Halloween Post-Mortem: “Dementia” (aka “Daughter of Horror”)

Yes, that’s the Preston Sturges!

This year, I revisited Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead Trilogy, Boris Karloff’s “The Mummy”, and a grossly overlooked gem, the latter of which needs to be seen.

“Dementia” has been on my mind. Not the real dementia, though I’m familiar with it, nor Coppola’s “Dementia 13”. No, I’ve been turning over a film also known as “Daughter of Horror.”

Also known as…

If a case could be made that David Lynch was actually born a couple of decades earlier and made an unreleasable movie in the fifties, this is it, and I’d be prone to believe that. 

Recently, the film popped up on my radar since it’s undergone a remastering and if I recall correctly, will stream in its renewed form next year. My understanding is that it was remastered a couple of years back by BFI, and while it was an upgrade, inadvertent cuts were made (to the credits, I think, but also to the soundtrack). This is a shame because the only version I’ve been able to find is in its incarnation as “Daughter of Horror” with an overwrought voiceover. However, this didn’t detract from the experience for me (I’m fairly adept at ignoring the shit that people do to films once they’ve been taken out of the original hands.)

There’s an awful lot that makes this film notable/notorious. At the very least, it’s no surprise it didn’t find distribution: there’s drug use/addiction, gruesome murder, dismemberment, and most shocking for the 50s, a black and white couple dancing! All of this is set to an avant-grade soundtrack by George Antheil accompanied by Marni Nixon whose voice is too organic to be a Theremin. Of course, it’s a non- or somewhat linear narrative with no dialog and only diegetic sounds when they do occur. It’s as somnambulistic as anything Lynch or Bunuel have done (well, for the time, let’s say) and I don’t see where it would have been a big draw had it received wide release. 

That said, it’s a beauty. Seriously. Ignore the ham-handed narration and you’re walking into a young woman’s nightmare. To be sure, it does traffic in the “was it really just a dream” trope, but all in all, that doesn’t detract from what unspools.

There are no names, Adrienne Barrett (no relation to me) plays The Gamine (or “Gamin” in the credits - good form urges me to correct the spelling), Bruno VeSoto as Rich Man, and others, including Shelly Berman as stoned beatnik/junkie, Shorty Rogers as himself (and his band The Giants, turning in some smoking jazz), and Angelo Rossitto as a newsboy.

We follow The Gamine into the streets after she awakes from a disturbed sleep. She encounters the newsboy and picks up a newspaper from him with the headline “Mysterious Stabbing.” She smiles at the headline - one of a series of dissonant/disturbing expressions Barrett will make in the film - discards the paper and walks off into the distance. I need to point out now that the cinematography is top notch. The DP is William C. Thompson, most well known as the man who lensed a number of Ed Wood’s films. Before we get too far ahead, I want to make a few more notes about Thompson as a cinematographer.

He was born in 1889 and began in the teens of the twentieth century as a cinematographer. In fact, he was the DP for the first Canadian feature film, an adaptation of Longfellow’s “Evangeline”.  A quick glance at his filmography shows no major masterpieces of what many would call “legitimate” films. Much of his work seems to have been on genre films through the decades and it appears that his greatest claim to fame would be Wood’s opuses like “Jail Bait”, “Glen or Glenda” and the infamous “Plan 9 from Outer Space.” 

In fairness to Thompson, his work - even for Wood - evinces remarkable skill and craft, and I say this with no irony: it is his camerawork that keeps Wood’s oeuvre from being completely disregarded. On this last point, I’m not sure that I’m an Ed Wood, Jr. apologist, but his films are not “the worst” of all time. In fact, I’ve covered worse films here in this blog.

If anything, Thompson had a remarkable command of composition and deep focus. His range of values is as good as anything I’ve seen in “better” movies and here, in “Dementia/Daughter of Horror”, he delivers visuals as rich as any you’re likely to find by other cinematographers. Most of any “special effects” seems to take place in-camera and I get the sense that was born of forty years of experience, almost since film’s inception. 

Returning to the narrative, such as it is (it’s really more of an impression of a tale, almost Poelike), The Gamine finds herself accosted by a drunk in an alley who is then beat up by a cop as she looks on giddily, palpable amused/aroused by the violence. Barrett was director-writer John Parker’s secretary and this movie grew out of a dream she had. She has a fairly plain aspect about her, until events begin spinning out of control. Then she regains her composure until the next crescendo. 

After she leaves the beating, she encounters The Pimp. It’s hard to say that she’s at odds with what he has planned for her and while she doesn’t seem happy that she has to tool around the town with Rich Man as a result of her being bartered to him, she doesn’t flee, either. And she’s armed with a switchblade, so you know that’s going to come into play (Chekov’s switchblade, anyone? Anyone?) 

It’s in the limousine with Rich Man that she has a traumatic flashback to her father who may or may not have molested her, his shooting of her mother as he discovers she’s been having an affair in a fairly emasculating pantomime, and her stabbing her father to death. It’s a quick, brutal scene and executed as quickly as such violence actually happens. It’s not the most accomplished bit of photography, but it’s expressionistic enough that it lodges in the mind deeply.

