Classic Horrors Club

There weren’t many horror films produced in Great Britain during World War II; however, Ealing Studios went horror-adjacent with one of the earliest anthology films, Dead of Night (1945.)

It’s the type of anthology that uses a “wraparound” or “framing sequence” to contain its stories. Here, Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) arrives at a country inn where the guests are part of a recurring dream that always begins just as its beginning for him now. In turn, they each share tales of the supernatural…

In The Hearse Driver (wr. E.F. Benson, dir. Basil Deardon), race car driver Hugh Grainger (Anthony Baird) experiences a haunting warning while lying in the hospital after an accident.

In The Christmas Party (wr. Angus MacPhail, dir. Albert Cavalcanti), young Sally O’Hara (Sally Ann Howes) discovers an unfamiliar boy crying in the attic.

In The Haunted Mirror (wr. John Baines, dir. Robert Hamer), Joan Cortland (Googie Withers) gives her fiancee (at the time), Peter (Ralph Michael), the titular item as a birthday gift.

In The Golfer’s Story (wr. H.G. Wells, dir. Charles Crichton), two men, George Parratt (Basil Radford) and Larry Potter (Naunton Wayne), are best friends until a woman, Mary Lee (Peggy Bryan) comes between them.

In The Ventriloquist’s Dummy (wr. John Baines, dir. Alberto Cavalcanti), Maxwell Frere (Michael Redgrave) recalls his relationship with the titular object, a character named “Hugo.”

Like most anthologies, some of the stories work better than others. To remind yourself what I thought about them and the movie as a whole, you can re-listen to episode 36 of The Classic Horrors Club Podcast, which was originally posted four years ago on October 7, 2019…