Dead of Night

None of us exist at all..........
1945 - Dir: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Chrighton, Basil Deardon & Robert Hamer
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 24th February, 2007
Best remembered for their classic British comedies, Ealing Studios broke all the rules with this psychological thriller, their first post-war release. Five stories by four different directors capture a brooding menace that's quite at odds with the middle-class world of the stiff-upper-lipped characters. Wartime films had been designed to comfort - this one was unsettling - the Daily Mail called for it to be banned despite its popularity (some things don’t change!). It’s a film that is enduringly frightening. After all the acres of gore, screeching music and ethereal mists of more recent scary pictures it’s a pleasure to see a finely crafted film that does without all the trappings and yet will still have you looking nervously behind you as you walk home tonight.
· Cosmologists Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi, developed the Steady State theory of the universe, an alternative to the Big Bang, after seeing "Dead of Night". They said that the circular nature of the plot inspired the theory.
· Despite its success, Dead of Night was a dead-end for Ealing Studios, which never really dabbled in horror again; the genre largely went back underground until the Hammer films of the late fifties.
· With typical disregard for quality, US distributors thought the film was too long and cut the golfing sequence and the Christmas ghost tale, confusing audiences, who couldn’t understand what was happening in the linking story.