In short: Dead of Night (1977)

This anthology movie was directed and produced by Dan Curtis, the doyen of US TV horror of his time and is, as was often the case with Curtis’s project, particularly the anthology films, scripted by Richard Matheson.

The first segment “Second Chance”, based on a short story by conservative semi-professional nostalgist Jack Finney (ask me privately about that man’s “Time and Again”, if you want to hear a proper rant) concerns a young, highly nostalgic man (Ed Begley) making a trip back through time thanks to a vintage car and inadvertently creating his new girlfriend by saving her grandfather before he can speed himself to death in that same car. It’s a competently enough realized tale, but it is also very slight and frankly not terribly interesting in any way that matters to me.

Story number two is “No Such Thing as a Vampire”. It sees Matheson adapting himself. Some 19th Century village is plagued by what looks a lot like vampire attacks. Particularly Alexis (Anjanette Comer), the wife of local rich man Dr. Gheria (Patrick Macnee) seems to be a victim of the bloodsucker, or at least that’s what the local peasantry believes. Gheria for his part is sceptical, but he still calls in family friend Michael (Horst Buchholz) for help. Until the tale ends with the sort of underdeveloped twist that left this viewer mostly surprised when I realized that this was indeed all twenty minutes of set-up ended with. Before that, it’s a pleasantly atmospheric tale, with fun performances – Comer does some particularly enthusiastic scenery chewing early on, and Buchholz milks being drugged in an utterly delightful way – and semi-gothic photography. Alas, for that terribly bland ending.

The anthology climaxes in “Bobby”, a script which Curtis would recycle a couple of decades later in Trilogy of Terror II. Here, a bereft mother (Joan Hackett) attempts to call back her drowned son with the help of black magic. A little later, her little Bobby (Lee Montgomery) does indeed knock at her door. Something isn’t right with the kid, though, as well as with the mother’s nostalgic remembrances of their time together.

Like twenty years later, this last tale is the high point of the anthology, its set-up using Matheson’s and Curtis’s flair for creating suspense with characters in a physically constrained space excellently and to great effect. The story also recommends itself by having a much harder edge than the first one and by being psychologically much more interesting and satisfying than the middle tale, really showing how dark and intense 70s TV horror could get in the right hands.

As a whole, though, Dead of Night (which one should of course not confuse with all those other films with the same title) is a bit of a disappointment, an anthology film where I’d be tempted to skip two out of three tales on my next viewing.