“Danny, we’re not playing any more!”

Danny (Albert Finney) is an eight-year-old boy trapped in a burly man’s body – all nervous energy and violent mood swings, desperate to be the centre of attention and determined not to let anyone spoil his fun.

He’s motto also appears to be “if you want to get ahead, get… a head”, because unlike other films of this ilk, there’s no ambiguity in THIS film.

In the first few minutes, as we see potential victim Olivia Brunstrom (Susan Hampshire) enjoying her soon-to-be-disrupted idyllic life as she flounces around a sun-drenched garden in a floaty frock, there’s Danny busy bludgeoning an unseen someone to death and throwing the body into a nearby pond.

Olivia lives a strange, detached life with her disabled, wheelchair-bound mother (Mona Washbourne), the pair of them looked after by the maid, Dora (a fragile performance by Sheila Hancock). Danny is the unsuspecting Dora’s boyfriend, and on a visit to see her he manages to inveigle his way into the Brunstrom’s home, charming the mother (or “Mrs Jam-Spoon”, as he christens her) into giving him a job as a live-in decorator. He arrives the next day on his scooter, the camera lingering on a hatbox (oh-oh) he has strapped to the parcel carrier.

Danny, despite all his boasting, is terrible at decorating, but Mrs Jam-Spoon doesn’t care. She’s fallen for the boy’s chunky charms, and he quickly becomes a permanent fixture in the house. Mrs Jam-Spoon may be in love with him (“You could call me mother,” she tells him, her normally strident voice reduced to a simpering, almost orgasmic plea), but young Danny only has eyes for her daughter. Like Danny, Olivia is a child in an adult’s body after a lifetime of being dominated by her mother, and she has watched, powerless to intervene, as the brash, bullying interloper has taken over the house.

But just as Danny seems to have conquered the entire household, the outside world arrives in the form of Olivia’s boyfriend Derek (Michael Medwin) - a four-square, tweed-jacketed, cricket-playing chap of the first order. Danny’s good mood evaporates as he watches through his attic window as Derek arrive in his sports car and instantly becomes the centre of attention for the two Brunstrom women. Danny’s brittle composure disappears entirely and he flips out, ending up scratching at the walls of his bedroom with his fingernails, over and over again. He grabs the hat box, opens it, and mouths the word “hello” before retching and throwing it to one side.

But all is actually not well between Olivia and Derek, and he leaves her. Danny begins his seduction of the newly-single girl, as nearby, the police are seen conducting a search of the pond.

Olivia is now falling for Danny’s rough charms, and she wanders up to his bedroom to find out more about him, rifling through his possessions (which include a strangely spooky glovemakers’ dummy hand and little else) to try and find out more about the new object of her affection. He arrives before she has the chance to look in the hat box and reacts angrily to this intrusion (there’s a remarkable ramping up of the tension as she tries to put the jigsaw-like dummy hand back together again), and things look like they’re about to turn nasty, but in the next scene the pair of them are laughing and messing about as he teaches her to ride his scooter. Now Olivia, too, is enamoured with the boy (“I just wanted to know you. I love you, Danny.”), putting him at the centre of a bizarre ménage a quatre. And the police have now dragged the pond, and found the body and the murder weapon…

For much of its runtime Night Must Fall is more stagey melodrama than outright horror, apart from the closing scenes of Mrs Jam-Spoon wheeling her way around the house, the camera close-up on her face as she begins to panic (“Danny, we’re not playing any more!”). But there is much to recommend it. The crisp black-and-white photography is wonderful, and the performances are uniformly excellent. The tension is done well and the feeling of powerlessness as Danny ruins everyone’s lives is palpable. His is a genuinely terrifying screen presence, and it is used to perfection here.