Dead of Night (1945) on Netflix
Approved19451h 43mFantasyHorror
Architect Walter Craig arrives at Eliot Foley's country cottage and finds the house and the other guests familiar from a recurring dream. He tells them he has dreamed the whole situation before.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.5/1016,082 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Walter Craig, an architect, is summoned to a country cottage in Kent by a client he has never met, Eliot Foley, who wants advice on renovations. In the sitting room Craig tells Foley and the assembled guests that he knows them all, and the house, from a recurring dream. He has no personal knowledge of any of them, yet he can predict small events in the room before they happen, and he recalls that something terrible lies further on. Dr. van Straaten, a psychologist among the party, argues that his fears have no foundation. To test Craig's foresight and to pass the evening, the guests take turns describing strange experiences of their own.
Cast
- Michael Allanas Jimmy Watson
Show all 20 cast
- Peggy Bryanas Mary Lee (Segment "The Golfing Story")
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dead of Night (1945)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film's circular plot inspired Fred Hoyle's steady state model of the universe in 1948. Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold discussed the idea after watching the film; Hoyle first said they would "dispose of this before dinner", but the three astrophysicists found the idea hard to dismiss.
- Horror films had been banned from production in Britain during World War II, which left Dead of Night as one of the few horror films made in England in the 1940s.
- Universal Pictures released the film in the United States in a truncated cut that removed two whole segments, "The Christmas Party" and "The Golfer's Story", leaving the film with continuity errors.
SPOILER
The "Christmas Party" segment is based on the real 1860 murder of Francis Saville Kent, for which his half-sister Constance Kent was convicted in 1865.
