Dementia 13 (1963) Movie Review, Cast & Crew, Film Summary

Often credited as the feature-directing debut of Francis Ford Coppola, Dementia 13 actually followed two quickie nudie flicks, The Bellboy and the Playgirls and Tonight for Sure (both 1962), and Coppola’s collaboration on bashing together a couple of Roger Corman quickies, including The Terror (1963). Dementia 13 nonetheless signals his emergence as a mainstream, individual director, and it’s a rough and awkward experience that contains flashes of real cinema. Produced by Corman during one of the occasional sojourns to tax shelter Ireland that his team made, Dementia 13 clearly signals itself as another film in the mould of Psycho. Coppola’s film, like Hitchcock’s, commences as a study in the malfeasance of a blonde, but turns into a psycho-killer flick ,with motifs based in a mystique of old houses, familial repression and oppression, and childhood traumas. The opening sequence is the most striking in the film, as Louise Halloran (Luana Anders) and her stocky, weak-hearted husband John (Peter Read) row across a lake at night, engaging in a marital tiff as loaded with nasty undercurrents and fulminating rage as any equivalents in Coppola’s later, more artful films. Louise is a gold-digger infuriated by the small endowment the couple are to receive from her mother-in-law’s will. John is sufficiently fed up with his wife to take delight in trying to shred her nerves in turning up the irritating rock ’n’ roll ditty playing on his transistor radio, and to mock her coming disinheritance even as he succumbs to a heart attack, induced by rowing. He dies before she can get him back to shore, and so she decides to dump his body in the water and pretend he’s gone off on business. She sinks the radio with him, and his body bobs eerily below whilst the music continues to echo sonorously from the murky brine.

After the intervening credits, Louise packs up her husband’s belongings and dumps them in the lake, clearly evoking both Janet Leigh’s baling out of Phoenix and Tony Perkins’ hurried clean-up in Psycho. Coppola cuts with awkward suddeness to a conversation between Louise and Billy Haloran (Bart Patton), the youngest of the three Haloran brothers, and it becomes clear that in spite of the American accents, the story is taking place in Ireland, as the Haloran brothers received American educations. The family had all gathered at Castle Haloran, a sombre old pile, for the will reading. Louise convinces the family that John has gone off to New York in a hurry, and plans to use the breathing space to work on Lady Haloran (Eithne Dunn). Lady Haloran is morbidly obsessed with her young daughter Kathleen who drowned seven years before, and keeps her sons on a tight leash with the threat of disinheritance to make sure her obsession is constantly stoked: coinciding with the family gathering is the yearly ritual where she and the boys recreate Kathleen’s funeral, at which the mother always faints. Louise attempts to use Lady Haloran’s fixation as the key to her fortune, by pretending to be in mediumistic contact with Kathleen’s spirit. But when she sets up a neat little trick that will see some of Kathleen’s favourite trinkets bob up in the estate pond where she drowned, Louise, as she emerges from the water, is brutally axed to death by a shadowed assailant.

Dementia 13, appropriately for the early work of a director notable for his capacity to make even assignment work seem deeply personal, contains plentiful fragments that anticipate future oeuvre gems. Many touches especially recur again in his The Godfather films, most overtly the theme of family legacy as a poisoned, murder-inducing chalice, and grief over lost kin. The opening scene with its charge of emotional convulsion in a lonely, watery setting, anticipates Fredo’s murder in The Godfather Part II. The wayward anti-heroine caught without options faintly anticipates The Rain People (1969), and the portraits of marital anxiety and strife, manifested in both in Louise and John’s relationship and that between older Haloran brother Richard (William Campbell), a troubled and sensitive artist, and his fiancé Kane (Mary Mitchell), present a theme that would bob up again in Coppola’s ‘80s films. Coppola returned to horror movie images and ideas in aspects of Apocalypse Now (1979) and more properly with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). His common fetishisation of ritual paraphernalia and funereal atmosphere is also apparent in the “reburial” of Kathleen.

