"The Night Walker" follows a woman who is widowed when her blind, pathologically jealous inventor husband is killed in an explosion in his laboratory. She is soon plagued by bizarre nightmares in which she is whisked away by a mystery man in the night, and subject to increasingly strange experiences.
Famous for being Barbara Stanwyck's last theatrical film, this offering from gimmick master William Castle is actually quite un-gimmicky, aside from a psychedelic, Salvador Dali-esque didactic prologue about dreams and the subconscious that prefaces the film.
Written by "Psycho" author Robert Bloch, "The Night Walker" plays out like a feature-length episode of "The Twilight Zone," and is riddled with odd details and unusual settings: Everything from the blind inventor husband's sprawling estate (complete with an in-house Frankenstein-esque lab!), to the beauty salon (where Stanwyck's character lived prior to marrying the abusive inventor), to the rundown chapel where one of the film's nightmarish centerpiece sequences occur. It is all underpinned by a strange, almost hypnotic score, and a series of chilling, surreal sequences that are truly the stuff of nightmares. Stars Stanwyck and Robert Taylor (her real-life ex-husband) gives solid performances, and Stanwyck (at times appearing to do a Marion Crane impression) never veers into full-fledged hysterics, though she comes close.
The film's final act is a bit of a letdown in the sense that it is somewhat anticlimactic, though it is not entirely a failure. All in all, "The Night Walker" is an effective, unusual horror film, and an oddball entry in Castle's filmography in that it does not feature an extra-diegetic gimmick or Castle's signature sense of playfulness. In a sense, it is a darker entry in his body of work, though it still possesses some semblance of levity, hence the "Twilight Zone" comparison. 8/10.
Famous for being Barbara Stanwyck's last theatrical film, this offering from gimmick master William Castle is actually quite un-gimmicky, aside from a psychedelic, Salvador Dali-esque didactic prologue about dreams and the subconscious that prefaces the film.
Written by "Psycho" author Robert Bloch, "The Night Walker" plays out like a feature-length episode of "The Twilight Zone," and is riddled with odd details and unusual settings: Everything from the blind inventor husband's sprawling estate (complete with an in-house Frankenstein-esque lab!), to the beauty salon (where Stanwyck's character lived prior to marrying the abusive inventor), to the rundown chapel where one of the film's nightmarish centerpiece sequences occur. It is all underpinned by a strange, almost hypnotic score, and a series of chilling, surreal sequences that are truly the stuff of nightmares. Stars Stanwyck and Robert Taylor (her real-life ex-husband) gives solid performances, and Stanwyck (at times appearing to do a Marion Crane impression) never veers into full-fledged hysterics, though she comes close.
The film's final act is a bit of a letdown in the sense that it is somewhat anticlimactic, though it is not entirely a failure. All in all, "The Night Walker" is an effective, unusual horror film, and an oddball entry in Castle's filmography in that it does not feature an extra-diegetic gimmick or Castle's signature sense of playfulness. In a sense, it is a darker entry in his body of work, though it still possesses some semblance of levity, hence the "Twilight Zone" comparison. 8/10.