When you dream, you become THE NIGHT WALKER in William Castle's gimmick-free scarefest on Blu-ray from Scream Factory.

Hairdresser-turned-housewife Irene Trent (Barbara Stanwyck, DOUBLE INDEMNITY) cannot even find peace in sleep, as her recurring dreams of a nameless, faceless lover have her wealthy blind scientist husband Howard Trent (I DREAM OF JEANNIE's Hayden Rorke) believing that she is unfaithful to him in waking life. While his lawyer Barry Morland (Robert Taylor, QUO VADIS) rebuffs his client's accusations that he is Irene's lover, he is not so charitable to Irene when she tries to convince him that her lover only exists in her dreams. When she is conveniently out of the house after a fight with Howard who then perishes in a lab explosion, Irene falls under suspicion of his murder. Unable to stay in the mansion after nightmares of her husband's fire-scarred apparition, Irene's decision to set up house in the apartment above her beauty salon provokes further suspicions from Barry. When her dream lover (Lloyd Bochner, THE DUNWICH HORROR) appears to her apparently in the flesh and takes her on a midnight trip to a wedding chapel, she not only comes to believe that he is real but also that her husband – whose body was never recovered since the intense heat of the explosion was thought to have obliterated every trace of it – is not tormenting her from beyond the grave but is still very much alive.

A somewhat classier horror excursion for Castle, THE NIGHT WALKER was made for Universal after his independently-produced HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL netted him a contract with Columbia Pictures that furnished higher production values with the period MR. SARDONICUS, 3D photography and exhibition for 13 GHOTS, and Joan Crawford for STRAITJACKET! (scripted like THE NIGHT WALKER by PSYCHO source novel author Robert Bloch). THE NIGHT WALKER had no 3D effects or admission ballyhoo, but its overfamiliar gaslighting scenario is well-played by Stanwyck, Taylor, and Bochner (the former two not having worked together since their divorce a decade before) with an ambiguous turn by Judi Meredith (QUEEN OF BLOOD) as the too-helpful beauty salon employee just hired by faithful Hilda (Rochelle Hudson, GALLERY OF HORROR). While Castle filtered PSYCHO through his gimmickry in STRAITJACKET! with audiences given cardboard axes, THE NIGHT WALKER found him referencing Hitchcock again by way of SPELLBOUND; however, the images to be interpreted in the dreams are literal landmarks rather than symbols, and Stanwyck's heroine is lead by the nose as much as the audience with nothing to work with more than suspicions until the script lets drop more exposition. The Universal contract regulars provide some nice sets while the exterior of the Trent mansion is a familiar location that also showed up much later in WITCHBOARD, while the monochrome photography of Harold E. Stine (MASH) looks a step up from his television work for the most part, but the shining element is really the playful score of Vic Mizzy (THE ADDAMS FAMILY) which evokes the macabre far more than anything else in the film. Castle's Universal tenure did not produce the same string of hits, with only the fun I SAW WHAT YOU DID! and LET'S KILL UNCLE to come before finishing out his filmography at Paramount with his producing success in ROSEMARY'S BABY, the lesser BUG, and his little-seen final directorial effort SHANKS. The long introductory sequence on the nature of dreams and nightmares narrated by Paul Frees might seem like padding in any other film but is not unlike the preambles that introduced HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and 13 GHOSTS.

Long unavailable after its Universal theatrical release apart from television airings, THE NIGHT WALKER popped up on VHS in the early 1990s with the resurgence of interest in Universal's lesser known horrors. It proved elusive once again in the DVD era, and when it finally reached the format in 2015, it was a non-anamorphic letterboxed transfer as part of a double feature with DARK INTRUDER as part of a Universal/TCM double feature disc. Scream Factory's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray is a new HD master from the film's interpositive, and the monochrome film looks spectacular with nice contrasts and detail evident after the wavy opticals of the title sequence and protracted introduction. While Stanwyck, Taylor, Bochner, and Meredith are given the glamour treatment, Rorke's blind man make-up does not hold up as well in HD but the resolution does make his burn make-up later more striking and the sculpted feature of the mannequins also gain a sense of depth in their expressionistically canted close-ups. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track boasts clear dialogue but it is Mizzy's score that gains a certain tactile presence with the lossless presentation. Optional English SDH subtitles are also provided.