Strange, that there are dreams, that there are mirrors.
Strange that the ordinary, worn-out ways
Of every day encompass the imagined
And endless universe woven by reflections.
(Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Mirrors’, in Dreamtigers, Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland, tr. [1960] Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964)
‘Haunted Mirror’ is the first of Dead of Night’s two segments based on an original story by John V. Baines. Baines shared the film’s screenplay credit with Angus MacPhail, and both also received story contributor credits alongside H.G. Wells and E.F. Benson. Dead of Night marked Baines’ first screen credit, and also provided Robert Hamer with his first formal credit as a director. Hamer had joined Ealing in 1940 and edited a couple of the studio’s wartime propaganda pieces – Ships With Wings (Sergei Nolbandov 1941) and The Foreman Went to France (Charles Frend 1942) – before playing an important part in the writing and completion of the docudrama San Demetrio London (Charles Frend 1943), a significant release in relation to Balcon’s ‘realism or tinsel’ positioning of Ealing’s output from that year on. Hamer was a consummate maverick and at least for a while suited Balcon’s desire to test the studio’s boundaries of theme, tone and subject matter after the war. Before the decade was out he would go on to direct several more features for Ealing, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in 1949, one of Ealing’s most popular comedies and certainly one of its blackest. ‘Haunted Mirror’ is distinctly characteristic of his later work.
Hamer’s frequently repeated quote – ‘I want to make films about people in dark rooms doing beastly things to each other’ – sums up succinctly the pessimistic view that permeates much of his work. The dim light of his world is fortunately sufficient to illuminate the principal object of this story, and a glance at Hamer’s subsequent films suggest that his preoccupation with mirrors was not limited to his Dead of Night contribution. If, for example, you go looking for them in Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945) and It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) you will find them featuring, albeit in natural as opposed to supernatural circumstances, as alluring portals to a rosier past or a more attractive alternative present. In each instance there is the strong allusion to a division, represented by the mirror, between a repressed reality and an idealised fantasy. It is a theme and a motif that can also be found in the work of Jean Cocteau; as a Dead of Night precursor it is especially evident in his first film Le Sang d’un Poète (trans. ‘The Blood of a Poet’) dating back to 1930 which includes a sequence depicting an artist passing through the ‘skin’ of a mirror and entering a different reality. Le Sang d’un Poète is regarded as the first part of Cocteau’s ‘Orphic Trilogy’, the second part of which, Orphée (trans. ‘Orpheus’) which post-dated Dead of Night by some four years, contains further evidence of Cocteau’s fascination with mirrors. A particular line of dialogue from Orphée encapsulates this: ‘Mirrors are the doorways through which Death comes and goes. If you look in a mirror all your life, you will see Death at work’.
The mirror as a supernatural threshold has become deeply synonymous with the horror genre, having travelled far and wide by way of Chinese and Greek mythology, Grimm’s fairy tales and the mind of Lewis Carroll. The earliest known mirror myth suggestive of another realm beyond the reflection dates back to 2697 BC, at the time of the great Yellow Emperor Huang Di. It was believed that creatures unlike anything on Earth existed in an alternative world on the other side of mirrors. According to the myth they staged an invasion of the earthly plain in that year and Huang Di used magic to return them to their own reality. The creatures came to be referred to as the Fauna of Mirrors, and were among the many fantastical beasts recorded in Jorge Luis Borges’ 1957 magical realist miscellany Book of Imaginary Beings.
