"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Dementia 13

I don’t know what DEMENTIA 13 means, but that’s the name of Francis Ford Coppola’s official on the record first feature directorial work, and it’s the rare Coppola horror outing, almost 30 years before BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA. It’s a tight little black-and-white Roger Corman production that seems to split the difference between gothic horror like the Poe movies (THE RAVEN, THE HAUNTED PALACE and THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH were released the same year, 1963) and the modern slasher like PSYCHO and PEEPING TOM (released three years earlier). It’s got a castle, a rich family and some possible ghostiness, but also a money scheme running afoul of an ax murderer. And there’s a mystery. And some brutality I wasn’t expecting in a movie of this era.

It’s got a great opening – John Haloran (Peter Read, THE BRAIN, TALONS OF THE EAGLE) is upset one night, wants to row out onto the lake to be by himself, but his wife Louise (Luana Anders, THE YOUNG RACERS, NOWHERE TO RUN) comes with him and bickers with him about money. His mother is sick and plans to will her fortune to charity – Louise wants him to talk to her about putting him in the will. All the rowing gets his heart worked up and he collapses. She goes for his heart pills (apparently this happens alot) but the container is empty, and he dies.

It’s certainly contrived, but very economical, the way he already teased her that she needed him to be alive to inherit anything. But, treating his death as an inconvenience rather than a tragedy, she immediately goes about disposing of his body, faking that he left on a business trip, and going alone to a Haloran family get-together in London to try to get her way. She does a more detailed cover up than seems necessary to the plot – hats off to her.

I love the atmosphere of that boat scene, taking place in practically a black void, with the sounds of water sloshing and a rockabilly song (“He’s Caught” by Buddy and the Fads) playing on John’s portable radio until it sinks into the lake with him.

In PSYCHO, Marion is embezzling money from work, but she still comes across as a nice girl. Louise does not come across like a nice girl, and I enjoy that about her. She’s just so brazen and shameless, she’s fun to watch. The funny thing is it’s kind of more ghoulish that she didn’t kill him! If she did it would be a normal type of evil plot. But she’s not a murderer, just a liar, who clearly really did just marry this guy for the money he doesn’t actually have.

I got a little confused because there are two blond American fiancees. The older brother Richard (William Campbell, LOVE ME TENDER, BLACK GUNN) plans to marry Kane (Mary Mitchel, SPIDER BABY), against the wishes of Mother (Eithne Dunne, SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL). I should’ve noticed she was different because her hair is different – Louise has the angular bangs that sort of match up with one of Richard’s abstract metal sculptures when Coppola dissolves to her from one.

There are lots of odd things going on with the family. They’ve gathered to commemorate the loss of a younger sister named Kathleen who drowned in the lake when they were kids. Lady Haloran wants immediate family only at a ceremony at Kathleen’s grave, but Louise is watching from a distance when the old lady faints, having seen her flower wilt when it touched the tombstone. Louise swoops in to take over walking her to her room and comforting her (it’s unclear why she’s more qualified for this than the sons), which finally gets her in Mother’s good graces.

But like I said, Louise is an asshole, so her plan is not only to gain the Lady’s trust but to fuck with her head, sneaking some of Kathleen’s dolls out of the house and planning to use them to stage more supernatural occurrences. At this point I gotta SPOILER – there is a huge shock when Louise is in the middle of carefully setting her plan into motion. We watch her sneak out to enact some scheme, tie something to the dolls, strip down to her underwear, dive into the lake… and come across a body (a little girl?) underwater! And then, as she resurfaces in terror, there’s a dude with an ax who chops her up! I mean, obviously killing off the ostensible lead was inspired by PSYCHO, but it’s still a very well executed sharp left turn. And for modern viewers it’s one of those moments where the black and white and the acting style have made you feel comfortable that it will be a certain old timey type of horror, so you’re caught off guard when it goes way harder than that.

So there are several mysteries here. Is the ghost of Kathleen haunting the place? How did she actually drown? Who is the ax murderer? And who else is scheming for the inheritance? Patrick Magee (BARRY LYNDON) plays the family doctor who gets suspicious and tries to figure out what’s going on. There’s some Norman Bates shit and some Scooby-Doo shit and some gothic castle shit. And it’s nicely photographed and swiftly paced, running only 69 minutes in the recently released director’s cut (75 in the previous home video version). It’s no BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, but I dug it.

I enjoyed it as a young-and-hungry-Coppola-trying-to-prove-himself-while-working-for-Roger-Corman movie, but I was even more impressed when I read more specifics. When Corman finished filming THE YOUNG RACERS in Ireland, he had $22,000 of budget left over and wanted to stay and do a quickie horror movie there. But he decided it didn’t work with his schedule so he asked his young sound man Coppola to do it, telling him to write a script kind of like PSYCHO. So he did, coming up with a treatment overnight and a script in three days, with uncredited help from Al Locatelli, art director for both films. Coppola also nearly doubled the budget by pre-selling the European rights behind Corman’s back.

The rookie director convinced YOUNG RACERS stars Campbell, Magee and Anders to stick around to star in another movie, with the cast rounded out by Irish actors from the Abbey Theatre and some of Coppola’s UCLA friends, who paid for their own flights so they could be in a movie. They filmed for 9 days.

Corman let Coppola shoot what he wanted, but was unhappy with the results, so he added some voiceovers and new scenes shot by Jack Hill and Monte Hellman (up-and-comers who, like Coppola, had directed parts of THE TERROR). Hill did a new beheading and Hellman did a William Castle style prologue with an actor playing a psychiatrist testing the audience to make sure they’re psychologically fit to watch the movie.

