Dementia / Daughter of Horror

Where do avant cinema and exploitation meet? Somewhere on the crusty margins of '50s Hollywood, perhaps. Consider the case of Dementia, written and directed by John Parker, shot in 1953 in poverty row studios in Hollywood, finally released in 1955 in a small art-house in New York after two years of censorship battles. Completely without dialogue, with only the eerie music of firebrand composer George Antheil and a sparse use of sound effects to accompany the images, a woman's descent into madness and dark isolation meanders with the dream logic and visual archness one usually finds in the "poetic cinema" of the period, although harsher and crueller than what you would find in Maya Deren.

Transparently Freudian in a way that belies its 1950s vintage, the film follows the "gamine" (as the young lady is called in the credits) as she saunters through the expressionistic skid row of Venice, California (with the long shadows and locations Orson Welles would appropriate with greater success in Touch of Evil). She accepts a ride from a cigar chomping fatcat, then retreats to a memory of an apparent patricide which takes place in a misty graveyard lorded over by a man with a black stocking mask. Then back to the here and now where our heroine watches in disgust as the fatcat noisily slurps and chomps on a chicken dinner. The gamine produces a switchblade and (in a really nice shot) the fatcat falls to his death several stories below. She finds her victim's body on the street surrounded by passersby, all wearing black stocking masks. The victim clutches her huge olympic sized pendant. She attempts to remove it but the death hand won't relinquish its grip. In a scene that upset the New York state censors, the man's lifeless head rocks back and forth while she saws his hand off with the switchblade. We follow her to a hepcat cellar where she unwinds to bebop provided by Shorty Rogers and his combo. Things get frenetic when her handless victim appears at the club's streetlevel window. She retreats to her dank noir apartment, where all is well, except for the man's hand writhing in a bureau drawer.

While the storyline seems grimly adolescent, one must remember that Dementia was shot in 1953 and that it was intended as an arty but earnest exploration of abnormal psychology. It's also not hard to see in its influences several antecedents from earlier avant garde films: the disembodied hand seems straight out of Luis Buñuel and Un Chien Andalou, the long shadows and harsh lighting from German Expressionism. Also, Dementia's composer George Antheil also provided the music for painter Fernand Leger's 1924 experimental smash Ballet Mécanique. Alas, this sort of pedigree does not usually spell boffo biz on Main Street America, or even on the piss scented streets of midtown Manhattan where it had a short-lived engagement (along with a co-feature documentary on Picasso) in 1955 at the 55th St. Playhouse After that, despite a glowing testimony from Preston Sturges (!)(who called the film "a work of art... It stirred my blood and purged my libido..."), the film known as Dementia simply disappeared, never to be seen again for decades.

Enter Daughter of Horror. Its history is pretty hazy, but, apparently, an outfit called Exploitation Productions Incorporated thought Dementia was just good enough to add some voice-over narration (courtesy of an announcer from Philadelphia named Ed McMahon), rename the effort Daughter of Horror, grind out a few prints and push them through the drive-in circuit. Once the prints have been too tattered and fried from way too many spook shows, Daughter of Horror would have been lucky to be shown on late night television.

Interestingly, it was its inclusion as the feature shown in the movie theater attacked by the blob in The Blob that may have saved Dementia/Daughter of Horror from complete ignonimity. Many fans thought the title on the marquee ("MIDNIGHT SPOOK SHOW - DAUGHTER OF HORROR also BELA LUGOSI") was some imaginary generic horror movie title dreamt by The Blob's makers, and discussions raged in the pages of early 60s horror movie magazines as to the film's existence.

It was probably an essay by Jim Morton in Re/Search's seminal Incredibly Strange Films book from 1986 that created a resurgence of interest in this little off-beat piece of marginal cinema. Until recently the film (as Daughter of Horror) was only availible as the crappiest of VHS dupes. Many thought that the original source of Dementia had been destroyed in the manufacture of Daughter of Horror. Fortunately, that was not the case. Indeed, the pristine original negative of Dementia had been unearthed and brought out by Kino in a very nice DVD package double-billed with a nice looking version of Daughter of Horror. Watched back to back (which is only recommended to the heartiest of souls), one finds that, except for the inclusion of McMahon's boogie-man narration and very short appearance in the beginning of the movie, the two films are essentially the same. It's interesting to ponder that the same film exhibited at a small Manhattan art house also played at drive-ins in the South and Midwest. Such is the strange democracy of cinema.

For more info on this film(s), Flickhead has a good piece, as does DVD Savant.