Malcolm Gaskill: Dangerously Scary

Malcolm Gaskill

Released in 1945, Dead of Night is the most imaginative British horror film of the postwar era. It was produced by Ealing Studios and pioneered the anthology format, much imitated in subsequent decades. The film fits five ghost stories from four directors into a framework that gathers its own supernatural momentum. It’s only when Walter Craig, played by Mervyn Johns, pulls up outside a Kentish half-timbered cottage that we realise something strange has happened, or rather is about to happen. Craig, an architect, has been summoned to discuss improvements to the property, Pilgrim’s Farm (a clue there), but is distracted by the spooky familiarity of both the place and his host’s family and friends assembled in the sitting room. Increasingly overwhelmed by déjà vu, he addresses each member of the company in turn, extracting their stories. A racing car driver recovering from an accident falls through fractured time to meet a sinister man driving a horse-drawn hearse. A game of sardines at a Christmas party, all flickering candles and angular shadows, results in a chilling discovery in an attic room, inspired by a real Victorian murder. A woman gives an antique ormolu mirror to her fiancé, opening a window onto a previous owner’s homicidal past and wickedly infecting the present.

There follows some dated comic relief involving a pair of bumbling golfers, based on characters first brought to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock in The Lady Vanishes (1938). This segment divides critics: the sight of two men competing for a trophy wife now seems tedious and distasteful (even in 1945 US distributors filleted it out, doing little harm to the overarching story). But just when Dead of Night seems low on ideas, Dr Van Straaten, a psychiatrist with a Central European accent (played by the German Jewish refugee Frederick Valk), takes the floor. This is the portion of the film that most people remember. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, it tells the story of Maxwell Frere, a stage ventriloquist trapped in a toxic relationship with a hideous dummy named Hugo. The audience senses that Hugo is either a demon inhabiting a doll or the maverick half of Frere’s divided self. The second interpretation explains why Van Straaten will become involved with the police.

It’s a mini-masterpiece of modern horror. Cavalcanti, a Brazilian who had joined Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios in 1940, also directed the Christmas party episode; he was best known for his propaganda film Went the Day Well? (1942). In the role of Frere, Michael Redgrave, who in 1942 had been medically discharged from the Royal Navy, looks fixated and frantic, genuinely unwell in body and mind. The final scene would play out similarly in Hitchcock’s Psycho, where a violent split personality also fuses permanently.

The narrative then returns to the country cottage, where Craig has not only forgotten what he’s doing there, but, like Frere, has pretty much lost his grip on reality. The film plunges into freefall, a fever-dream flume ride through scenes derived from the stories, transporting the dissociating architect into madness.

Dead of Night, which opened in London at the Gaumont Haymarket, was praised by critics and cinemagoers alike, and did well at the box office. Assured storytelling had much to do with this, as did Cavalcanti’s genius and the social comment and psychological depth that Robert Hamer, later known for Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), brought to the tale of the haunted mirror. Its impact was enhanced by the fact that in 1942 horror films had been banned because of the depressing effect they might have on public morals and morale. After VE Day the ban was lifted, but even so newspapers condemned Dead of Night for being dangerously scary.

Concern about the corrupting effect of horror films had been growing in the interwar period. In 1931 James Whale’s Frankenstein was banned by London County Council and Manchester City Council, prompting the British Board of Film Censors to introduce a new class of certification: H for ‘horrific’. Set up twenty years earlier, the BBFC was the fledgling film industry’s engine of self-regulation. The fuss made in London and Manchester was a welcome shot across the bows, but elsewhere the H certificate soon became a reason for local authorities to embargo all such films. Cinemas hesitated to order ‘horrifics’, which might be blacklisted just hours before they were due to be screened.

Tussles between directors and censors, councils and cinemas, lasted into the 1960s and beyond. Harsh certification and insistence on drastic cuts caused no end of artistic grief, especially to auteurs such as the doomed wunderkind Michael Reeves – the director of Witchfinder General (1968) – who employed grisly violence to educate as well as entertain. Whenever horror broke new ground, it provoked controversy. Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), a phantasmagoria of blasphemous sexual excess, provoked a new level of outrage. Then, in the way of moral panics, the passion subsided. The shock of the new wore off, and the films settled harmlessly into television schedules, albeit in graveyard slots.

I remember seeing Dead of Night aged seven or eight. My sister reckons that we watched it together on our grandmother’s black and white portable TV. I doubt that the stories corrupted me, but they did play on my young mind. When we visited Maidstone Carriage Museum, a sign on a coach door read ‘room for one more inside’ (or something similar), which was too eerily like the line spoken by the hearse driver in the first of the stories. But it was the ventriloquist and his weird puppet that really got to me – Redgrave’s descent into mania alongside Hugo’s soulless patter and swivel-eyed gaze.

Then again, I was the sort of child who enjoyed being scared that way. It felt like creeping through the looking glass, from daylight into darkness. The occult threshold also blurred the line between past and present. Chancing on that coach in Maidstone felt like straying from reality into the story, much as Walter Craig finds himself sucked into the vortex of his own nightmares. It was a sensation I never forgot. Years later, I bought an overmantel mirror from the estate of the literary scholar Dadie Rylands, which I fancied had hung in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge. Whose faces had appeared in that glass, I wondered – possibly that of Michael Redgrave, whom before the war Rylands had directed in numerous undergraduate productions.

