The back room from Dead of Night: the production design for a dusty hiding place

Ealing Studios’ singularly disturbing foray into horror, Dead of Night (1945), had its cohort of characters haunted by many different things: a premature hearse, a ghostly golfer, an antique mirror, a demonic ventriloquist’s dummy. But arguably the haunting that is most pervasive in the film is the eerie, uncanny presence of the 19th-century forcing its way into the present day. It’s there in the haunted mirror segment, where the patriarchal tyrannies of the past are reanimated through the looking glass, taking psychological possession of a previously bland young husband and transforming him into a murderous jealous monster. 

The Victorian era looms large in an earlier segment of the film, ‘The Christmas Party’, which centres on a children’s game of sardines in a large old house. There are allusions to something terrible taking place there in the past but nothing that spooks the gang of assorted children and adolescents out of their boisterous playfulness. The oldest girl there, in her mid-teens, Sally (played by Sally Ann Howes) runs up towards the top of the house, accompanied by fellow teenager Jimmy (Michael Allan), who clearly has a bit of a crush on her and is happy about the opportunities afforded by the game to sneak off somewhere quiet and undisturbed. 

The first hiding place they find is sketched out here in Ealing art director Michael Relph’s production design (preserved in the BFI National Archive), and it is fairly faithfully followed through in the film. The small window at the rear of the mise-en-scène lets in enough light to illuminate a long antechamber that seems to have become a dumping ground for various bits of old-fashioned bric-à-brac or obsolete household objects. There are pieces of heavy wooden furniture and large trunks, unhung picture frames and rolled-up rugs, all thick with dust. A birdcage is suspended from the ceiling, and its criss-cross form is echoed in the bare crinoline hoops that hang down from an abandoned dressmaker’s dummy. 

This forgotten room, crowded with the stuff of the past, is not only a good place to hide. It functions as a portal into the Victorian past. Beyond another door, Sally befriends a young child she thinks has got lost playing sardines but then finds is actually a resident of the house, who fears his bullying older sister. When Sally later asks about the boy who lives there, and says his name, Francis Kent, it becomes apparent that she has encountered a ghost, murdered nearly a century earlier by his sister (the story is based on the real 1860 murder case that later inspired Kate Summerscale’s book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher). 

Michael Relph was not only a talented designer who made important contributions to the look of many Ealing productions, including the evocative horror settings for Dead of Night. He would subsequently also move into a producer role, and working with one of the team of directors behind Dead of Night, Basil Dearden, would form one half of one of British cinema’s most durable and productive filmmaking partnerships.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.