Dead of Night

INTRODUCTION: ‘A WEEKEND IN THE COUNTRY?’

‘Pilgrim’s Farm…I wonder why that sounds so familiar…’

…on a quiet, sunlit, tree-lined lane in the heart of the Kent countryside a handsome Sunbeam-Talbot 10 cabriolet, registration EYY260, slowly pulls to a halt. Its sole occupant, architect Walter Craig, glances across at the timbered exterior and tiled roof of his destination, Pilgrim’s Farm, and a look of puzzlement plays across his face. A look that says, ‘Haven’t I been here before?’

And so begins (and ends) Dead of Night, Ealing Studios’ extraordinary post-war treasury of the supernatural. Walter Craig, in the early stages of his déjà vu cycle, is about to meet the house guests at Pilgrim’s Farm who, upon learning that they are all players in his recurring dream, decide to share recollections of their own strange experiences. Seventy years after its theatrical release, this famously elliptical cinematic anthology of claustrophobic scary stories continues to haunt the dreams of anyone who has seen it. Released a matter of days after the end of the Second World War and a dozen years ahead of the first full-blooded Hammer horror, it featured contributions from some of the finest directors, writers and technicians ever to work in British film. Since its release it has become evermore widely regarded as a keystone in the architecture of horror cinema, both nationally and internationally, and is regularly cited by writers and researchers as a singularly important title in the history and development of British national cinema. Yet for a film that packs such a reputation this, as far as we are aware, is the first time a single book has been dedicated to its analysis and appreciation.

As is the case with a good number of horror movies made during the pre- and post-war era, we have television screenings from the 1960s onwards to thank for the kindling of memories. If you were born in the UK during the period when Amicus Productions were releasing their succession of lurid portmanteau homages to Ealing’s masterpiece – let’s say between 1964 and 1980, roughly the period that demographers and cultural commentators have come to call ‘Generation X’ – you probably first discovered Dead of Night tucked away in the twilight zone of the late night television schedules, back in the days when the midnight movie was followed only by a weather report, a ‘good night’ from the announcer, the National Anthem and the ominous black screen and dog-whistle ping of ‘Closedown’. Dead of Night first did the rounds on regional ITV stations in the 1960s and 1970s before being picked up by the BBC who proceeded to show it four times between 1977 and 1990.1 After these outings it was acquired by Channel 4 who ran the film several times on its main station between 1992 and 2003 and several times more on its then-pay service FilmFour. It received rather unheralded VHS releases in 1996 and 1999 before appearing slightly more prominently as part of one of the Ealing Classics DVD Collection boxsets in 2003, accompanied by Went the Day Well? (Cavalcanti 1942), Nicholas Nickleby (Cavalcanti 1947) and Scott of the Antarctic (Charles Frend 1948).

In February 2014 Studio Canal released a digitally restored special edition Blu-ray and DVD of the film, complete with a 75-minute featurette ‘Remembering Dead of Night’. The disc is a fitting and timely celebration of the film, making it widely accessible in the run-up to its 2015 70th anniversary. In recent times the film featured at number five in Martin Scorsese’s ‘11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time’, compiled by the director for The Daily Beast website. A capsule appreciation attributed to Scorsese defines it as ‘a British classic’ with a collection of tales that are ‘extremely disquieting, climaxing with a montage in which elements from all the stories converge into a crescendo of madness. It’s very playful…and then it gets under your skin’ (Scorsese 2009).

Those earlier television screenings were to prove important. In these days of (somewhat ironically) non-stop, round the clock Möbius strip TV schedules that have no discernable beginning or end, or for that matter TV on demand that allows viewers to watch whatever, whenever, it’s perhaps a little difficult for children of the eighties and onward to appreciate the early adolescent frisson attached to those fondly remembered opportunities during the pre-VCR Gen X years to stay up long past your bedtime and watch the late film ‘live’ as it were. In their own small, domestic but quite important way, those viewing opportunities were a pre-teen rite of passage, an early glimpse of a grown-up world beyond midnight. Of the many black and white and often quite whiskery films that the schedulers served up in the wee small hours of our youth Dead of Night was one that both authors of this book independently remember very clearly, and yet in the intervening years the specific reasons for its memorable effectiveness have been rather elusive. To quote Walter Craig in his efforts to explain what it’s like trying to remember a dream: ‘How shall I put it…being out at night in a thunderstorm, there’s a flash of lightning, and for one brief moment everything stands out vivid and starkly’. This book is our attempt to capture the film’s lightning strike. There’s a sense that it was one of those films that lodged itself in a cobwebbed corner of the post-Baby Boomer collective consciousness; conversations that we’ve had about it with our respective contemporaries in the intervening years have frequently resulted in questions such as ‘is that the one with the ventriloquist’s dummy?’ cropping up, usually followed by a detectable shiver of remembrance.