VeSoto (Rich Man), a bit player in too many films to begin listing here, claims to have directed most of the film and co-written it. In the interview I read with him, he seemed too insistent and while he has some writing and directing credits, they’re nothing this good. In any case, he’s a dead ringer for Jack Black in a blond wig and I couldn’t help but wonder what this film would be like as a remake with Black in the role.

Rich Man and The Gamine truck from night club to night club in a sequential montage that evokes more dread (remember, she’s been pimped and is armed) than glamor. Once they arrive at his penthouse, The Gamine endures his piano playing, and his consuming his dinner of chicken wings. It’s not the worst example of gluttony nor could it approach more graphic examples of repellant dining (think “Gummo”); but in the context of what Barrett’s character is facing, it is disgusting. 

In the scene we know is coming, he offers her a roll of bills and she stabs him and although it’s not clear in the print I viewed, he apparently falls out the window, plunging to a more certain death after ripping off her necklace. Before she exits the penthouse, she passes Rich Man’s butler who grins one of the oddest grins in an exceptionally odd movie. The tacit assumption I have is that he witnessed the murder and was pretty pleased about it. 

She flees downstairs, dropping any pretense to cool once she discovers her necklace missing and once she finds his body on the sidewalk (surrounded by faceless individuals called “ghouls” in the voiceover), she tries to wrest the necklace from Rich Man’s clenched fist. Failing to free it from his grasp, she take out her switchblade and severs the hand and takes off with it.

The film goes full oneiric (like it wasn’t before?) at this point and we see her pursued by a cop with her father’s face (and another disturbing smile) through the streets. She finds her way to a speakeasy/after hours club where - according to the judge-y narrative - she can be free with “her own kind” (Christ, now I hate that voiceover) and meets a posh fellow who presents her with a lovely evening gown. Her rather dowdy outfit is replaced in a reverse shot straight out of Cocteau of the gown cascading onto her. From there, she enters the club, vibing to Shorty and his combo and surrounded by people who seem to be having a genuinely good time. Sure, some are hop-heads, some are just dancing, but this is a really bangin’ happening scene. Daddy-o.

But it’s too good to last. We see the coppers at the basement level window and the dick-in-pursuit comes in, pays his bribes and the tone shifts radically as everyone in the joint knows - knows, I tell you! - what she’s done! In a sequence that presages the 1979 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and evokes Peter Lorre’s isolation in “M”, she is surrounded by pointing people and then grasping hands. You almost feel the noose around her neck. Until she wakes up.

Normally, this would be a deal breaker for me, but she walks slowly over to her vanity, opens the top drawer and finds Rich Man’s hand still grasping her necklace. However, is this “real” or only part of a continuing nightmare/catastrophic mental breakdown. And here lies the genius of the piece: there are no answers.

As much as the idiotic narration co-opts and attempts to enforce a linear narrative on the proceedings, it simply can’t compete with the images unfolding before us. If by some chance, “Dementia” finds cinematic release, I’m there. It is immersive and spun out of dream logic the like of which we wouldn’t see again until “Eraserhead”. 

It’s not too difficult to see the film as an indictment of violence against women and its repercussions or as a journey through death, resurrection, and the limits to renewal in light of heinous actions regardless of motivation or as a journey into a traumatized mind on the order of Polanski’s “Repulsion” or all of these.

Parker and company shot the film in 1953 and it saw a limited screening in 1955 (when it was rebranded as “Daughter of Horror” with the appended narration). A snippet of it shows up in the Steve McQueen sci-fi vehicle “The Blob” and to say it was not well-received is neither surprising nor understatement. 

It is not surprising that it has been rediscovered, particularly having been something of a holy grail for film geeks through the 80s. Kino Lorber produced a version in 2000 and in 2020 the British Film Institute put both versions out on Blu-Ray. “Dementia” is available for free (with ads) on Tubi and I recommend seeing it however you can.

I should mention that the attribution of the narration to Ed McMahon isn’t definitive and that - one more aspect of this - William C. Thompson’s location shooting heralds Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil”; both films were shot at Venice Beach, and you can see the same locations in certain scenes (from different angles, of course). 

Additional resources/reading

Ellinger, Kat. In praise of Dementia, the psychosexual dream-horror that New York banned. British Film Institute. https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/dementia-john-parker. October 28, 2020. 

Kubincanek, Emily. The Unsettling Appeal of Dementia. Film School Rejects. https://filmschoolrejects.com/unsettling-appeal-of-dementia-movie-1955/?amp

McLean, Ralph. Cult Movie: John Parker's 1955 psychological horror Dementia was as influential as it is disturbing. The Irish Times. https://www.irishnews.com/arts/2020/10/02/news/cult-movie-john-parker-s-1955-psychological-horror-dementia-was-as-influential-as-it-is-disturbing-2080865/. October 2, 2020. 

None of the stills below quite capture Thompson’s photography, but are striking enough I think, to evoke it. Click on them to see enlargements.