The Ovidian tale of Narcissus, dating back to 6AD, will be the mirror myth familiar to most, its cautionary tone informing and lending credence to concerns about excessive self regard held throughout history. The Queen’s magic talking mirror in the Grimms’ Snow White, first published in 1812, mixed together similar negative associations with vanity and long held folkloric beliefs about mirrors harbouring a presence on some ‘other side’.11 “The mirror through which Alice gains access to a fantastical alternative world in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass is used as a device for the satirical reversal of the real world but her speech to her pet kitten and initial description of the room that she sees on the other side in the first few pages of the novel is not dissimilar from Peter Cortland’s description to Joan of the room that he sees in his mirror:
First, there’s the room you can see through the glass – that’s just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair – all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit! I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too – but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room. (Carroll 1871: 20)
The portrait in oils that absorbs the hedonistic sins lived out by the protagonist of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is referred to in the text as ‘the most magical of mirrors’. Although obviously non-reflective in the literal sense, it is clearly still a weird portal of vanity, and it is perhaps not entirely coincidental, considering this discussion of Dead of Night’s ‘Haunted Mirror’ story, that a Hollywood film version of Wilde’s book directed by Albert Lewin was released in March 1945, depicting Gray the fine-boned socialite standing transfixed before a framed image and inspired to commit wanton acts. There is some physical similarity between Ralph Michael as Peter Cortland in Dead of Night and Hurd Hatfield in the title role in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It has been documented that Hitchcock was a devotee of Wilde’s work, especially Dorian Gray, and was also very much aware of the Lewin film version. There are echoes of the Divided Self theme in a number of his films, especially Vertigo (1958) and certainly Psycho (1960), a film that is famously replete with meaningful mirrors.
In the early years of the twentieth century we had Freud to thank for the formation of the psychoanalytic theory of narcissism to help define and codify the spectrum of self-worship, from surface vanity and the misplaced pride of egotism through to the perils of excessive masturbation and sexual perversion. In the most recent years of the twenty first century we have Facebook and other social media to thank for the recordable rise in Narcissistic Personality Disorder, arguably finding its ultimate expression in the form of the selfie. Illusions of self-worth seem ever more tightly coiled around society’s central nervous system, but the neuroses stoked by today’s social media pale in comparison to the crises of masculinity associated with the aftermath of the twentieth-century’s two world wars, and in discussing ‘Haunted Mirror’ as a consequence of the 1939-1945 conflict we should look further back to the conditions and motivations of film-makers on both sides in the years after the earlier war.
‘I thought you’d like to look at yourself.’
The German Expressionist movement, so influential on the look and feel of Dead of Night, was born of the psychological effects of losing the First World War and the impotent rage of surviving German servicemen returning home to find their domestic role displaced and uncertain. Themes of madness combined with the visual disturbance of disfiguring lighting or actual disfigurement tended to characterise much of the German silent horror films of the period. The psychological impact of a disastrous transplantation in The Hands of ‘Orlac (Robert Wiene 1924) and the implications of the surgical punishment inflicted in The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni 1928) are evidence of this, and they were traits that crossed over into the silent and early sound horror of Hollywood. Several Lon Chaney films of the twenties featured amputation and disfigurement of one sort or another and the Universal cycle of horror films starting with Dracula in 1931 employed expressionist lighting to frightening effect. Dracula’s director Tod Browning, later responsible for the dubious exploitation of real physical deformity in Freaks (1932), benefited in the making of his screen adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel from the uncredited assistance of Karl Freund, Fritz Lang’s cinematographer on Metropolis.
By comparison to this visceral response in Germany, the British fascination with spiritualism that flourished in the Victorian era experienced a resurgence in the wake of the losses suffered during the Great War, with many people seeking to make contact with lost loved ones now supposedly residing on ‘the other side’. Kine Weekly, in its review of The Other Person, an Anglo-Dutch production from 1921 concerning a man’s possession by an evil spirit, predicted the onset of ‘the Spook Era’ in British cinema, and while what followed tends not to be widely recognised as a distinct sub-genre, a drip-feed of ghostly films followed between the wars. These frequently took the form of screen adaptations of classic novels, true story murder cases and popular fright fiction from the previous century. Between 1918 and 1939 for example there were multiple takes on The Hound of the Baskervilles, Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (based on a real murder case possibly even more notorious in its day than the Constance Kent case that inspired ‘Christmas Party’) and Sweeney Todd.
