always be, unsuccessful in preventing his violent death.
And herein lies the potency of that pay-off for the audiences of 1945. The use of the ghost of a child as the central aspect of ‘Christmas Party’ highlights one of the anxieties of Second World War Britain; the trauma and danger presented by aerial bombing and long-range rockets placed the country’s children in peril from a war whose battle lines were hundreds of miles away. Thousands of children were evacuated to the country from big cities to escape the devastation wrought by the long-distance Nazi onslaught. The party in which we meet Sally is populated by many children but there are only two adults present and we only hear one speak: Mrs Watson the hostess. We do see an elderly man in the background in what appears to be the garb of a butler, but the majority of the revellers are young children with a handful of older adolescents. This absence of adults of parenting age is striking; the older adolescents are seen to assume a shepherding role in much the same way that many young people were forced to on the home front through the absence of parents either fighting the war or working to keep the nation going. Children raised by children, already a fact among the working poor, became more prevalent during the war, and the maturity in girls of Sally’s age came to be called upon early. The responsibility of protecting younger siblings from harm was a heavy burden for many older children still of school age and the dread of failure to prevent their death must have played on many adolescent minds.
After the conclusion to Sally’s story, back at Pilgrim’s Farm, Van Straaten is at his most dismissive; as Leon Balter explains in his article, the psychiatrist sees it as a ‘hysterical dissociative episode with hallucinatory features’ (op. cit.: 766). Van Straaten makes reference to Saint Teresa of Avila, whose religious visions were reportedly of an erotic nature. Saint Teresa was the subject of the only film – Nigel Wingrove’s Visions of Ecstasy from 1989 – ever to have been banned by the BBFC on the grounds of blasphemy. The mix of female sexuality and religion proved as problematic for the censor as it has been for the Church where it was so often punished and feared. Horror cinema, by comparison, has mined this sexuality both progressively and regressively but has always admitted its power. Balter takes time to expand on Van Straaten’s theory in elaborate Freudian terms, which also go some way to contextualising the long association between horror and sex. It resolves, in the manifestation of Francis Kent, to the creation of an imaginary younger brother figure in Sally’s mind onto which she projects her own pre-adolescent masculinity. The hallucination, as Balter terms it, comes after Sally has been sexually stimulated in a way she is not yet ready to accept. The fantasy of partial decapitation, presented by the knowledge of Francis Kent’s demise, is an eradication of her boyishness so as to advance her burgeoning sexuality. It is also a symbolic castration, in keeping with the overall theme of male sexual anxiety in the rest of the film. Slasher films from the 1970s and 1980s were notorious to the point of parody for punishing the sexually confident female by making her the victim of whatever masked killer stalked the movie, often early in the story. This trope reflected a perversely prurient conservatism inconsistent with the subject matter. The connection between female sexuality and horror was better explored in films like Repulsion (Roman Polanski 1965), in which a sexually troubled young woman (Catherine Deneuve) is driven mad when left alone in a London flat, and Carrie (Brian de Palma 1976) where repressed sexuality collides with a teenage girl’s adolescence to memorable effect.
‘Stay with me. It’s better now you’ve come.’
Whatever the merits of Balter’s dissection of Sally’s story, the feel of the piece is subtly disturbing, rather than horrific, in service of the slowly mounting sense of dread the film as a whole requires. Its effectiveness stems more from the reflection on what Sally’s encounter was, not from the encounter itself, or the setting. It is the realisation that little Francis Kent still awaits his awful fate in the time-slip reality he inhabits, and that Sally would be incapable of preventing it even if she had understood more at the time of her encounter – this terrible event will always happen. It foreshadows and complements the larger idea of the dream from which Walter Craig cannot awaken with the idea of a fate that cannot be escaped. With its notions of an unseen murderous presence and a dark mirror-image alter ego in the absent form of Constance Kent, it sets the stage for the chillingly memorable story which is to follow.
