Spools Out
- 10 May 07, 10:45 AM
I was footering around the internet last week when I came across a film called Dead Of Night. This had scared me witless as a child, and so the credit card details were punched into a secure server and the DVD arrived a few days later.
As you know, it΅―s risky to meddle with old memories, and I thought that the film could never approach that original terror in my head. But as the disc started to hum in the machine, plenty of that anxiety returned.
Dead Of Night was released by the Ealing Studios in September 1945, only a month after the war ended. It΅―s about a house party in Kent that falls victim to a supernatural loop of time. Dreams are relived and bizarre stories are recounted. There are lost rooms, cracked mirrors and hearse riders in the sky. Googie Withers is awesome as the partner of a possessed husband. Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist who trades personalities with his horrendous dummy. It all ends with the kind of thematic spin that would later be used by Donnie Darko and The Sixth Sense.
A great purchase, then. Sure, the accents are plummy and the acting is terribly theatrical ¨C a throwback to an era when blokes were called Basil and Nauton. But my imagination thanks me, and now I΅―m tempted to delve back into other movies that moved my impressionable mind. Next on the list is Wages Of Fear, about a nitro-glycerine convoy across the South American jungle followed by Ace In The Hole, a Billy Wilder classic from 1951 about media fever and dirty morality.
I΅―ve also got this mad recollection of a film that portrays a murderer, hiding under floorboards and breathing with the use of a snorkel. Or was that just a ridiculous dream?
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Not surprisingly, it's called The Snorkel. "...and then, there were no more bubbles." Wonderful ironic conclusion.
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