The made-for-TV From the Dead of Night, which premiered on NBC over two nights in 1989, opens with the ominous footsteps of a male-coded figure in a dark lobby. That is then intercut with a woman, Joanna Darby (The Bionic Woman’s Lindsay Wagner), toiling into the wee hours at a drafting desk. In the first of many red herrings, the eerie music dissolves into seductive pan flutes as the man is revealed to be Joanna’s boyfriend Glen (Robin Thomas), a dependable partner more interested in marriage than her burgeoning fashion design career. That weekend, Joanna escapes to the balmy backyard of a holiday party, avoiding her sexy-if-flaky anthropologist ex-boyfriend Peter (Bruce Boxleitner). Distracted, she trips and falls into the pool, hitting her head on a floral installation and drowning—a gossamer apparition floats away from her body and into a swirling, shadowy figure-filled tunnel until Glen revives her. Plagued by nightmares of those haunted moments, Joanna struggles to balance her professional success with increasingly violent threats to her life at the hands of zombie-like strangers and dire predictions from Tarot cards and psychic mediums alike. Prefiguring the Final Destination franchise by more than a decade, Joanna must figure out how to “cheat death’s plan” and escape her fate in Paul Wendkos’s From the Dead of Night.
With a three-hour commercial-free runtime, this film packs in plenty, from Joanna and Glen’s extended make-out scenes to pyrotechnic fashion shows and a procedural-style hunt through the autopsy reports of the so-called “walkers,” those gray-skinned, murderous citizens whose deaths seem to have occurred long before by causes other than those that have brought them to the morgue. Joanna’s mother’s recent passing suggests a potential cause for her obsession with her own mortality and the sinister significance of a few frightening if still plausible coincidences; a scholar of near-death experiences even suggests to Joanna that she might be suffering from “delayed grief syndrome,” an interpretation shared by Joanna’s outrageously sympathetic boss (the late, legendary Diahann Carroll). Perhaps most disturbing of all is the repeated motif of the nighttime stalker, revealed each time to be a male acquaintance or lover; or, the way the shadowy figures which seemed to stand stoically, arms crossed, during Joanna’s initial near-death experience eventually transform into violent, grasping phantasms in her recollections. These are all potent images for a film about a woman torn between two men whose paternalistic arguments over her care regularly turn physical. For a rising star in the fashion world, the prospect of marriage to a traditionally-minded man like Glen, who wants to be the sole breadwinner, represents a kind of death, echoing the abandonment Joanna suffered when Peter pursued international adventures while she cared for her ailing mother.
The film shifts gears into horror-action territory in the final act, dissipating the tension of these ambivalences for the sake of the genre’s more conventional approach to suspense. Directed by Wendkos, who is best known for the Gidget films and The Mephisto Waltz (1971), and based on a novel by Gary Brandner, whose The Howling can barely be recognized in the 1981 Joe Dante adaptation, From the Dead of Night is first and foremost a compelling if low-budget artifact of its time. Where the effects and plot twists leave a little something to be desired, the ample shoulder pads and vast studio apartments provide much to enjoy. One can’t help but wonder if the reference to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the influential death and dying scholar-turned-disgraced-death-denier and cult-member, landed potently with live TV viewers, inspiring a turn down the Near Death Experience rabbit hole in search of an explanation for Joanna’s turmoil? Then, Wendkos’s film is also a relic of the anthropological pop horror movie heyday—inspired in part by the likes of Wade Davis (author of 1985’s The Serpent and the Rainbow) and peaking with the original Candy Man (1992)—with its references to “witch doctors” and a lecture-hall performance by Peter that effectively freeze the film in 1989. Most troubling and generative of all is the insistence of every woman in Joanna’s life that her problem was “all in her mind,” accompanied by the threat of violence pulsing just beneath or emerging within her interactions with men, whether romantic partners or strangers. This is a timeless combination.
From the Dead of Night screens tonight, May 24, at Spectacle.
