When I first watched DEAD OF NIGHT in 1977, I considered it the best horror film I had ever seen. Watching it this year on the Kino blu ray, with a print unrestored and hardly pristine but still better-looking than I had hoped, I retained my respect for its acting, photography, script, direction, and music, but asked myself if it still frightened me.
The answer is no -- and yes.
As a traditional ghost story, its only filmic rival, in my opinion, would be Thorold Dickinson's THE QUEEN OF SPADES, but today I find its approach to the supernatural more interesting than frightening: certainly well-handled, but not something to make me nervous after midnight. Yet the brilliance of the film is that it sets up expectations for a standard ending, but then kicks away any sense of cosy familiarity by shifting from ghosts to the quicksand of mental illness.* Even the comic golf story -- brightly directed and genuinely funny, but rejected by many viewers for its lessening of tension -- now seems the perfect way to set up an audience for the disturbing final segment. "Isn't this fun?" the film seems to ask, before it punches you in the gut.
After the final segment, the conclusion remains, for me, the one example of its decade that crosses the line into genuine fear. The film that comes closest, Robert Wise and Val Lewton's THE BODY SNATCHER, has an unexpectedly ferocious final sequence, but still ends with a restoration, no matter how sombre, of normalcy. DEAD OF NIGHT offers no such return to the normal, but implies, instead, a night without end.
* One aspect of the film that fascinated me on this viewing was the way it seems to reflect a development in the range of ghost stories, from simple tales of premonition and of the restless dead, to highly subjective, personal accounts of the mental trauma that a suspected ghost might cause (as in Le Fanu, Wharton, Henry James, and so on), to a disbelief in ghosts that makes them suitable for humour, and then to a kind of restoration of the ghost story, in which people can be haunted not by ghosts but by the malfunctioning of their own brains, to the point where not only a human mind but reality itself can begin to fall apart.
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