Product Details

• Actors: Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers
• Format: NTSC, Black & White, Full Screen
• Region: All Regions
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Hollywoods Attic
• Run Time: 102 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000W4876S
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #78,154 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This film features five stories of supernatural terror from four directors. A group of strangers are inexplicably gathered in an isolated country estate. Dreams and nightmares dominate the conversation, and each guest shares a frightening event from his or her past. Two of the stories stand out: a mirror with a horrifying story that shows you a different room when you look into it and a ventriloquist who goes mad when his dummy appears to come to life. In 1946 this artistic film was awared Most Interesting Screenplay by the Locarno International Film Festival.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Confection Of Genteel Horror, August 3, 2009

By	darklordzden "darklordzden" (Australia) - See all my reviews

Released by Britain's legendary cinematic power-house, Ealing Studios, in 1945, 'Dead Of Night' is one of the earliest - and still most accomplished - portmanteau horror films ever to be released on an unsuspecting public.

Prefiguring the likes of Twilight Zone - The Movie by nearly forty years or so, each tale within the film is the work of a different director (Alfredo Cavalcanti, Basil Dearden, Charles Crichton and Robert Hamer), is adapted from an original short story (by luminaries such as H.G. Wells, Angus McPhail, John Baines and E.F. Benson) and is linked together by a very nicely unfurled bridging-tale which compels the audience to keep watching.

Architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) arrives at the Kentish farmhouse of the affable Eliot Foley (Roland Culver) in order to measure up the specifications of a remodelling job. But Craig is gripped by an awful sense of foreboding - he's sure he's been to the house before and his sense of deja-vu is compounded upon being introduced to the other guests staying at the house: society wife, Joan Cortland (the stunningly beautiful, if implausibly named, Googie Withers); psychiatrist, Dr. Van Straaten (Frederick Valk); racing driver, Hugh Grainger (Anthony Baird); youthful neighbour, Sally O'Hara (Sally Ann Howes) and Foley's mother (Judy Kelly).

Craig informs his fellow guests that he has dreamed the events that are unfolding and Van Straaten, ever the rationalist, attempts to palliate his sense of unease. However, Foley, Cortland, Grainger and O'Hara are less than convinced. You see, they've all had run-ins with the bizarre themselves and, as the film progresses, they recount their stories one by one...

And what stories they are - we are treated to tales of ominous hearse drivers; eerie mirrors; haunted houses; spectral golfers and demented ventriloquists.

'Dead Of Night' is very much a film of it's time. It's production values, although excellent by rationed British post-war standards, may seem dated and rickety to younger audiences and it's incorporation of a musical number may seem antiquated by today's sensibilities, but its elevated above what may be perceived by some as these shortcomings by an excellent script, earnest performances (Johns, Withers, Falk and Michael Redgrave, as a tortured ventriloquist, are particularly good), and a brilliantly demented streak of black humour which is overt not only in the deeply amusing tale of spectral golfers - which satirises the British middle-class obsession with golf and 'fair-play' - but in subtler instances (upon being informed, by her daughter, that Craig has suffered a premonition in which he will hit the child savagely, the deeply horsey O'Hara matriarch responds with an indulgent grin and a rebuff of "Oh well, I'm sure he can hit somebody else instead!")

Whether you're a fan of British cinema, portmanteau horror films in general, or just a more genteel era of film-making, consider 'Dead Of Night' a must-see.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Veddy British, December 2, 2008

By	John Floars "commajockey" (Woodbridge, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This film is a nice collection of ghost stories -- all understated, in that veddy British manner -- arranged around a central theme. Typically for a British production, the acting is first rate (as, with such notables as Michael Redgrave involved, would be expected). If you like thoughtful stories and don't subscribe to the slice-and-dice school of ghost stories, you'll like this little gem.