Dead of Night

Dead of Night

Directors ~ Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton

Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer

Writers ~ John Baines, Angus MacPhail, T.E.B. Clarke

1945 ~ UK

Stars ~ Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave, Roland Culver

‘Dead of Night’ was Ealing’s first post-war release and their only horror, despite other-wordly elements in others. Although preceded by the German film ‘Waxwork’ (1924), this is generally considered the precedent for the portmanteau genre. Amicus and Hammer owe an obvious debt, and its template can be sensed through to the recent ‘V/H/S’ franchise, but it would seem there really wasn’t a cohesive British Horror genre beforehand. There was Tod Slaughter as Britain’s first Horror star, barnstorming through ‘Maria Marten’ and ‘Sweeney Todd’, but no genre properly established. Previously a lot was being derived from theatre, and this certainly seems to be the case when we start here with a drawing room drama with cut-glass received pronunciation.  

The over-arching tale of Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) driving up in a in a 1938 Sunbeam-Talbot Ten drop-head coupe to a farmhouse to meet six people with an intrusive sense of déjà vu is strong. It’s not just bookending, it is an intrinsic narrative element itself, setting in motion the storytelling of the characters and justifying the incidental, anecdotal nature of the tales told. Where there are tonal shifts – creepy, romantic, dated comedy – the over-arching story keeps a momentum and cohesiveness that many anthologies don’t manage. The datedness offers the crisp Received Pronunciation dialogue, which is smart, spritely and engaging, endearingly old-fashioned. Drawing room debates punctuated by spooky anecdotes proves solid and arguably bolsters any slightness in the stories themselves. If wordy, educated slightly pricky drawing room banter appeals to you, ‘Dead of Night’ is rooted in this.  

A notable omission is a lack of reference to the very recent war. During wartime, horror films had been banned in Britain, and by extension this has the air of asking to be let back in if we don’t mention it. Conspicuous by omission, perhaps, but Jamie Russel’s BBC synopsis is helpful:

"Best remembered for their classic British comedies, Ealing Studios broke all the rules with this spooky psychological thriller, their first post-war release. Released in 1945, its dark tales of neurosis and obsession proved the perfect response to the trauma of the war years with five stories by four different directors capturing a brooding menace that's quite at odds with the middle-class world of the stiff-upper-lipped characters."

Indeed, premonitions of death, fear of latent violence, suicide and cracked mental health all feature. Also at the time, the second story would have had period echoes of the infamous case of Constance Kent, a teenager who murdered her brother. There’s a lot of trauma lurking.

Although Googie Withers and Ralph Michael stand out, it is Michael Redgrave’s performance as the ventriloquist that steals the show in the film’s most renowned episode, although . It’s one that especially nods to the psychological basis and interiority of the Horror genre to come and not just the failing reality and hauntings of the other stories. All along, the film is in debate with its only foreign element, the German psychologist Dr Van Straaten (Frederick Valk) who insists on scientific explanations, but its agenda is definitely spookiness in showcasing several writers and directors. With the mirror and ventriloquist stories coming latterly, only interrupted rudely by the dated misogyny and buffoonery of golfers’ episode, the film only gets better as it goes on.

Much of the pleasure is the period detail and set-design, full of bric-a-brac from a different era, and it retains a timeless sense of atmosphere and some genuine eeriness. Having vanquished its symbol of rationality, the film succumbs to its nightmare logic. Along with its sense of a supernatural bubble-trap, its denouement not only gives a genuine nightmarish conclusion but also excels by giving the stories a second ending which, especially for the ventriloquist’s dummy episode (three chilling endnotes, by my count), proves a neat trick and greatly satisfying.

FrightFest 2025 - Day 4

 

 

 

FrightFest 2025 - Day 4

 

 

 

213 BONES

Director: Jeffrey Primm

Cast: Colin Egglesfield, Dean Cameron, Toni Weiss, Liam Woodrum.

USA

 

At first, there’s the promise of a straightforward non-postmodern slasher providing horror comfort food, but it becomes quickly apparent that this has all the subgenre’s weaknesses too. Predominantly, it hinges on a thoroughly unconvincing bunch of college student victims, and its not clear how they managed to get this far in their studies as they don’t appear to have any critical thinking at all. It goes through the motions, the kills are humdrum and then the killer with the ridiculous motivation is unmasked and the audience goes “Wha?”

 

 

TOMB WATCHER

Director: Vathanyu Ingkawiwat

Cast: Woranuch Bhirombhakdi, Thanavate Siriwattanagul, Arachaporn Pokin Pakor.

Thailand

 

It has the chief elements to appeal to the Gothic sensibility: a big remote house, portraits of the dead wife and the corpse of the dead wife itself on the grounds. All the couple have to do is put up with the husband devoting to the dead body for one hundred days. The trouble is that the husband was cheating on the wife, and she wants the hundred days to exact her revenge from beyond the grave. Cue the long-haired Asian ghost and no one believing the haunted wife driven to near-insanity. It is a standard, traditional ghost story, but it looks good and carries out its tropes with elegance rather than excess, at least until its ending where it goes a little loopy. 