In its own unique way Dead of Night represents a fusion of these visceral and spiritual responses, galvanised afresh in the aftermath of the Second World War, and ‘Haunted Mirror’, the story at the literal and, if you will, spiritual centre of the film embodies this particularly. It mixes the notion of a malign spirit on the ‘other side’ seeking to claim Peter Cortland with ideas of violent, gruesome murder and suicide of which the aforementioned Sweeney Todd would have been proud. When Joan revisits the antique shop in Chichester that supplied her with the mirror we learn from its proprietor Mr. Rutherford that its former owner, Francis Etherington, having been confined to his bed chamber by injuries suffered as a result of a horse riding accident, strangled his wife in a fit of jealous rage before sitting down in front of the mirror and cutting his own throat.
The act that is recounted is consistent with repeated references to other very similar instances of trauma to head and throat found throughout the film. In ‘Christmas Party’ Jimmy Watson takes ghoulish delight in telling Sally about the violent crime that took place in the country house: ‘There was a murder committed here in 1860, I think it was…strangled him, then half cut his head off’. Hugh Grainger’s motor racing accident results in head injury in ‘Hearse Driver’ and Maxwell Frere crushes Hugo’s head to a pulp after ‘suffocating’ him in ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’. Walter Craig’s final act before his attempt to escape through the other houseguests’ stories involves the fatal strangulation of Dr Van Straaten with his necktie and he himself is strangled by Hugo at the very end of his dream, mimicked at the point of waking when we see him back in his own bed seemingly strangling himself. In the final moments of ‘Haunted Mirror’ Peter’s jealousy, precipitated by the mirror’s malevolent occupant, drives him to attempt to strangle Joan with his silk scarf. When Joan breaks the spell by smashing the mirror a shard of broken glass causes a gash to Peter’s forehead.
These images and ideas of strangulation, throat-cutting, decapitation and assorted head injury fit well as emblems of Freud’s metaphorical or symbolic castration anxiety, an idea that emerged in the early years of his development of psychoanalysis. Put simply, Freud considered that the processes of desire, sexuality and fantasy are interwoven with consciousness of self, commencing in the phallic stage of psychosexual development roughly between the ages of 3 and 5, and at this stage the male fear of castration emerges. Freud theorised that symbolic castration anxiety related to feelings of social degradation, insignificance and the tarnishing of pride. In the decades surrounding Dead of Night’s release the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was heavily influenced by Freud, but also philosopher turned psychiatrist Henri Wallon, whose 1931 paper ‘How the Child Develops the Notion of His Own Body’ would prove to be the foundation of Lacan’s concept of the ‘mirror stage’. The concept, initially relating to the phase in infancy when recognition of the self in reflection begins, came to be applied to the formation of the ego through identification with the counterpart or specular image.
Peter Cortland is an accountant with a comfortable, affluent yet anodyne life. When the mirror enters that life Peter and Joan are making marriage plans and there is nothing to suggest that either party has any doubts about the impending matrimony. Contrary to the rather staid tradition of the Anxious Bride, the introduction of the mirror brings out wedding nerves in Peter not Joan. The story is, of course, told from Joan’s perspective; she is the instigator and the decisive prime mover of the piece, from purchasing and having the mirror delivered in the story’s first moments to the smashing of the mirror in the dying minutes. She is the socially mobile half of the couple, frequently returning from engagements to find Peter at home, confined, a borderline invalid. Before the effects of the mirror work their stranglehold on Peter his one torpid stab at conviviality – ‘What shall we do tonight? Dress up, spend a lot of money? – paints him as disengaged and dislocated. Joan is the potent force in the relationship; in the form of the mirror she is the deliverer of the conduit of lust and desire into Peter’s environment, and in the shape of her friendship with ‘Guy’, her never-seen occasional companion, she is the instigator of Peter’s gendered crisis.
‘I feel as if that room, the one in the mirror, were trying to…to claim me.’