The measured creep of Walter Craig’s car along the lane provides not only a suitably understated opening to Dead of Night, but also an indicative speedometer reading of the effect the film will have on its audience. Viewing Dead of Night was, still is (and, to borrow the film’s narrative structure, will forever be) an experience that results, steadily, gradually, in goose bumps, cold sweat and the prickle of nape hairs. Such physical manifestations of fear, more readily associated with the macabre spine-chilling tales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, are enduring testament to the film’s power to genuinely terrify anyone who watches it.

Modern audiences may struggle to regard Dead of Night as a horror film by definition. Perhaps a more appropriate classification would be ‘terror film’. If one considers the distinction between terror and horror that emerged in early analyses of Gothic literature, a basic interpretation of Dead of Night might place it in the former category. Ann Radcliffe, one of the most influential pioneers of the Gothic novel, contributed an essay entitled ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ to an issue of The New Monthly Magazine published in 1826 in which she distinguished between the two concepts: ‘Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them’ (Radcliffe 1826). This distinction was substantiated further by Devendra Varma, a leading authority on Gothic literature, in his 1957 work The Gothic Flame:

The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse…Terror thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic dread…Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre. (Varma 1957: 130)

The dark and troubling feelings of déjà vu experienced by Walter Craig throughout Dead of Night are clear signifiers of this intangible dread. But a closer consideration of the direction of travel of Craig’s narrative and the procession of vignette tales that constitute the film’s portmanteau form reveals a journey from nascent abstraction through to stark realisation, from terror to horror. The film received its British theatrical release on the 4th of September 1945 just two days after the final surrender documents were signed by the Japanese signalling the formal end of the Second World War. Less than six months earlier the world had begun to witness the full horrors of the concentration camps via newsreel footage, a point at which, for many on the British home front, the terror that they had experienced in wartime, of impending death from invasion, bombs and poison gas, were horrifically realised and revealed to them on cinema screens in the most resultantly graphic way imaginable.

It has frequently been noted by other critical assessments of the film that despite its proximity to the war Dead of Night makes not a single mention of the conflict, odd on the face of it considering that the impression given by the film’s five tale-tellers is that their stories took place in the fairly recent past. And yet each story’s setting or circumstance suggests that the events depicted are more likely to have taken place pre-1939, or perhaps more appropriately given the film’s themes, were set in an alternative reality in which no war took place. For example, the two sports to feature, motor racing and golf, were effectively suspended for the duration of the conflict. In one story we see an affluent couple living a blandly comfortable life in a London of spacious Chelsea apartments and quaint antique shops, not bomb craters and rationing. We are also shown scenes of a Paris nightclub, ‘Chez Beulah’, frequented by Britons and Americans which, thanks to the date of a document seen on screen, could not have taken place any earlier than February 1938 and therefore depict a time unaffected by the German occupation of the city. There is nothing on the surface to suggest that this is a nation of people still dealing with the austerity and displacement of the Britain of 1945.

However, we should consider the very first image that appears at the film’s beginning, Figure in a Shelter, a highly characteristic Henry Moore drawing rendered in pencil, wax crayon, coloured crayon, watercolour wash and pen and ink dating from 1941 that can be seen behind the opening titles. Moore’s sketches of figures in the subterranean confines of London Underground stations are almost uniquely synonymous with the British home front experience during the war, but more than that, they vividly capture the interrupted passage through sleep that many British people, especially Londoners, endured during the early years of the conflict as a result of Germany’s deliberate night time bombing policy.

So the troubled sleep and dreams of Walter Craig are redolent of the fear-defined slumber deprivations of a nation at war, epitomised by the Moore sketch. The Dead of Night effect was, still is, one of caliginous disquiet; you don’t particularly relish sleep after a viewing, which by any standards is surely the measure of a successful horror film. But there’s much more going on in Dead of Night besides simple sleep-depriving frights, and that is what this book sets out to identify, analyse and appreciate. The examination of the film will proceed through each of the separate stories in turn and will focus on a number of themes that each episode provokes. These themes may well run through the entire film and occur in several if not all of the individual stories, but each chapter will focus its discussion on a selection of themes which we feel are especially pertinent to the story under scrutiny.