Dead of Night
Dead of Night, British horror anthology film, released in 1945, that is considered a classic of the genre. Of the movie’s five segments, arguably the most notable is the episode featuring a tormented ventriloquist.
Dead of Night opens with architect Walter Craig (played by Mervyn Johns) being summoned to a country house on the pretense of acquiring work. Once there he meets several guests, all of whom are familiar to him because of their strange appearance in a recurring dream he has experienced. Each guest then entertains the group with a tale about an uncanny or inexplicable event in his or her life, setting the stage for each of the segments within the movie. Tales of ghostly encounters and strange premonitions of death then follow, with the last segment featuring an unstable ventriloquist (Michael Redgrave) who thinks his dummy is alive.
The directors Basil Dearden, Charles Crichton, and Robert Hamer each tell one of the stories in the episodic script, and Alberto Calvalcanti helms two segments, including the ventriloquist piece. The version of Dead of Night initially released in the United States had two entire episodes cut from the film, rendering the ending partly inexplicable; these segments were later reinstated. The circular nature of the film reportedly inspired the steady-state theory of the universe as interpreted by Thomas Gold, Fred Hoyle, and Hermann Bondi. The theory holds both that the universe is expanding and that matter is being continuously created to maintain a constant average density. Dead of Night influenced many later horror tales, including Magic (1978), starring Anthony Hopkins as the deranged ventriloquist.
Production notes and credits
- Studio: Ealing Studios
- Directors: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer
- Producer: Michael Balcon
- Writers: John Baines, Angus MacPhail, and T.E.B Clarke
- Music: Georges Auric
- Running time: 102 minutes
Cast
- Michael Redgrave (Maxwell Frere)
- Mervyn Johns (Walter Craig)
- Roland Culver (Eliot Foley)
- Sally Ann Howes (Sally O’Hara)