Dead of Night (1945)
TOMATOMETER
AUDIENCE SCORE
Critic Consensus: With four accomplished directors contributing, Dead of Night is a classic horror anthology that remains highly influential.
Movie Info
Cast
as Maxwell Frere
as Walter Craig
as Joan Cortland
as Eliot Foley
as Mrs. Foley
as Dr. Van Straaten
as Mrs. Craig
as Mrs. O'Hara
as Joyce Grainger
as Hearse Driver
as Sally O'Hara
as Jimmy Watson
as Dr. Albury
as Peter Courtland
as Hugh Grainger
as Dealer
as Sylvester Kee
as Beulah
as Mitzi
as Harry Parker
as George Parratt
as Larry Potter
as Mary Lee
as Dummy
as Maurice Olcott
as Hugo
News & Interviews for Dead of Night
Critic Reviews for Dead of Night
All Critics (43) | Top Critics (14) | Fresh (40) | Rotten (3) | DVD (4)
It offers the same sort of spine-cooling thrill you get from listening to a group of accomplished liars swapping ghost stories.
The audience is worked up to thrilling point with one story when it breaks to pick up another... It ls like eating a dinner in which, while you are enjoying toe fish, the plate is snatched away and poultry or dessert is substituted.
For the lover of good entertainment, the whole picture is worth seeing, once its somewhat disconnected style is understood and taken for granted.
There is much sound acting and directing in Dead of Night, but the handicaps inherent in the form this film chooses prove too much for its ingenuity.
Producer Michael Balcon turned each individual episode over to a different director and, told via flashback, they're equally good.
A dead scary horror movie that skimps on the blood but not the goose bumps,
Audience Reviews for Dead of Night
It is a beautiful thing to see how this British anthology of horror stories is so eclectic and relies mostly on an intelligent dialogue, having completely influenced the genre ever since and offering us five tales ranging from spooky to funny to chilling to creepy as hell.
Super Reviewer
A super-psycho-natural flick. For a 1945 flick, the scripting seems quite advanced. Not the best, but definitely worth a watch (and maybe even more entertaining if you can resist looking for plot-holes).
Super Reviewer
Many of the reviews I've read over the years of "Dead of Night" seem to sideline the "Christmas Party" episode as being less successful and effective than the other stories involved. At first, I tended to agree with them; however, after a while it dawned on me that there was something rather unusual about the sequence that I couldn't quite place my finger on. Normally, in a ghost story, any part of the story containing the appearance of the ghost looks rather unreal in comparison with the everyday part to underline the supernatural aspect of the spectre's apparition. However, in this particular story, it's the (real) children's party that looks unreal, and the (supernatural) ghost that looks real. The party shows a massive house, with a roaring log fire, loads of toys, food, etc, and the children enjoying themselves enormously, without any adults present. It has the look of a fantasy of the perfect party any child would want. However, the meeting with the young boy seems more rooted in reality, and this is the irony of the story - that Constance Kent, the sister he mentions, actually did exist and did admit to killing her younger brother. In real life, the boy was actually a baby when he was murdered, but his age has obviously been changed so that Sally could talk to him. This gives an extra poignancy to the story, in that he likes Sally and presumably would have wanted her for his real sister, but instead had Constance, who killed him - the worst crime she could have committed against a helpless child. I think it would be wrong to overlook this sequence as unworthy of comment, and reassess its value in "Dead of Night". It may not be as frightening as the famed ventriloquist story, but it does carry an emotional power which is perhaps its strongest point.
Super Reviewer
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