The mirror is comprised of a central large looking glass with two smaller side panels, and more than once, when the couple are both standing in front of it, we see them reflected in differing panels, divided and separated. Only when Joan forces Peter to confront and challenge his vision of the other room do we see the couple joined together in the mirror’s central panel, hand in hand and framed not unlike a wedding photograph, brought into union through Joan’s extended force of will. It is enough to boost Peter’s confidence, albeit temporarily; in the next scene, depicting the just-married couple in their new apartment, we see him dressing confidently before the mirror with only Joan reflected in his actual bedroom, recumbent behind him enjoying breakfast in bed, reduced briefly to a more passive role. It is a momentary reestablishment of gender conventions; when Joan is mobile once more, away visiting her mother, Peter’s self-doubt returns and he again finds himself alone gazing fixedly at himself in the other room in the mirror. He is powerless to counteract what he sees and it takes an intervention from the altogether more powerful Joan to break the spell by smashing the mirror in the story’s final scene. She accomplishes this by wielding a decidedly phallic candlestick, an act seemingly orchestrated to emphasise Peter’s comparative male ineffectuality.
Google Withers had precious little time in the story to portray Joan as a fully realised, three-dimensional character, and yet during the course of the twenty minutes of screen time that ‘Haunted Mirror’ occupies she delivered a performance that was the equal of the numerous other ‘strong woman’ screen roles for which she would later become well known. Joan is confident, purposeful, decisive, and through the implication of her off-screen dalliance with Guy she is both comfortable with her sexuality and prepared to wield it. She possesses what Peter lacks, not just an all-round potency but also control of her own mind. When Peter finally relates his mirror visions to Joan he does so convinced that the problem is of psychological and not supernatural origin. ‘The trouble’s not in the mirror, it’s in my mind, it must be…I’ll have to see a mental specialist…it’s no use I tell you, I’m going mad!’ The torrent of self-diagnosis illustrates both his neutered introspection and also his unwillingness to believe his own eyes. Only Joan’s strong sensitivity can break the spell; at the point of asphyxiation, when Peter attempts to strangle her, she finally sees the room in the mirror, but unlike Peter she does not fall under its influence and is able to destroy it. Her actions disrupt his gaze, a male viewpoint that is found repeatedly elsewhere in the film but which peaks with Peter’s fascination. Like other male characters, the stare that he maintains is in fact a sublimated effort to look into his own mind.
Anthony Vidler’s 1992 investigation of the architectural Uncanny, as the chapter on ‘Linking Narrative’ attests, focussed on the built environment and paid less attention to the two other aspects that Freud identified in his 1919 essay on the Uncanny: optics and identity, the latter associated with the motif of the Doppelgänger. Freud didn’t coin the phrase ‘Doppelgänger’, that honour goes to the German Romantic writer Jean Paul Friedrich Richter who included the notion of the supernatural double as a portent of death in his 1796 novel Siebenkäs. The Doppelgänger motif, as it came to be defined by Freud, suggests the paradox of encountering oneself as another, fusing supernatural horror with a philosophical enquiry concerning personal identity and a psychological investigation into the hidden depths of the human psyche. When Freud expanded upon the notion in his 1919 essay he even added a footnote that told of his own startling brush with a mirror image of himself:
I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. (Freud 2003: 248)
Peter sees himself in the mirror but it is a self gradually possessed by the entity that was the murderer Francis Etherington – it is Peter but it is not Peter. Optical reflection of the double as found in ‘Haunted Mirror’ produces a condition where imagery directly challenges identity by destabilising the point of view. And herein lies another of the film’s means of frightening the viewer; Peter’s stare into the mirror is representative – a reflection, if you will – of our own stare at the cinema or television screen when watching the film. This subtly, perhaps subliminally, draws us to associate with his actions, and just as Peter sees, disbelieves then comes to terms with his view of the other room, so might we become aware of the immediate surroundings in which we find ourselves as viewers of the film. Although obviously Dead of Night was intended as a shared audience experience for the cinema there is an added shiver to be had by experiencing ‘Haunted Mirror’ in a room on one’s own. In some respects the most unsettling moment in the story comes near its beginning when Peter looks into the mirror and momentarily notices something odd about the reflection. It is a fleeting glimpse for him and he quickly dismisses it, the viewer sees nothing odd and there’s no suggestion that Peter has begun to see the other room in any detail, but it is enough of a ‘corner of the eye’ sensation to plant the seed of uncertainty about the viewing environment and our position within it. Try watching this story alone and notice how you become uncomfortably aware of the space in the room behind you.
