Three scientists left a cinema in the 1940s, and one asked a question that would split the field of cosmology for a generation: What if the universe is like that film?

An architect arrives at a country house and comes to realize he has met everyone there before, in a recurring nightmare, and that he knows how the evening ends. The guests tell him uncanny stories to calm him, five tales in all. His dread intensifies as he becomes increasingly suspicious that his life is a never-ending loop.

DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) was made by Britain's Ealing Studios, famous for gentle comedies, in a country that had all but banned horror during the war. It arguably kicked off the entire anthology-horror tradition.

Its most famous tale, Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist certain his dummy is alive and scheming, remains the story every killer-doll since has been measured against. Scorsese lists it among the scariest films ever made.

But Dead of Night's most unlikely influence was on science. Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, and Hermann Bondi said this film inspired their steady state theory of the universe, which was for years the great rival to the Big Bang theory.