 

 

The DESCENT

Director: Neil Marshall.

Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, MyAnna Buring.

UK

 

Even after all this time, you’ll be likely to jump at least once again. Perhaps the attacks are edited to the incoherent side, but what mostly struck me once more this time is how much David Julyan's forewarns the tragedy from the very start. You are so invested into the girls foolishly going deeper and deeper underground that you almost forget that they’ll be monsters. Marshall has so far never captured this classic status again.

 

 

BONE LAKE

Director: Mercedes Bryce Morgan

Cast: Marco Pigossi, Maddie Hasson, Alex Roe, Andra Nechita.

USA

 

Perhaps the opening promises something less graceful, just to get the attention, but what follows is a slick, silly and thoroughly entertaining romp. The great performances are essential to above-average characterisation, which is important when the fragility of couples is the whole discourse: Diego and Sage are thoroughly convincing as a decent couple struggling to get over themselves. Perhaps not quite as twisty and surprising as it thinks, but its thoroughly engaging, gorgeously shot and played and all you have to do is sit back and enjoy.

 

REDUX REDUX

Director: Kevin McManus, Matthew McManus

Cast: Jim Cummings, Derick Alexander, Raphael Chestang, Debra Christofferson

USA

 

Emotion-led lofi scifi is often a good place to find something fresh in the genre, and this excellent multiverse tale impresses with how packed with emotional grounding it is. From grief making our protagonist pursue a hellbent mission to visit all the dimensions to kill her daughter’s murderer to a streetwise brat finding her limitations, the measured pace allows the loneliness to surface even when foregrounded and tent-poled by action set-pieces. Although mostly a two-hander there’s uniformly great acting, lowkey and immersive atmosphere, pleasingly clunky dimension-hopping freezer unit, a script only interested in the characters with little need to linger on backstory, allowing the existential and relationship questions to dominate. Proof again that an indie film with single well written conceit and a solid agenda of investigating the human condition can generate full-blooded, unsettling and rewarding entertainment.

Smile 2

Smile 2

Writer & Director – Parker Finn

2024, USA

Stars ~ Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage

 

Parker Finn’s franchise ‘Smile’ is proving to be quite the empathic franchise. Whether you see its premise of psychological illness as an infectious demon as questionable or as a manifestation of an old misconception, there is no doubting that Naomi Scott’s performance has the fiercest compassion. Just recently, I heard some work colleagues opine that as a celebrity had been into drugs and whatever, their untimely death was somehow unsympathetic, and obviously this lacks nuance, consideration and kindness. As Skye Riley, Naomi Scott’s raw turn as a successful pop star who is filled with self-loathing – and therefore most susceptible to the smile demon – never once drops the ball into implying she is deserving, even at her worst. The film goes a long way to determining that the celebrity life isolates and brings out the worst in an individual. It is Scott’s performance that is central and elevates the sequel to higher merit, even as it contains several showstoppers.

 

There’s more confidence here with the bigger budget and a deliberate focus that the original. It comes with many memorable images: a traffic accident blood smear like a smile; and the relentlessly smiling fangirl at the signing; a face pulled into a distorted grin in a vanity mirror, to name just three. The opening scene had me engaged in a way that ‘Terrifier 3’ didn’t manage at all – a carefully choreographed long take will always grab my attention – and by the end I was wondering why so many were saying they hadn’t seen something along the lines of ‘The Substance’ ever before. It won’t top ‘The Substance’ but then ‘Smile 2’ has a more eloquent agenda and characters and is more a bowl of multi-coloured candy than day-glo jelly. MikeMcGranaghan finds ‘Smile 2’s last act laughable, but as I was reading it as viewing the mental collapse of a flawed character, as well as the contagion potentially spreading, I was left strangely moved.

 

‘Smile 2’ spins through small-time crookery, popstar biopic, music video and supernatural curse so that the jump scares aren’t just cheap tactics (one jump scare had the entire audience I was with vibrating with chuckles at being caught for thirty seconds afterwards). And of course, the world of fame is the domain of fake smiles, although arguably Finn doesn’t quite make the most of this. Where he does is with the creepiness of an approaching dance routine, where the audience is the prey.

 

Going from the grey hues of the opening to the candy pop colourscheme of an endlessly superficial pop-world to more nightmarish shadows of horror, Finn uses the unique ability of cinema to undermine reality until everything collapses in on itself. When the biggest enemy is your own self-hatred, there is little reprieve and no winning.

 

All to say ‘Smile 2’ is a fun downer, a A24 horror version of Brady Cobert’s ‘VoxLux’ with a foot in James Wan jump scares. But like it’s predecessor, there’s a properly tragic feel and a haunting aftertaste and that most troubling and that most underrated ingredient that makes up horror: unfairness.