I read that DEMENTIA 13 was the b-picture that played in double features with X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES. Man, that’s a good double feature! I might’ve watched them back-to-back if I had known that.

Movies later filmed at Ardmore Studios in Bray, Ireland include ZARDOZ, THE COMMITMENTS, the live action parts of ROCK-A-DOODLE, BRAVEHEART, SPACE TRUCKERS and THE GREEN KNIGHT. Howth Castle, which doubled as Haloran Castle, also appears in Sergio Leone’s DUCK, YOU SUCKER and Whit Stillman’s LOVE & FRIENDSHIP.

Reshoot directors Jack Hill and Monte Hellman of course became notable filmmakers in their own right. The year Coppola had THE GODFATHER Hill had THE BIG BIRD CAGE and Hellman had just done TWO LANE BLACKTOP.

Mary Mitchel, who played Kane, later became a script supervisor, working with Coppola again as second unit script supervisor for DRACULA. She also plays a script supervisor in Joe Dante’s LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION, one of his many nods to his Corman days.

Art director/uncredited co-writer Al Locatelli was later second unit art director for STAR WARS, art director for MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, and production designer for PUSHED TO THE LIMIT starring Mimi Lesseos.

Assistant art director Eleanor Neil hit it off with Coppola, they started dating and got married the following February. They are still married today, and she’s known for co-directing HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE with George Hickenlooper. She’s also directed more recently than her husband, with LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE in 2020.

I didn’t know this, but there was a remake of DEMENTIA 13 released in 2017. It would be cool if it was a shot-for-shot remake of the original in order to count as a rip off of the remake of PSYCHO, but judging from the trailer it seems to start out faithful but adds a slasher mask and more chasing and chopping. It didn’t seem to get much of a release, and only has 3 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but one of them, by Kimber Myers in the Los Angeles Times, calls it “an enjoyably cheap little gift” and “a capably made indie that should please genre fans searching for a haunted diversion.” Those quotes describe the original pretty well too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30th, 2021 at 7:03 am and is filed under Horror, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

6 Responses to “Dementia 13”

  1. I haven’t seen this in more than 20 years, when I watched it on a public domain VHS on the recommendation of Stephen King in his non-fiction book on horror, DANSE MACABRE. I mainly remember how black the water looked and how that gave the cinematography a very stark, almost graphic look. I love that. After all, it’s called a black-and-white movie, not a shades-of-gray movie. I picked up that new Blu-ray a few weeks ago but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Is it wrong that I trust Corman’s fucked-with-after-the-fact version more than Copolla’s director’s cut? I wish the disc had both. I mean, the movie’s shorter than some season finales. I wouldn’t be against doing a compare-and-contrast.

  2. I can imagine Roger Corman being like: “Okay Francis, you get money for a movie, but it must be something that can be released as DEMENTIA 13. Don’t ask me what it means, I just think it’s a great title.”

  3. This was originally released in the UK as THE HAUNTED AND THE HUNTED, which works for me. Apparently, Coppola talked Ardmore Studios into putting up an additional $20,000 in exchange for the UK rights, and they changed the title. Legend has it that Coppola initially kept all this secret from Corrman in case he asked for his $22,000 back.

  4. According to imdb the title comes from the fact that there was another movie called DEMENTIA (John Parker, 1955). So Corman and Coppola cooked up a story about something bad happening to the killer at the age of 13.

  5. In addition to being one of Tarantino’s favourite filmmakers, Jack Hill’s claim to fame is, of course, discovering Pam Grier. He directed her in FOXY BROWN and COFFY, among others. But here’s where things get really interesting. Hill was classmates with Coppola at UCLA. After graduation Coppola brought him along to work on D13 and other Corman pictures. Later, Coppola would crash Hollywood, while Hill made a string of successful drive-in movies. But their connection doesn’t end there.

    “Hill blames himself for what many critics regard as the fatal flaw of Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” When he finally saw the picture in a theater, he was shocked to discover that Coppola had borrowed an ending, complete with references to “The Golden Bough,” that Hill had created for one of his UCLA projects.
    Later he heard from a second-unit assistant on the Vietnam War epic that Coppola had joked that “We’re shooting Jack Hill’s student film.”

    https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19960620&slug=2335436

    “The Golden Bough” is a turn-of-the-century scholarly exploration of mythology and religion. The book can be seen in Kurtz’s compound at the end of APOCALYPSE NOW, and informs the climax that cross-cuts the ritual sacrifice of the bull with the assasination of Kurtz.

    Lovecraft mentions “The Golden Bough” in “The Call of Cthulhu”.

    And Joseph Campbell drew on “The Golden Bough” in “Hero With a Thousand Face”. Which, of course, we know was a massive influence on George Lucas.

  6. pegsman: Oh, hey, I just watched the original DEMENTIA this week. It was the second half of my private double bill of ’50s noir movies with no dialogue. The “noir” label turned out to be misapplied, since despite various stabbings it’s more of a filmed nightmare, very indebted to expressionist German silents. Still, I enjoyed it. I paired it with THE THIEF, which doesn’t seem like a silent at all despite the lack of conversation. Ray Milland plays a traitorous scientist who’s trying to pass atomic secrets to a foreign power while evading the FBI. There’s a great sequence where he’s being chased around the Empire State Building. It turns into an unconvincing propaganda film in the final scene, but it’s very solid up till then.

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