A pioneer of the postwar avant-garde film, Curtis Harrington, in his first feature, captures the Val Lewton (Cat People) spirit, creating a queasy world of legend, poetry and the occult that inserts itself into the everyday. In a California seaside locale, a young sailor on leave (Dennis Hopper) falls in love with a woman posing as a mermaid in a waterfront sideshow. Slithering into her fishscale outfit, she confesses she is a member of an ancient race of Sea People. Childhood fears have convinced this orphaned girl that she is a waterborne changeling, who must destroy the lonely men who yearn for her. Within Harrington's Poe-like conceit, she might well be a changeling. Played with imagined, not depicted horror, Night Tide never questions the intrusion of the fantastic into the banal circumstance of the amusement pier. Harrington himself stated that "the terror of waiting for the final revelation, not the seeing of it, is the most powerful dramatic stimulus toward tension and fright." The "fact" of the mermaid, then becomes an ambiguity wedged into the heart of the young sailor's love. Hopper's brooding, nocturnal character compounds the effect of dislocation. J. Hoberman observed: "Where another actor might have settled for bland sappiness, Hopper textures his naiveté with a borderline hysteria that seems all the more edgy for being surrounded by a galaxy of disconcertingly flat readings." The crumbling Santa Monica pier, with its decaying fun fairs and tawdry inhabitants, gives Harrington just the setting to turn the commonplace into a five-and-dime nightmare.