Sure,
William Castle wasn’t known for high-brow art films, nor for subtlety, but
sometimes his single-minded focus on one intriguing premise yielded wonderfully
surreal and kitschy results. Thanks to his collaboration with screenwriter
Robert Bloch – on this film and the preceding Straight-Jacket (1964) –
Castle was able to evolve from hilariously pathetic gimmicks like “Emergo” for House on Haunted Hill and
“Percepto” for The
Tingler (both 1959). Aping the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1962), Castle enthusiastically leapt aboard the “hagsploitation” genre by
casting Joan Crawford in Straight-Jacket and
Barbara Stanwyck in The
Night Walker. As with the memorable explanatory prologues to 13 Ghosts (1960) and
other Castle films, The
Night Walker has one of the best; an animated sequence outlining a
pseudo-scientific history of dreams and nightmares. Tormented by a tyrannical,
jealous and blind husband who does something in a private laboratory upstairs,
Stanwyck is visited by a handsome young lover in her dreams every night. After
the husband dies in a lab explosion, the widow’s dreams take on a more
disturbing quality, leading her to believe that she is either going mad or
being gaslighted by an unknown villain. Stanwyck’s frequent caterwauling will
get a laugh or a wince from most viewers. Her beleaguered earnestness is what
keeps driving the film after Castle’s showmanship loses steam. The intro and
early dream sequences are fun, but afterwards the plot is pretty humdrum.
Stanwyck sure screams her head off, though.
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