ChikPapa Very disappointed :(

Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

elvircorhodzic Dead of Night is just something like a nightmare. Romantic, funny, mysterious and terrifying dream. I think in this film is not the point in watching the future but the premonition and despair. This is one compound of confusing psychological experience, sharing stories by several protagonists, and at the end the main protagonist of all the experiences connected to one fantastic nightmare climax. Witnesses chronologically contain foreboding and vision, love and hallucination, "spicy" section and finally jealous split personality. Attempted murder leads to hilarious dreamy swirl in which intertwine all recounted horrors individually.Michael Redgrave as Maxwell Frere left the deepest impression as mad ventriloquist. All the other actors are episodic protagonists who dominate in their sequences. Group of director and screenwriter made sure that every story has a frightening honest tone.

travnlou Such an entertaining movie! It grabs you pretty quickly in the beginning and keeps you captivated throughout the film. Great plot, story line, dialogue and great performances by all. Definitely worth watching. Michael Redgrave is one of my favorite British actors. Anyone see him in "The Browning Version"? Each character's relayed experience is so intriguing. My husband doesn't especially like old British movies. After the man started explaining about his dream and the real life similarities he was finding with the group of guests, he told me "Don't change the channel!" We were transfixed through the entire movie. Highly recommend this one and hope to see it again some time.

gavin6942 An architect (Mervyn Johns) senses impending doom as his half-remembered recurring dream turns into reality. The guests at the country house encourage him to stay as they take turns telling supernatural tales.British anthologies really took off in the 1970s with my favorite studio, Amicus. But here we have Ealing, not known for their horror films, making an anthology in the 1940s. That is way ahead of the pack (excluding earlier German films like "Waxworks" and "Eerie Tales").For the most part, this is a really good one. It runs a bit long, and perhaps one of the weaker segments could have been cut. But some of the scenes (such as the haunted mirror) are really good and can almost stand on their own. And then when we get the big reveal, it is terrifying, both for us and our protagonist.While I still prefer the Cushing-Lee anthologies of the 70s, this is well worth checking out for those who are not familiar.

TheRedDeath30 This movie definitely holds a good deal of historical significance for a number of reasons. Horror had a golden age at the turn of the century, in both film and literature. While movie studios like Universal were churning out monster movies, there was a flood of British authors churning out high quality horror stories for a number of very successful pulp magazines. All of that came to a stop during WWII when Britain decided its' citizens had enough horror and banned the genre. This movie really was the comeback for British film horror and used several stories from those old pulps as its foundation. It's also, quite arguably, the first horror anthology and sets the standard that would be used in many movies to come over the next 50 plus years.Of course, with any anthology, it's sometimes difficult to judge the movie as a whole because we tend to remember high points and low points in a movie. This stands out even more in an anthology when we have good segments and weaker segments. This film begins with a "wraparound story" that connects all of the segments together. Though this is so common now we barely register it, this is the beginning of that framing device. We start with a man arriving at a house full of strangers, only to realize that he's experiencing incredible deja vu as he has dreamt them over and over and knows what events are to come. The first story, "The Hearse Driver" is the shortest, almost too short to even be effective in any way. It is very reminiscent of the sort of horror story that would become wildly popular in EC Comics and later works like TALES FROM THE CRYPT. A race car driver receives a premonition of his death with a creepy hearse driver announcing "there's room for one more". I think had the movie been made ten years later, the driver would have been dripping with shock theater creepiness, but here he's more understated.The next story is "The Christmas Party" where a young girl plays hide and seek in an old home, only to discover its' ghostly inhabitant. It's far too quaint and innocent for most modern audiences as its' style is very much turn of the century. It's the sort of tale we tell each other as small kids now around a campfire and not very effective for an adult audience. Even when put into the context of the 40s, it probably seemed tame even then.The middle is "The Haunted Mirror" which is one of the better stories in the anthology, mostly due to the performance of Ralph Michael as a rich man being haunted/ possessed by a mirror bought for him as a gift that seems to be showing him another world. What seems, at first, like a silly premise actually develops well into a fairly chilling story with some good acting.Then, the movie takes an extreme left turn with "The Golfing Story", a comedy about two men playing a round of golf for the hand of their love and the haunting that is created by one man's cheating. One thing to point out is that this movie was based very largely on those pulp horror anthologies from the turn of the century, most of which used Gothic and supernatural stories. The "haunted golf course" was a very popular and recurring motif in those stories, so this was sort of a natural story to tell British audiences during this time. The comedic tone is what throws people off more often than not and certainly put between the two segments that it is, it throws the movie's tonal progression off, but is an amusing story that holds my interest.The final story is the one that gets most of the attention. "The Ventriloquist's Dummy" is a remarkable story of a man's descent into dementia and the loss of identity, propelled by a great performance from Michael Redgrave. I'm not sure if this is the first example of that device being used, but this is certainly the touch mark for many stories that have been told since about a haunted dummy with its' own agenda. What could feel too familiar to a modern audience is still unique due to the great acting of Redgrave.The movie, at this point, has built up to a crescendo that comes to a finale in the wraparound story, as our main character reveals that he is drawn to commit murder. Then we get to the "twist ending" that I'll leave as somewhat of a surprise, though many have already mentioned.I can understand why some stories were trimmed at the time of release to make this movie shorter for American audiences. It does run a little long, but none of the stories are long enough to lose your attention. More than just a historical "landmark" film. This movie is still effective and interesting and probably one of the better horror movies to come out of the 40s.