Daughter Of Horror (Dementia)

After being written up in the Incredibly Strange Movies book it still remained a film about which little was known. It bears no director or actor credits, so one had to take it on faith that somebody named John Parker was the director. The only other trace it had left in movie history was a snippet or two that showed up in Jack H. Harris' The Blob, both on the screen of the amoeba-infested movie theater and on a garish poster seen for a split second as the terrified teens of Valley Forge run for their brylcreemed lives. The poster read Daughter of Horror ... it's a clue, kids! Forrest Ackerman once ran a mystery poster in his Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, a reproduction of this poster for some phoney film called Daughter of Horror ... a fake title if we ever heard one. Even Forry was thrown by this one .. in his next issue he admitted that he didn't know if it were a real movie or not!

Dementia is a real movie made independently by a cineaesthete from the Northwest who lived high and filmed wide on his mother's money. And it's no ordinary lowbudget movie. Filmed professionally on Hollywood stages and photographed by Ed Wood regular William C. Thompson (although claims have been made that film students shot most of it) Dementia has no dialogue whatsoever and is really a silent movie with added music and sound effects, in both the spirit and technique of Dreyer's great Vampyr... only even more twisted toward German Expressionism. Add to that an artsy/slightly pretentious dab of Maya Deren / Curtis Harrington-style experimental film atmosphere and you just about have it. Dementia never looks incompetent (Bride of the Monster), naive (Carnival of Souls) or commercial (The Mask). In fact, it's like no other movie ever made, really.


The Gamin (Adrienne Barrett) wakens on a dark night in a city of the Damned. Dressed like a beat chick from pre- rock'n roll days (except for an attention-getting medallion), she takes a switchblade from her dresser and starts out on the town. She witnesses an arrest for wife-beating, sees some winos and is accosted by a midget newsboy (Angelo Rossito) who hawks a paper with a prophetic headline about a murder. A pimp finally gets the Gamin's attention and sets her up with a porcine Rich Man (Bruno ve Sota) in a chaufeurred black car. He takes her to a series of nightclubs, and then to his highrise apartment in a building with an enormous staircase. There she watches him eat a greasy meal of chicken. When he makes advances, the Gamin defends herself ... or is she attacking? This is no ordinary night, for from this moment on events and perceptions no longer have even the pretense of reality ... as the Gamin enters a nightmare of murder and mutilation.

The story is not only told cinematically, the film switches gears between realism and surrealism on the turn of a dime. Besides Anthiel's creepy music there are several minutes of hip jazz from Shorty Rogers in a basement nightclub at the edge of the world. Here's where the hopheads hang out and the oily police detective (who looks suspiciously like the Gamin's father) takes his bribes. Since our Gamin is kind of a beat type herself this is a horror film in the vein of Jack Kerouac. Several of its exteriors are filmed in the same Venice, California collonade block made famous by the later Touch of Evil, although Jim Ursini recognized the massive staircase as belonging to an L.A. hotel right off MacArthur Park. The last recognizable element is the voice of a young Marni Nixon, who wails throughout the Antheil score practically non-stop. Except for some laughter, gunshots, screams and a little be-bop jazz it goes on uninterrupted for an hour. It was seemingly lampooned in a short film in an old Saturday Night Live. In that skit a female motorist is terrorized by wailing, nervous singing that is finally revealed to originate from a woman shrieking into a microphone on the floor of her apartment. Very far out stuff ... it might have been a Ben Stiller movie.


 If you don't care for mini-budgeted, dank and creepy, old and eeky horror films that crawl out from under rocks, well, Dementia /Daughter of Horror might not be your glass of tea. Finally seeing it in a version that doesn't require night-vision goggles was truly a thrill - maybe some films must be coveted for 30 years, to work up an appropriate lack of perspective!  (Glenn Erickson - DVD Talk)