Agatha Christie published Endless Night late in her career, in 1967. It’s a stand-alone novel, without the stabilizing center provided by either of her famous detectives, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. It is, perhaps because of that, a good place to start for horror fans interested in how Christie’s work as mystery writer frequently veers into horror. While the novel itself contains many horror elements, I’m focusing here on the (quite faithful) 1972 film adaptation, which brilliantly amplifies those elements.
Here is the trailer for Endless Night:
A quick summary of the plot (and, again, the film tracks very closely to the novel): Endless Night is the story of a working-class English man, Michael Rogers (Hywel Bennett), who meets, instantly falls in love with, and marries a rich American heiress, Ellie Thomsen (Hayley Mills). Except it’s perhaps fairer to say that Mike falls in love with a particular place – Gipsy’s Acre, which lies on the coast in England. From the moment he sees it, he is determined to build a house there; that he marries a wealthy American heiress makes this desire a reality. Mike and Ellie build their dream house (actually, Mike’s dream house) and they move in. Before long, though, Ellie is thrown from her horse and killed – and it’s revealed that Mike, along with Ellie’s companion and close friend, Greta (Britt Ekland), murdered her so they could get her money (and the house). Christie’s Endless Night is told by Mike (revealed to be an unreliable narrator), and the 1972 film adaptation, written and directed by Sidney Gilliat, follows not only the plot of the novel, but also hews close to Mike’s perspective.
“You could see for miles all around”: The object of Michael Rogers’ desire
There are many ways in which Endless Night (novel and film) can be read as horror, including the fact that the land on which Gipsy’s Acre is built is allegedly cursed – and both novel and film feature a witch-like older woman who keeps insisting to Mike and (especially) Ellie that the land they’ve built on is cursed and that they are doomed (something like the ‘harbinger’ figure who has since become a staple of slasher films).
The horror of being seen
What I want to focus on here is how both the novel and the film, but especially the film, center the horror of looking and being looked at – watching and being watched. Being watched is a staple trope of horror, not least in two films from British directors that precede Endless Night: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, which famously features Norman Bates spying on the doomed Marion Crane through a peep-hole,[i] and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, also released in 1960, about a man who films women close-up as he murders them – insisting that they watch themselves die, just as he repeatedly does.
Mike Rogers and his acts of murder are, like the killers of Psycho and Peeping Tom, entangled in the relations of looking. Mike hates to be looked at or watched, something that is very much about keeping his psychopathy – his utter lack of morality and his acts of violence – from the eyes of others. As a result, his narration in both the novel and the film weave webs of misdirection, ensuring he’s not ‘seen’ (as in known) by anyone (except apparently his partner in crime, Greta, although we ‘see’ virtually nothing of what they are like together).
The eye that centrally haunts the film (and Mike): “Thou God seest me”
Mike’s absolute aversion to being seen (as who he really is) is evident in a haunting motif in the film – the presence of a Biblical text, “Thou, God, seest me,” which hung on his wall as a child and which seems to haunt him in later life.[ii] The film of Endless Night also includes a scene (not in the novel) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where Mike stares for a long time at a 1662 Rembrandt painting called ‘Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild” – a painting of stern men staring from the frame at him: “They seemed to be quietly sizing me up and finding me wanting,” he says, in voiceover, a comment that links up with his mother’s saying to him, “You never liked being watched.” Indeed, the house that Mike has built pointedly has an entire side made of glass that his architect says cannot be seen through: no one can see in, no one can see them, even as they can look out.
Mike looking at Rembrandt’s ‘Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild,’ as the men in the painting look at him
The murderous dehumanizing gaze
While Mike hides, making sure no one “sees” him, retaining his power, he looks – gaining mastery over what he sees. He likes the site of Gipsy’s Acre precisely because “You could see for miles all around. . . . It’s as if I could see the house I’d dreamed about.” And, for him, to see is to capture, to possess – just as much as when Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom films, masters and kills women. Mike says in voiceover at the opening of Endless Night: “I’ll never forget Gipsy’s Acre as I saw it for that very first time.” And then he sees Ellie. He decides to possess both – specifically, to possess Ellie in order to possess the house. For what Mike desires is things – as Fiona Peters points out. Mike’s marriage to Ellie, Peters writes, “is predicated on his desire, not for another human being but for a house, a fantasy house.”[iii] His is a violently dehumanizing look, as he only ever sees Ellie as a means to an end.
Mike’s dehumanizing gaze, desirous only of things, which destroys Ellie (among others) explains the haunting images of Ellie and another of Mike’s victims, Mrs. Townsend, who appear in heavily edited and surreal montage scenes with bandages covering their faces. They return, faceless, to confront Mike, reflecting back to him the dehumanizing way he looked at them, a look concomitant with his ability to murder them. Not looking – reflecting back his particular brand of evil, they damn him – something he realizes in horror at the end of the film.
Two of Mike’s victims, reflecting his dehumanization of them
Endless Night ends with Mike being interviewed by a doctor, evoking the famous ending of Psycho, in which Norman is studied by a psychiatrist. The doctor tells Mike, “You know, you never tell the same story twice,” indicating the extent to which Mike is detached from reality. The film then concludes with a montage, three images cross-cut with reverse shots of Mike: the Biblical text, “Thou, God, seest me,” Ellie standing at Gipsy’s Acre, and the landscape with an eye centered in it: the camera moves closer to the eye until it is all encompassing, staring at Mike. His ability to evade being seen, being looked at, is gone. He is now caught in the gaze of the other – and he screams.
The eye that consumes Mike at the end of the film
Endless Night’s ending is not unlike the final track of the camera towards Norman Bates’s face in Psycho – towards his eyes, as the film uncovers the extent of his insanity. Mike Rogers and Norman Bates are quite different in the nature of their murderous pathology, but the two films’ emphasis on their eyes – on the insanity of their respective ways of seeing – ties them together as modern horror films with a similar interest in the perspective of the killer and its integral link to seeing and being seen.
Notes
[i] There’s another connection to Psycho in that Bernard Herrmann, who famously created the score for Psycho, also did the score for Endless Night. Indeed, Mark Aldridge notes that Hitchcock was the biggest influence on 1972’s Endless Night (120), and that contemporary reviews noted that Endless Night’s twist may have surprised even Alfred Hitchcock (122). Mark Aldridge, Agatha Christie on Screen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
[ii] This text is mentioned only fleetingly in the novel, and it is something that hung on Mike’s mother’s bedroom wall, not his. It looms much larger in the film – appearing repeatedly in Mike’s mind.
[iii] Fiona Peters, “Agatha Christie: Evil, Love, Desire,” Crime Fiction Studies, 3.2 (2022), p. 126.
