Escape Into Night (1972)

Escape Into Night (1972)

Dir. Richard Bramall | 6 episodes, approx 25 mins each.

Adapted from British novelist Catherine Storr's Marianne Dreams (1958), Escape is the story of what happens when a young girl's dreams become a kind of second reality for the incapacitated youth.

Marianne (Vikki Chambers) is confined to bed by the family doctor, on account of a cracked leg bone obtained in a riding accident. She's told it may take up to six weeks to heal. The news displeases Marianne, who's normally a very physically active child, so to pass the time she picks up a drawing pad and an old pencil and exercises her imagination.

When she dreams her drawings are brought to life in a peculiar way. She's able to walk around inside and around them. But when the young girl's thoughts become troubled in real life her dream place takes on a similarly dark tone, shaped by her adolescent frustrations and troubled, emotional outpourings.

The series was shot on colour stock, but the original masters were "junked many years ago," according to the blurb on the back of the box. The current DVD edition issued by Network uses a black and white (made for export) telerecording as its source. Because it was lit for colour, the contrasts of the B+W image aren't ideal but its better than no version at all. Incidentally, B+W is probably how most people remember it being screened, because a colour TV in 1972 was something that few working-class households had.

- The isolated house that Marianne draws, as it exists in her dreams -

Marianne can sometimes be more annoying than sympathetic, and the mother figure is badly written, but the series does okay, all things considered. The haunting aura within the house is well-placed, helped along by a ticking clock reminding us that time is of the essence for at least one of the characters. And the notion is clear that the consequences of what we do in anger sometimes can't easily be erased thereafter. The FX of what lurks outside the house are less successful visually, but for the most part manage to tick the eerie boxes in other ways.

NOTE: if you feel that part of what's written in the opening few paragraphs sounds vaguely familiar but are sure that you've not seen the series, then you may have seen a film called Paperhouse (1988), which is based on the same text. Paperhouse is much more successful in exploring its themes than Escape Into Night is, but the film version had the benefit of a higher budget and better actors. There are some powerful differences in the story, too.