Dead of Night
By Jez Conolly and David O. Bates
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Dead of Night - Jez Conolly
‘A NIGHTMARE OF HORROR’
‘You see, everybody in this room is part of my dream.’
I suppose because we felt we were at the beginning of a new era after the war we were inclined to try out our talents on different sorts of films – things we had never done before. We decided, for instance, that it would be a good idea to make a series of ghost stories, joined by a suitable central story thread which would display the all-round talents of the creative teams we had built up, and it was from this decision that Dead of Night was made. (Sir Michael Balcon: Michael Balcon presents…a Lifetime of Films. Hutchinson 1969)
In the spirit of the film’s temporal trajectory, and before moving on to the discussion of its constituent parts, it is appropriate to consider some past, present and future context. If there is one phrase that repeatedly crops up when today’s writers attempt to define Dead of Night in their retrospective reviews and appraisals of the film, it would be ‘ahead of its time’. The term has become rather commonplace at the populist end of the film journalism spectrum, but in the case of Dead of Night the phrase is certainly apposite if one considers its anticipation of post-war British horror cinema. However for all its reputation as a pioneering work of the genre the film is just as much ‘of its time’ as it is ahead of it.
Later chapters will discuss the element of psychoanalysis found in the film in greater depth, but for now let’s just say that 1945 was a big year for Freudianism in film. In some respects it was the point at which film and psychoanalytic theory culminated. In their modern, definable, recognised forms both came into being around 1895, so by the time of Dead of Night both had enjoyed parallel fifty-year histories. The leading academic Laura Marcus, in her introductory chapter to Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: New interdisciplinary essays, observed: ‘Psychoanalysis and cinema emerged in tandem at the end of the nineteenth century – twin sciences or technologies of fantasy, dream, virtual reality and screen memory.’ (Marcus 1999: 34) A few short weeks after Dead of Night’s September 1945 release cinema audiences found themselves once again on the psychiatrist’s couch; following Frederick Valk’s mid-European bespectacled Sigmund schtick as the film’s sceptical psychiatrist Dr. Van Straaten, both Herbert Lom’s Dr. Larsen in The Seventh Veil directed by Compton Bennett and, especially, Michael Chekhov’s Dr. Brulov in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) – a film that shares a writer credit with Dead of Night in the shape of Angus MacPhail — channelled the founding father of psychoanalysis for their inspiration.
It is important to interrogate that phrase ‘ahead of its time’ a little further. In many respects Dead of Night was more a cinematic pinnacle of a storytelling tradition than a forebear of a new form. It has plenty of antecedents, both literary and cinematic. Fundamentally the frame narrative is a device that dates back to some of the earliest known examples of recorded storytelling, which were frequently collections of even earlier tales originating in oral storytelling cultures. The ancient Egyptian text now known as ‘the Westcar Papyrus’ has been dated back to around 1800 BC and consists of five tales of magic and miracles. Several Sanskrit epics and fable stories emerged from India in subsequent centuries, including Baital Pachisi which was adapted and translated by Sir Richard Francis Burton and published in 1870 for an English readership as Vikram and the Vampire. Burton is more renowned for his translation of One Thousand and One Nights, one of the most well-known collections of folk tales and, in the form of Scheherazade’s nightly storytelling efforts designed to spare her from death by order of the Persian king Shahryar, another early example of the use of a frame