At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Incredibly well written, somewhat hammy acting at some points, overall, a masterfully told story with great twists and turns!

Irene Trent (Barbara Stanwyck) is struggling with her nightmarish world. Her possessive blind inventor husband Howard supposedly dies in a laboratory fire but she continues to be haunted by his presence. Her lawyer Barry Morland locks up the destroyed lab and she moves out of the home.This is solid for a modest B-horror. It has veteran actress Barbara Stanwyck and serves as her last theatrical performance. There is a good nightmare world. It's lower budget with limited sets. Some of it is definitely older style horror. This is not going to break the mold but I always like Stanwyck.

With sinister music sounding much like "Oliver's" "Food Glorious Food" and taking it down the realm of something you might hear in Disney's Haunted Mansion, "The Night Walker" is perhaps one of the best of the "Let's put an axe in the old dame's hand and see what she does with it" films. O.K., so leading lady Barbara Stanwyck gets no axe or butcher knife, but what she does get is to scream her head off as she wonders why the nightmares she's having seem so real. Stanwyck gets the chance to be reunited with her ex-husband, Robert Taylor, here, but really, it is her show, not his. Taylor's presence is really more of a curio for their first teaming in almost 30 years and the gossip columnist's opportunity to recall their Cinderella romance of the mid-late 30's which lead to his alleged infidelities and their divorce in the early 1950's.Hayden Roarke, of "I Dream of Jeannie" fame, plays Stanwyck's deceased husband who died years ago in a fire, and his presence in her nightmares make Stanwyck convinced that something amiss. You half expect her to scream, like Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby", in the middle of one of these dreams, that she's aware that what she appears to be dreaming is truly real. Lloyd Bochner, who ironically played one of Stanwyck's brothers on "Dynasty" (whom she never got to share scenes with), is another presence in the dream, and this is where the spooky music comes in. The film isn't as scary as the same year's "Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte", but it isn't as campy as either "Baby Jane" or "Die Die My Darling!". What it is turns out to be a riveting thriller where Stanwyck, after years of all those "tough dame" roles, gets to be a little more vulnerable, and is totally convincing in doing so.While William Castle certainly turned up the "camp" level in his films at Columbia, here he gets a more seriously themed plot than normal, and the laughs (both intentional and unintentional) are at a minimal. Several other veterans are seen in pivotal roles, but this is a shear reminder of the power that Stanwyck had shown, and continued to show, way past her romantic leading lady/film noir femme fatal prime and makes her one of the treasured stars of the golden age of cinema long after her career ended.

The "Grand Guignol"-style in horror movies became a hot box office commodity after Robert Aldrich's runaway hit WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962)and, true to form, legendary film-making showman William Castle jumped on that band wagon (quite successfully, I might add) with one of that film's stars, Joan Crawford, in STRAIT-JACKET (1964). This immediate follow-up exercise in similar vein adds an intriguing element of Freudian psychodrama and cleverly casts a former royal couple of Hollywood, Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck (whose final theatrical feature film this turned out to be!), in the leading roles; I should be following this with their much earlier on screen collaboration, THIS IS MY AFFAIR (1937). Opening with a remarkably eerie animated sequence on the nature of dreams – I even seemed to recognize the silhouette of the titular creature from that crazy Mexican flick, THE BRAINIAC (1962) as one of the haunting nightmare figures! – it gives the audience its very first jolt immediately as a creepy, Mabuse-like, eyeless figure comes pacing towards the camera! It turns out he is no figment of the imagination but Stanwyck's blind, embittered millionaire husband (Hayden Rorke – whose decidedly effective facial make-up is first-rate) walking around his mansion as his wife has her nightly dream of a romantic liaison with a mystery man (compulsively recorded on tape, as is every other conversation held within his household)! Taylor plays the millionaire's lawyer and, suspected of being his wife's lover, learns that his employer has had Stanwyck followed by detective Lloyd Bochner. After Rorke's death in an inexplicable explosion in his laboratory(?!), Stanwyck (who was virtually held captive by her deeply suspicious husband) bafflingly goes to live in the back-room of a hairdressing salon headed by young Judi Meredith who, lo and behold, is not really as sweet-natured as her attractive exterior suggests! As can be expected from such 'let's-drive-an-heiress-mad' scenarios, the plot thickens with new twists and turns every few minutes and, among the highlights we have: Stanwyck's dead-of-night wedding – in a supposedly abandoned chapel – with Bochner (who is amusingly billed as "The Dream" in the opening credits) presided over and witnessed by waxwork dummies and the climactic fistfight between Bochner and Taylor in Rorke's lab – which is about to blow up for the third time in the film! Driven by a minimalist but catchy score by Vic Mizzy (of TV's "The Addams Family" fame) – even if the main musical motif is oddly reminiscent of the "Food, Glorious Food" number from Lionel Bart's musical "OLIVER!" – THE NIGHT WALKER is possibly the second best – after the utterly unique oddity SHANKS (1974) – of the 8 William Castle films I have watched so far (although, thankfully, I will soon be filling in some of the remaining gaps with 4 more)…which makes its absence on DVD (I had to make do with a full-frame VHS rip of acceptable quality) almost as big an enigma as the strange occurrences that befall the sturdy Stanwyck throughout the film!