User Reviews

Dead of Night was a BBC horror anthology series broadcast in 1972; only seven episodes were made, and the program languished in obscurity for many years, but apparently retained a cult following fuelled by the memories of those who saw it at the time, and its association with Nigel Kneale's celebrated television play The Stone Tape, which was reportedly conceived as the eighth episode and made by the same production team. As with so many BBC programs from the seventies and earlier, some of the episodes were junked: three survived in the archives however, and were made available to a whole new audience when the British Film Institute released them on DVD in 2013, complete with scripts of all seven episodes and a booklet about the series.

Dead of Night began with 'The Exorcism', generally regarded as the best by those who watched the series when it was first broadcast, and certainly the best of the three surviving episodes. Written and directed by Don Taylor, the simple but terrifying Dead of Night opening titles give way to story in which city folk move into a countryside house, and promptly endure a night of absolute terror. With its rural setting and a cast that includes Clive Swift and Edward Petherbridge, it feels like the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas (another series released on DVD by the BFI) and is even set at Christmas, whilst actress Anna Cropper's presence recalls the folk horror of the John Bowen's Play for Today 'Robin Redbreast' (Bowen also penned Dead of Night's final episode).

'The Exorcism' is therefore in good company, amongst which it holds its own. All of the episodes of Dead of Night feature some kind of haunting, and 'The Exorcism' does this more overtly than some. Taylor's plot sees two smug middle class couples preparing to enjoy a Christmas dinner, whilst casually discussing issues such as socialism and Marxism and bourgeois lifestyles. This proves to be more than just throwaway dialogue; their dinner is soon ruined by increasingly creepy occurrences, which ultimately see one of them - Rachel - possessed by the spirit that is haunting them, which turns out to be the ghost of young woman who starved to death with her children whilst the local Parson and his family feasted greedily in their nearby house. Taylor's characters' nerves start to fray as they are gradually deprived of the creature comforts that they take for granted, as a have-not takes revenge on these haves from beyond the grave.

Whilst few would argue that the four central characters deserve the grisly fate they ultimately suffer, Taylor's ironic exploration of social issues adds a layer of sophistication to 'The Exorcism', and it obviously struck a chord with viewers as he would later remount it as a stage play with some success. But the other reason that it works so well - and why it still stands up as the best episode of Dead of Night that survives - is that it is also memorably scary. The small cast is excellent, with Cropper, Swift, Petherbridge and Sylvia Kay all giving convincing performances as Rachel, Edmund, Margaret and Dan are slowly consumed by terror (Cropper in particular is very impressive when Rachel is possessed). Taylor ramps up the atmosphere slowly but relentlessly, with wine suddenly tasting of blood, the house's power and telephone lines cut off, and then the furnishings and fittings starting to collapse.

One imagines that 'The Exorcism' transferred to the stage very easily: aside from the establishing shot at the start and the very final scene when the police arrive at the house, the whole episode takes place inside a single house, on a few small sets, with only four cast members and lengthy, dialogue heavy scenes. Nevertheless, Taylor uses the tools of television effectively at times: simple special effects such as the plasterwork disintegrating work well, and the sudden cut to the skeleton on the bed is a spine-tingling moment; the ending retains its capacity to chill, even if the mummified corpses don't entirely convince now. Herbert Chappell's discordant incidental score is used sparingly and economically for maximum effect.

Overall then, 'The Exorcism' makes for a memorable opening episode for Dead of Night and is worth buying the DVD for alone. But two more survive intact, including the second and part of the appeal of anthology series is the fact that the viewer does not know quite what the next episode will bring, even when - in this case - there is a supernatural theme uniting them. And so it is that the following episode is a very different beast entirely...

This was the first episode of an obscure, short-lived British horror TV series. Despite the title, there is no exorcism involved – since the possession emerges as only a device by which the back-story to the strange events occurring during one Christmas supper is recounted. The preliminary stages are rather humdrum, but once the sense of dread makes itself felt, the film becomes a gripping and quite chilling experience. All the power in the central cottage goes out; a woman is compelled to play a tune she was unfamiliar with, then sees the skeleton of a child on a bed and, finally, serves as the vessel through which the spirit speaks; her husband's wine tastes like blood; and all four of the protagonists feel ill after eating a piece of turkey. Eventually, they discover the corpses of a woman and her two children, dead some two hundred years previously…and ultimately realize that they had been chosen to duplicate their martyrdom so as to placate the social injustice that went unpunished back in the day! The film ends with the Police investigating the scene the next morning, and a TV news bulletin reporting the weird incident of a gathering that had starved to death in spite of the fact that their dining-table was amply replenished with tasty food! Incidentally, director Taylor is not to be confused with the Hollywood actor-turned-director, nor leading man Edward Petherbridge with the lookalike but younger and better-known actor Anthony Higgins!

'Dead of Night' was a British horror TV series which ran for one season with seven standalone episodes. Due to it being broadcast in 1972 well before the advent of home video recording and also owing to the fact that it was a pretty obscure series, only three of the episodes have survived to this day, the others having long since been destroyed. It seems like this instalment, 'The Exorcism', is the most well remembered and certainly, on the strength of this alone, it seems like a very unfortunate waste that four of the episodes from this series have become forever lost.

Despite the title, this one has nothing to do with exorcism. It's a haunted house ghost story which involves supernatural possession. It centres on an affluent couple who buy a remote cottage to do up and use as a second home. They invite two of their friends over for Christmas dinner and it is during this get-together that strange events begin to occur. One of the women inexplicably discovers the ability to play mysterious music she hitherto had never heard before, the electricity and phone lines go down simultaneously, at dinner the wine tastes of blood and the skeleton of a young child is seen in the bedroom.

Owing to its TV origins this is a pretty low-key affair, with all of the action happening within the house. It very much has the format of a tele-play which it essentially is. But despite these restrictions this is an oddly effective bit of horror. It builds things up deliberately and it is somewhat atmospheric in doing so. And once it gets to its possession scene, it's downright chilling. Unusually for a horror tale, the scares are primarily channelled through words. The scene in question has one of the women going into a hypnotic trance of sorts and recounting events that happened at the very house hundreds of years ago. Her words are those of the ghost whom has possessed her physical body and they relate to the horrible mistreatment she and her family suffered at the hands of the authorities at the time, primarily a squire and his wealthy family and associates. The ghost wants vengeance from beyond the grave and has chosen these unfortunate middle-class people as her victims.

Unusually for a ghost story, there is an unmistakable social message at the core of the drama, where poor people have been heinously mistreated by their rich rulers for minor misdeeds, while simultaneously these landowners live a life of luxury while the poor suffer lives of desperation leading them to commit 'crimes' in order to just feed themselves. The socialist undercurrent in the script is certainly distinctive and well integrated into the story. What also makes it work so well is that the acting of Anna Cropper, in particular, is of an extremely good standard. In the key possession scene we simply have a disconcerting close-up of her faces as she recounts her tragic tale in a clearly distressed manner. It's one of the most individually memorably haunting sequences from any bit of TV I've seen. The film wraps up not long after this moment with the people finding the bodies of the dead mother and child in an upstairs room; with the film ending on a pleasingly odd note with a TV report of four people being found in a house all having died from starvation, despite the presence of an abundance of food in an uneaten Christmas meal.