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The Night Walker (1964)
"Have you ever dreamed that you were flying, flying into strange places, far beyond the worlds we know? Yes, that's it: fly. Fly! Maybe you can get away after all... fly! Fly! No. There's no escape. Now you're falling, falling... and they say if you ever complete that fall in a dream, you'll be dead. Yes, there's death in your dreams, too. Death and blood and the realm beyond death - the realm of eternity."
#the night walker#1964#american cinema#william castle#horror film#robert bloch#barbara stanwyck#robert taylor#judi meredith#hayden rorke#lloyd bochner#jess barker#rochelle hudson#marjorie bennett#tetsu komai#paul frees#paulle clark#vic mizzy#enjoyable Castle hijinks‚ notable for teaming up Stanwyck with ex husband Taylor and for a wonderfully effective score of#jangly‚ discordant strings by Addams Family composer Mizzy. Castle eschewed his usual stunts and theatre gimmicks in favour of the high#profile Stanwyck Taylor casting‚ and there's no onscreen intro by him either (but the opening narration we do get by Frees overlays some of#the most impressive imagery in the whole film‚ visual interpretations of dreams and nightmares that stand alongside some of the best trippy#visuals of this era). the plot is so much hokum but i must admit it kept me guessing to some degree; Stanwyck is very fine playing against#type‚ and Bochner makes for a suitably otherworldly dream figure. the final black and white feature from Universal studios‚ the lukewarm#reception of this film marked the beginning of the end of Castle's reign as a horror king of US cinema. he'd wanted Joan Crawford for the#lead and that's a film I'd have been very interested to see but props to Babs on a strong performance#outside of the dream stuff this owes a fair debt to Hitchcock's Psycho (which had been Bloch's own stepping stone into the film biz)
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