Director William Castle had a certain recipe for creating 1960s horror films that sold well but didn’t break the budget. It involved mixing…
- Limited special effects and settings
- Skilled actors on the downslope of their careers
- psychological horror as opposed to vibrant monsters and action.
All this is on full display in “The Night Walker.” To point one, the FX are spare and the settings are drawn from the Universal back lot. To point two, he used Barbara Stanwyck (most famous for the great noir thriller “Double Indemnity”) and Robert Taylor, both big former stars in the forties on the wane. (Taylor would die within five years of lung cancer, and he appears somewhat weathered here in the way that cigarette smokers often do.) To point three, the film is driven by a mystery, not flash and pomp or gore.
What’s the story here? Irene (Stanwyck’s character) is in a terrible marriage to a miserable blind millionaire. He dies, and she starts having strange dreams. But are they really dreams, or is reality merging with the world of our sleep? Her husband’s lawyer, played by Taylor, is determined to help her find out.
The twists and turns of the mystery got a little convoluted towards the end, but I did not see a lot of it coming. Well done!
There’s an interesting buried theme here. While her husband is alive, Irene dreams of a younger lover (in the implied but never shown way of films of this era.) This exploration of a women’s desires for younger men seems something we are still observing today.
The film has a terrific theme song, which, unfortunately, got repeated to the point of driving me batty. It was vaguely reminiscent of the theme song from the 1990s X-Men cartoon.
It’s a hokey movie at times, but a lot of fun.
