1. Dead of Night - The Wraparound
DEAD OF NIGHT is one of the original horror anthology films and has by hailed by many, including Martin Scorsese, as being one of the greatest horror films ever made. While it may seem somewhat quaint to todays audience, theres something wonderfully offbeat and creepy about the film that lasts to this day. For the right sort of viewer, someone with an appreciation for stories like The Turn of the Screw or The Woman in Black the low-key spookiness of these stories that will linger. In a lot of ways, DEAD OF NIGHT more easily recalls the TWILIGHT ZONE than modern horror. Theres an off-handed ease to the way the supernatural and natural worlds overlap, and to the characters reactions to these events. Take a wrong turn in a mansion and youll come unstuck in time. Buy the wrong mirror at a boutique and you can suddenly peer into the land of the dead. Nowhere is this ease with other-worldliness more appreciable than in the wraparound segment. Usually the weakest part of an anthology film, relegated to little more than an after-thought, here the linking story (directed by Basil Dearden) sets the exact right tone for all the tales to come and is able to mount its own crawling sense of dread. A man arrives at a country house, finding a small party underway. Everyones friendly, but hes put-off: Hes seen all this before, in a dream. He cant remember how it ends but he knows that something terrible happens, something he must stop. But is this just a coincidence or a true premonition? You can probably guess where this is going, but the film does an excellent job of keeping you off-balance mounting tension and when the ending does spring, it allows the story to fold back in on itself and return to each previous story with a nightmare logic thatll leave the audience staggered as the credits begin to roll.
Runner-up: The Ventriloquist dummy sequence is probably the most influential and well-known (with good reason.Ventriloquist dummies are an easy mark for horror because VENTRILOQUIST DUMMIES ARE FREAKIGN TERRIFYING WHY DO THEY EXIST WHYYYYYY sorry, had to get that out there) but my money for best goes to the Haunted Mirror story. Marred by an ending that obliterates all mystery, the rest of the story hits the perfect note of overwhelming dread. At its best, the mirror story broaches the notion of a malicious, otherworldly intelligence asserting its will with the finest of Lovecraft and King.