It may be entirely coincidental, but the very last frames of ‘Haunted Mirror’, when Joan pulls the rotten remnants of the shattered mirror’s frame from the wall, mark the exact half-way point in the film’s running time. It is a point of no return; in the minutes afterwards, back at Pilgrim’s Farm, Walter Craig misses his chance to take his leave and is consequently impelled to stay and continue experiencing the gathering dream memories. The saving of Peter is the last time in the film when characters ‘pull back from the brink’ of their respective experiences; in the preceding stories Hugh Grainger steps back off the bus that crashes and Sally O’Hara descends back down and away from the ghostly upper reaches of the country house. Joan breaks the mirror which brings her Peter back to her, but in the subsequent stories it is the supernatural elements that gain the upper hand. In ‘Golfing Story’ the late Larry Potter succeeds in returning to the land of the living to take the place of his cheating golf partner George Parratt and win the girl; in ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ Maxwell Frere succumbs to the dark psychological forces surrounding him and irreversibly takes on the personality of his dummy Hugo; and in the final section of ‘Linking Narrative’ Walter Craig makes his inexorable way to the deadly conclusion of his nightmare. One might actually question how complete and enduring Peter’s recovery is once the mirror is smashed; while he seems restored and has no apparent recollection of his possessed state of mind, the many shards of broken mirror glass may merely represent the scattering of his still-afflicted personality. Joan is unaccompanied at Pilgrim’s Farm which might suggest that Peter is elsewhere still convalescing, not a murderer facing execution, perhaps, but the unhappy recipient of seven years bad luck. Maybe he even went to see that ‘mental specialist’ after all.
In the earlier chapter discussing Dead of Night’s context the mirror was positioned as both recollective and predictive. Peter certainly sees the past reflected in the form of Francis Etherington’s lavish Victorian bedroom, but in the breaking of the mirror we are provided with a vision of the film’s future. Taken as a designed component within an architectural structure, the collapse of its rotting frame and the fracturing of the image that it reflects foreshadows the folding disintegration of Pilgrim’s Farm around Walter Craig during the final leg of his nightmare. In addition, we will witness the breaking of glass at a crucial moment later in the film; the act of Van Straaten dropping and breaking his spectacles is the beginning of his end.
‘I’m going to punish you as you deserve to be punished.’
‘Haunted Mirror’ and ‘Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ share more than the fresh war wound of male gender uncertainty; they both make use of a supernatural vessel that possesses a surface impassivity belying an indefinable ‘inner’ evil. To onlookers it is just a mirror, just a dummy; Joan describes the mirror as ‘just a little birthday present’ and Hugo refers to himself as ‘just a bird in a gilded cage’. However, as grand embodiments of the Uncanny according to Freud, the Etherington mirror and Hugo the dummy work so effectively by maintaining an outward mask of indifference. Despite their cold, dispassionate exteriors both are capable of drawing the blood of the ones that they latch on to – the cut to Peter’s head from the mirror shard and the bite left in Frere’s hand by an angry Hugo – and both perish as a result of destructive reciprocal ‘punishment’ that leaves them smashed to pieces. In the case of Hugo it could be argued that his destruction releases the evil ‘personality’ which moves to completely consume Frere. As for the mirror, we might presume that the ‘monstrously evil’ spirit that is released from the glass when it is broken fails to find another host, but Peter’s unaccounted absence from the group of guests at Pilgrim’s Farm raises questions. We do, of course, see Peter one final time, during Craig’s escape attempt at the end of the film, and it is telling that in his dress and manner he seems to have been completely taken over by the spirit of Francis Etherington.
