Dead of Night / Multiple (1945)
Don't BlinkGhost stories. People gather and take turns sharing theirs. It's an ageless tradition, proven by 1945's Dead of Night. One of the guiding rules of The Unblinking is to try to review only what is on the screen. Not the cultural legacy, or the appearance on filmmakers' Top 100 lists.
Films from this era can be challenging to review for this reason. For people like myself, watching a nearly endless stream of horror, it's hard to have an objective reaction to all films. I rewatched this film in a weekend with Evil Dead Burn and Faces of Death (2026). Still, this film is amazing.
It's not scary in the way today's audiences are accustomed. It's elegance is nearly shocking in a different sort of way. Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) is an architect who arrives at a stately home, and finds himself familiar with what should be strange surroundings and new faces. He's been called to Pilgrim's Farm, owned by Eliot Foley (Roland Culver) to discuss renovation work on the property when he realizes he's re-living the exact scenario from his recurring dream. He's seen these scene in a dream. A nightmare, actually. A recurring nightmare. All the people, in that place, the actions of each. He's able to predict what will happen next. This is the setup for the anthology approach. Each person, in an attempt to calm him, tells their own ghost story, to an unbelieving psychiatrist, Dr. Van Straaten (Frederick Valk).
The film is made up of five segments within the wraparound story, directed by Basil Dearden. Each of the guests takes their turn, and the segment is a cutaway from the parlor in which they all sit. The segments are not terrifying by today's standards, but they are well executed and provide needed tension. Each segment delivers a frightening turn, and each is directed uniquely to the benefit of its telling, by four different directors.
##Directors:##
Wraparound story: Basil Dearden
The Hearse Driver: Basil Dearden
The Haunted Mirror: Robert Hamer
Golfing Rivalry: Charles Crichton
Christmas Party: Alberto Cavalcanti
The Ventriloquist's Dummy: Alberto Cavalcanti
Dead of Night is widely credited as the film that established the anthology-horror template that would go on to define British horror for decades, most directly in Amicus Productions' run of portmanteau films in the 1960s and 70s. Dead of Night also effectively blends subgenres within the structure it establishes: gothic ghost story, psychological horror, and even takes a stab at horror-comedy in Golfing Rivalry, the only segment directed less successfully by Charles Crichton.
As in many modern anthologies, the wraparound is treated as the most dry, occasionally hinting at some darkness until the close of the film. In this case, that close pays off the entire film. Basil Dearden directs the wraparound and the first segment, The Hearse Driver, with the very straight-forward air of English films of this period. You can feel the sets, the acting is dependable. There is a matter-of-factness to it all.
The performances by English actors (mostly) are truly of a time, and effective. That's what makes the uncanny wrongness in each segment work. The context of the film itself makes the supernatural elements off-putting and odd.
The Haunted Mirror uses a hazy, dreamlike naturalism that's deceptively ordinary. The quiet horror is rendered more disturbing when it arrives. It is the most visually inventive of the film. The mirror's reflected room (a different, older, more sinister space) depicts a different, colder lighting scheme than the "real" room, creating an immediate visual disconnect. The Hearse Driver segment uses stark, quiet lighting and a static, almost clinical camera to make the appearance of the hearse driver at the window feel abrupt and wrong. The Ventriloquist's Dummy segment, shot by Cavalcanti, leans into high-contrast, expressionist-adjacent lighting and unbalanced framing. Close, claustrophobic shots of Redgrave's increasingly unstable face and canted angles visually suggest his fracturing psyche. It's the most traditionally horror-like direction of them all.
This is very much a film of atmosphere over spectacle, in keeping with British restraint of the era. Throughout, deep shadow and restrained, almost theatrical lighting stand in for overt visual shocks.
It struck me, after I'd telephoned you, rather cheek on my part to ask a busy architect like yourself to come down and spend the weekend with a set of complete strangers.
The conclusion of the film, where the nightmare becomes the reality (or does it) escalates Dearden's direction to another level. The loop resets at the same early evening hour, introducing viewers to Walter first receiving Foley's call and denying him even the peace of a new day. The film pulls back the other scenes and segments, putting Walter into each, now in full terror, even by today's standard. Callbacks from each are re-presented with a new darkness before presenting a seemingly calm reset. The looping nature leaves viewers off balance.
The film was made at a specific point in time, and that's a strength. Post-war, this film was likely a re-introduction of manufactured fear to a country that was immersed in very real fear for nearly an entire decade prior. But the themes in the wraparound segment persist to this day, in England and beyond. The rationalism versus the supernatural construction is seen in English films from The Wicker Man and Don't Look Now and even Nick Murphy's The Awakening.
The film is even more deeply about fate and control. Walter is aware of his situation, but cannot escape it. In each of the segments, the protagonists are victims to a similar construct. They recognize something is off, but are simply subjected to it, unable to change the outcome. That's a horror theme (and sometimes trope) that still shows up in Final Destination. Even in the bizarre looping conclusion, we see Walter recognizing his fate. And moving forward anyway.
Dead of Night cannot scare viewers the way its descendants will. Instead, it unsettles patiently, until the loop closes and you realize the whole film has been the trap all along. More than eighty years later, the terror is the restraint. Dead of Night has the confidence to let atmosphere, structure, and one very unlucky ventriloquist do the work. Few horror films this calm have been this effective.
Key scene
Spoilers below.
The death of the dummy.. This won't make any sense without a deep introduction to the segment, but go with it. Ventriloquist, Max Frere (an excellent Michael Redgrave) is consumed by jealousy and believes that his dummy Hugo has become a rival for control of his act, even for his life. Within his prison cell, Frere finally attacks the dummy, beating it apart in a frantic burst that ruptures the film's otherwise restrained visual language.
The horror isn't the dummy, that may be sentient (undoubtedly an influence on Magic). It's what destroying Hugo does to Frere. Breaking Hugo doesn't restore his sanity; in the asylum scene after, he speaks in Hugo's voice, as if the possessing personality simply relocated into him. The crushed doll becomes a failed exorcism: violence aimed at the wrong body.
The image of the crushed doll is the most chilling within the film. The film never resolves whether Hugo was ever truly independent or purely psychological projection. Redgrave holds both readings at once, which is why the moment lands as tragic and uncanny rather than merely grotesque. Frere is a man trying to murder his own psychosis, and failing.
Own it
My Letterboxd review