#1 - Dead of Night (1945)
(dir. Basil Dearden + others)
When architect Walter Craig is hired to do some work at a country house, he arrives only to find a group of strangers that he remembers from a dream - one that ends as a nightmare. He shares this with everyone, and they all begin to tell their own stories about the supernatural, stories featuring ghosts, a haunted mirror, and in the best one, an evil ventriloquist's dummy. All the while, Craig is terrified that the nightmarish events he dreamed about will end up coming true.
This is a really excellent British horror anthology film, released at a time when the country wasn't producing much horror at all (I'm sure the real life horror of WWII and The Blitz was enough). I can't help but compare it to the later anthologies put out by Amicus in the '60s and '70s, especially Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, because it was obviously a huge influence on those films and feels like an early prototype of the format. Parts of it do feel a little half-baked, especially some of the earlier segments that are much too short, but the final segment about the dummy is fantastic. The very end of the framing story is also really good and kind of unsettling.
If you're a fan of classic horror, especially Hammer and Amicus stuff, this is a really good precursor to those and absolutely worth a watch. I've often heard this listed as one of the best horror films of the 1940s, and after finally watching it I'm inclined to agree.
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