Dead of Night is to date the best of its kind. A compendium of macabre short stories that culminate in a shocking twist laden finale. A group of people are gathered over at a country manor and recount their encounters with the unexplained. One of the group is a man who is plagued by nightmares and visions of déjà vu warning him of impending doom. The psychiatrist among them rationalizes each experience that the others narrate.

Each of the stories is fascinating and chills to the bone with one glaring exception - a golfing ghost story that serves as comic relief before the double jolt of the ventriloquist episode and the nightmarish shocker of an ending. The humdinger among the stories is the one of the "psychotic" ventriloquist and his inseparable dummy Hugo.

This brilliantly directed tale is riveting and chilling in equal measure. There is a tautness of tension and an edginess to the story which is so reminiscent of a shorter version of Hitchcock's Psycho.

The film is very cleverly conceived as intertwining horror stories within an overall nightmare - the scenario of doom awaits just around the corner, ever so tantalizingly near, yet no one realizes where the terror is coming from and in what shape or form. A quite memorable scary movie.