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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

31 Days of Halloween - Day 19 - Movie


Dead of Night (1945) is a British anthology film containing short tales of the supernatural including premonition, ghosts both told straight and comedically, a haunted mirror, a troubled ventriloquist and his rebellious dummy, and a very satisfying connecting story climaxing in a hallucinatory nightmare.

The stories themselves are a bit old fashioned and familiar and unlikely to give a modern viewer chills of even the most moderate kind, but the movie is well acted and directed and worth a look. The stand out tale is the one involving the ventriloquist, convincingly played by Michael Redgrave. Unlike many films of this nature, the surrounding tale which allows the stories within the film to be told and connects everything together is not flimsy, but succeeds in overshadowing the vignettes themselves.

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