The haunted mirror and two of the other stories in Dead of Night – the racing driver and the Christmas party – involve time slips between the 1940s and the 19th century. M.R. James once said that ghost stories should be set in the recent but not too recent past: he thought thirty or forty years about right, just enough for ‘a slight haze of distance’. Modern horror directors seem to have found the 1970s and 1980s a fruitful setting – Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs (2024), starring Nicolas Cage, is a case in point. Ghosts are themselves historical relics: post-mortem messengers, spurs to memory, agents of retribution, raising repressed thoughts to the surface of consciousness.

The overall effect of Dead of Night is spectral disorientation, bending the familiar out of shape and reversing the reassuring thrust of time’s arrow. It’s oddly unsettling that the war, which must have loomed large in the characters’ recent lives, is never mentioned or even alluded to. We see a date, 1938, written on a police statement, but this may have been a tease or a directorial slip-up, and in any case relates to something that had happened some years earlier.

Undated time points up universal themes: the jolt of the uncanny, the frailty of the human psyche, the persistence of guilt and shame, the corrosiveness of envy and desire. The life of Hamer, an alcoholic given to DT-induced hallucinations, adds a tragic edge to his haunted mirror, a story that not only displays the ravages of insanity, but, in a burst of self-loathing, also skewers bourgeois self-satisfaction. ‘Handsome couple,’ purrs Joan Cortland, played by Googie Withers, as she and her husband-to-be Peter admire the mirror and themselves in its reflection. The section featuring the ventriloquist’s dummy is both a cautionary tale about the perils of ambition and envy, and a portrait of a tormented unnatural relationship. Maxwell Frere’s surname is a clue to twisted fraternity, and the dummy might symbolise anything from a savage id irrupting through his master’s ego to a manipulative evil twin or a gay lover stoking the fires of jealousy. He might even be seen as some kind of fetish or imp mediating between the shattered fractions of Frere’s inner life.

Eighty years on, Dead of Night stands as an astute meditation on repression and madness. Time, however, has dulled the cultural historical implications. The lavish Regency room Peter sees in the mirror is juxtaposed critically with the modernist minimalism of his Chelsea apartment, which must have struck a chord in 1945 – pricking the bubble of pride in victory, perhaps, to reveal waning self-confidence and uncertainty in direction and purpose. The absence of references to the war only makes its agonies, invisibly encoded, more traumatic. There’s nothing more horrific than the violent removal of identity, the fate of the characters thus representing the unease of a nation peering unsteadily at the future.

This unease was informed by recent death and destruction on a vast scale. The racing car episode was directed by Basil Dearden, who had made The Halfway House, a patriotic ghost story produced by Balcon and released in April 1944. Set in a Welsh pub inexplicably intact after it was meant to have burned down in an air raid, the story involves a cross-section of distressed and dislocated people, each with their own back story. ‘Time stands still here in the valley,’ comments the landlord, played by Dead of Night’s lead, Mervyn Johns, chillingly unreflected in a mirror; his daughter, Gwyneth, played by his real-life daughter, Glynis Johns, similarly casts no shadow. The most moving thread in The Halfway House concerns bereavement – a son torpedoed in the Aegean – and the choice between accepting death and the fantasy of post-mortem survival. The studied timelessness of Dead of Night carries it off in a different direction, but The Halfway House now works like a prologue to the later, more famous film.

After 1945, discontinuity and loss forced British people to adjust to a new sense of who they were and might yet become. Consciously and unconsciously, horror films zeroed in on the pain and perplexity. In June 1948 the president of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, complained to the House of Commons about horror films that failed to represent national life, whatever this meant, by suggesting that ‘amnesia and schizophrenia’ were dominant traits in society. If Wilson wasn’t thinking of Dead of Night, he surely had in mind its successors, among them the disturbing Universal Pictures thriller The Lost Moment (1947), which owed something to it.

And yet the horror boom of the 1950s and 1960s proved that postwar audiences, much as they identified with the kitchen-sink vérité of Look Back in Anger (1959), were as receptive as ever to macabre explorations of paranoia and misrepresentation, as well as mainly American monster and science fiction movies, which played less on mental affliction than on Cold War anxieties of invasion and annihilation. By that time, the most terrifying capital H in Western culture stood for ‘hydrogen’, not ‘horrific’.

Dead of Night’s unique place in the canon owes much to the way it muddles the psychological and the supernatural, making audiences contemplate both the grand mysteries of heaven and earth and the small secrets in the recesses of their minds. Ultimately Dead of Night exerted its greatest power through the manipulation of time. By sliding temporal planes over each other and curling events round to their beginning, the film found a fiendish new way to mess with a viewer’s head.

For three cinemagoers, however, Dead of Night offered a unique source of inspiration. Hermann Bondi, a brilliant mathematician who in 1937 had fled Nazi persecution in Austria for the UK, spent much of the war working on radar with the astronomer Fred Hoyle. One evening in Cambridge, the two men went to see the film, accompanied by Bondi’s fellow Jewish émigré, the astrophysicist Thomas Gold, with whom he’d previously been interned. Strolling back to Bondi’s rooms in Trinity College, Gold speculated that the universe might be like the film’s narrative structure – not extending from a ‘big bang’, a phrase Hoyle had coined, but travelling in a huge circle, where a continuum of time and space endlessly looped back on itself. That evening they tried to talk the whole thing away before dinner, but the idea that Gold hatched in the cinema stuck. In 1948, through a series of papers from the three scientists, the steady state theory of an expanding universe, proposed by Einstein and others, was finally established as a model for the origins of everything.

Send Letters To:

The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HNletters@lrb.co.uk Please include name, address, and a telephone number.