by Daniel V. Garcia
Daily Lobo
With Halloween coming up, I thought it would be good to write about a vintage horror film.
The problem is that everyone knows about classics like "Dracula" and "Frankenstein," and everyone has seen "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" - whose prequel, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning," was so bad, I can't for the life of me understand why it didn't go directly to video.
Underground gorefests like "Cannibal Holocaust," which features scenes of extreme animal cruelty and the "Guinea Pig" series, which was long purported to contain an actual snuff film, are too disgusting to view even by my desensitized standards, so I scoured the digs in order to see what could be found.
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What surfaced was "Dead of Night," a British anthology flick from 1945. The story centers around a guy who is invited to spend the weekend with some strangers on a country estate. When he arrives, he discovers he knows all of them by means of a recurring dream in which the conversations and sequences of events to come have already happened.
As in his dream, he is powerless to prevent the horror that later unfolds. When he tries to convince them the occasion has happened before, the critics and believers among them share their respective supernatural experiences with him.
The result is that there are multiple stories within the overarching story of the film, a theme that gets eerily twisted into a paradox at the end that is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Circular Ruins" and is later echoed in Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," Chris Marker's "La JetÇe" and Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys."
The individual stories themselves are classic examples of horror themes, and they range from a forewarning of death that results in its later avoidance to a possession by a dead killer whose disembodied spirit uses a fetishized mirror to urge the living to re-enact its notorious murders.
The most outstanding tale is about a ventriloquist whose sentient dummy drives him to murder; a theme that is fully explored in the '70s film "Magic" and countless other spin-offs.
What this film lacks in gore, it more than makes up for with its well-conceived stories - each directed by a different person. The actors - including Michael Redgrave of the acting dynasty that bears his name - are superb, although the lines are delivered in that monotone rapid-fire way that was fashionable at the time.
This is a tiny cost in the overall benefit of viewing this odd, eerie and largely forgotten horror gem.