But the film operates firmly under the laws of the period’s genre shockers, as well as, in its modest way, also forming part of a vanguard of new-fashioned genre style. Coming out in the same year as Mario Bava’s instigation of the giallo genre with Sei Donne per l’Assassino and Herschell Gordon Lewis’s splatter-defining Blood Feast, Dementia 13 has some similarities to both. Whilst the creeping, tricking gamesmanship of the killer is closer to the former, the murder scenes come within shouting distance of the latter. There’s a surprisingly gamy, brutal charge in visions like the dead Louise, still dripping wet, stripped to her underwear and covered in blood, being dragged across the lawn, and a hapless poacher’s head being severed and bouncing away into the water. A sequence of the axe-wielding psycho stalking Lady Haloran, glimpsed as a silhouetted figure, smashing his way through wooden barriers, clearly looks forward to ‘80s-style slasher flicks. Other visual and aural gimmicks, like the glimpses of creepy children’s toys and the heavy use of the harpsichord in the score, would become heavy clichés in ‘60s and ‘70s horror, but seem fairly original here.

Coppola makes insistently naturalistic use of location filming, but the technical limitations, apparent in the artless cinematography, hurried lighting, and poor sound recording, hamstring the impact. Still, his nascent ingenuity is apparent, in spite of the strictures of a no-budget shooting schedule, to push away from merely stand-and-talk dialogue, moving his camera when he can, and offering some lively shows of editing in the murder scenes. He builds to the film’s two killings with some decent suspense-mongering, managing to imbue the physical surrounds with a sense of lurking threat. He offers occasional eerie imagery, such as Louise’s sunken totems bobbing to the surface, and the sight of a doll facsimile of Kathleen. That dummy is kept by the killer as a fetish of worship and guardianship, submerged in the lake, freaking out Louise when she sees it lying on the lake floor just before she’s murdered, its blonde hair wavering in the water a la Shelley Winters in Night of the Hunter (1956), and afterwards secreted in other locales around the estate.

Later, Kane, afraid her husband might be the killer and following him into the castle’s lowest levels, finds troves of the sculptures that the family’s men have specialised in producing, and the killer tries to keep Kathleen alive through just such a lifeless yet emotion-charged stand-in for the living figure. Such motifs possess the right lustre of a morbid charge inherent in inanimate totems associated with the dead love-object. The plot offers up the usual abundance of red herrings, including all the Haloran brothers and their unctuous, oddball family doctor, Justin Caleb (Patrick Magee). The idea that John might be still alive and responsible for the killing is mooted when the lake is drained and his body is not found, the receding water instead revealing a bizarre gravestone for Kathleen that was sunk there. Caleb, entering the narrative halfway through, begins picking at the surface of the hitherto enclosed clan dynamic, approaching Kane with warnings about Richard that seem more like bizarre threats, inspiring her paranoid revulsion.

The problem with Dementia 13 is that, dramatically speaking, it’s flatter than a dead flounder. Whilst Coppola would later use his authorial gifts to garner himself a shared Best Screenplay Oscar for Patton (1970) and fill out his auteurist credibility in the best years of his career, here his writing, shared with fellow B-movie hero Jack Hill who was in charge of the second unit shooting, is bland. The story, probably cobbled together in a rush typical of the Corman aegis, barely hangs together, seeming to swerve in different directions opportunistically rather than through well-considered development. In spite of the location, the Irish atmosphere is weak, exacerbated by the chiefly American cast. Apart from Magee and Anders, Corman’s versatile starlet, the acting is insipid, although it’s amusing to note that Mitchel, here the young ingénue, later reinvented herself as a production assistant, and worked in that capacity for Coppola on several of his later films. The whole project resembles one of William Castle’s droll but corny Hitchcock imitations more than Corman’s own lucidly hysterical horror films, and doesn’t, in spite of smoother aspects, actually equal Monte Hellman’s debut for Corman, The Beast from Haunted Cave (1959) as an integral starting-point for a future ‘70s art-cinema legend. Magee, early in his emergence as a screen actor and a year away from his salutary appearance in Corman’s Masque of the Red Death, contends with an awkward part which gives the feeling Coppola enjoyed watching the actor work and let him take up more of the screen time than his character justifies, in trying to fill both the Sherlockian investigator and the fishy potential villain and satisfying neither use. But the killer is actually Billy, who accidentally killed his sister and has developed a psychotic determination to “protect” her doll-avatar from prying eyes, shot dead in a clumsily rushed coda. There’s still a charge in the final shot of Caleb slamming the murderer’s axe into the head of the Kathleen-doll, all too eager to shatter the last, literal straw-dummy illusion that the Halorans have been sustaining in defiance of all life logic, suggesting such an act is, in its way, as cruel as any physical murder, but necessary.