A Film Canon

 

 

This seminal horror anthology is remarkable for possessing a framing structure that nuances its subsidiary narratives, rather than merely acts as a pretext for them. Upon arriving at a house party repeatedly experienced in a nightmare, architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) makes several attempts to forestall its ghastly, invariable conclusion, producing a generalised foreboding whose most unnerving implication is that every event, however minor, is a mere repetition, or reflection, culminating with the haunting dream sequence in which he wakes up - back into the dream - and the closing credits roll over the same imagery that opened the film. As a result, all the subsidiary narratives - which are offered, generally, as evidence of the supernatural, and, specifically, as a suggestion that Craig's dream doesn't conform to the psychoanalytic explanations of the party's resident sceptic - turn on enlivened reflections, repetitions and doubles. The weakest, "Golfing Story" (Crichton), deals with a golfer who commits suicide by walking into a perfectly still lake, as a reproach to his inseparable buddy for cheating him in a criticial game, and is more in keeping with the wry, dark humour of later Ealing efforts that the tighter horrific focus on display here. Two shorter stories, "Hearse Driver", (Dearden, who is also responsible for the framing structure) and "Christmas Party" (Cavalcanti) anticipate the more atmospheric riches of the film's masterpieces - "The Haunted Mirror" (Hamer), which turns on a mirror's refusal to disclose anything to its owner other than another room, and, above all, "The Ventriloquist's Dummy" (Cavalcanti), the prototype for all horror involving enlivened dummies, dolls and children's toys, in which the choreography of the dummy and his 'victims' captures the elusiveness of the supernatural more poetically than any of the other plots, as well as clarifying the extent to which that elusiveness accounts for its terror.