Deserves its spot in the cult pantheon, hints of Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958), mesmeric atmosphere of dream/nightmare held together by a hypnotic performance by Barbara Stanwyck, tonsils in overdrive. But no point screaming at the unseen, at the unknown, when it invades reality, no point trying to escape a dream when you’re trapped inside.
Except that there’s no sign of the demonic figure haunting widow Irene Trent (Barbara Stanwyck) on the poster it delivers on all other fronts, driving you to question our heroine’s grip on reality as much as she questions herself. If there’s such a thing as self-gaslighting, she’s in the vanguard.
Creepy rich blind husband Howard (Hayden Rorke) is an emperor of surveillance, microphones everywhere catching her every word, including what she utters in her dreams, which convinces him that she’s having or has had an affair. When he dies in an explosion, body eviscerated in the inferno, she can’t come to terms with her freedom, holing up in the tiny apartment at the back of her beauty parlor, relying on assistant Joyce (Judi Meredith) and attorney Barry (Robert Taylor) for moral, and perhaps in relation to the solicitor, physical support.
When the unreal invades her daily life and she begins to believe in her dreams and when the handsome lover (Lloyd Bochner) of her night-time imagination takes shape, she begins to doubt her sanity. But so convinced, on the other hand, that she must be sane, she tries to convince Barry that her dreams have basis in fact. She tracks down the apartment (No 341) she visited in her dreams and the chapel where she imagined she was married to said lover.
You wish director William Castle (Straitjacket, 1964) had continued exploring the theme of dreams vs reality, and how to cope when the imagination takes over. But instead, it twists into thriller territory, the old set-up, the gaslighting that could send Irene over the edge and straight into a sanatorium while her husband’s substantial wealth ends up elsewhere.
Even so, once it heads down this particular path, it’s still mighty tricky. Who could be in on the act? All the people she trusts – Barry, Joyce, even Loverboy? And if she’s going to let her suspicions run riot, how is she going to come out the other side, for surely that will tip her over into madness?
Exceptionally lean, barely 80 minutes once you exclude the treatise on dreams at the start that establishes the premise of the “Night Walker” – the person who lives through their dreams – and exceptionally clever. Irene is so given to screaming that you’d scarcely think there’s space left in her brain to to work out just what’s going on. And there’s no shortage of permutations.
Has her dead husband, half his face obliterated by burns, come back to haunt her? Is the Lover just a figment of her imagination? Why can’t she make do with someone as handsome as Barry?
We’ve got smoke issuing from under doors, recurrent bright flashes of explosion, mannequins that seem alive, all sorts of jiggery-pokery with guns, telephone wires cut, a blind man who can tell the color of your dress, eyeballs plucked from faces and squeezed until they pop, and the expectation all the time of a straight dive into madness. No escape in other words.
Even when it fast approaches a climax you might have guessed the outcome of, turns out you were wrong and there’s still a few more twists – and screams – to come.
The fact that it turns into a straightforward thriller at the time tended to diminish the emphasis on the demonic, but these will be more fully appreciated today when the line between reality and fiction is stretched ever thin.
Four-time Oscar nominee Barbara Stanwyck (A Walk on the Wild Side, 1962) might have been accused of slumming it in low-budget horror fare such as this, but, boy, in her final big screen appearance, (although she successfully switched to television as star of The Big Valley, 1965-1969) does she give it her best shot. If this was Stanwyck’s swansong, Robert Taylor (A House Is Not a Home, 1964) , a fellow relic from Hollywood’s Golden Age, wasn’t far behind, only a few movies left in him.
For all this relied on William Castle’s directorial dexterity, the imagination behind it came from master of the macabre Robert Bloch (Psycho, 1960).
Cult doesn’t come much better.
The Magnificent 60s 