Dementia (aka "Daughter of Horror", 1955)

"You, you out there. Do you know what horror is? Smug, confident, because you're sane!"--Opening Narration.

When a film is put out by "Exploitation Productions," one rarely has to wonder what to expect. Or, maybe not.

Dementia, also known as "Daughter of Horror," is a dark, weird, mysterious little film of just under an hour, with no dialog except some really bad over-dubbed narration. It is very reminiscent of Carnival of Souls if Carnival of Souls was much shorter and directed by Roger Corman or even Ed Wood.

It begins with a young woman (Adrienne Barette, credited the "Gamine") dreaming she is on a beach while a tidal wave sweeps over her. An allegorical image, to be sure, but she awakens in the slumbering darkness of her hotel bedroom, creeps downstairs, as if in a somnambulistic trance state, and comes across a domestic dispute involving downstairs neighbors and the cops. She seems as if she is in a hypnotic state. There is much shadow-play of a noir aspect, and she goes out into the street, to cast further shadows of weirdness against the walls of crumbling buildings, as she walks her nighttime pathway past sleazy hoods wolf-whistling, and surrealistic flower sellers pulled from some bad Jack the Ripper drama. There is a brief cameo by famed midget actor Angelo Rossito, who was in Freaks (1931) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985).

Two hoods in 1955 hood suits beat each other bloody in an alley. One of them has a lead pipe. She laughs, an attractive if dangerous, and callous-seeming young woman with a black turtle neck, a huge, mysterious medallion, and curly dark hair. She lets the two to their bloody brawl.

Next, she flees to the chauffeured car of a wealthy man that looks as if he is the bastard child of Orson Welles and Fatty Arbuckle. He eats ribs most disgustingly and rudely, smokes fat cigars, and takes a dive out of a window. First, though, we go to a cemetery and a gravedigger or sexton from beyond, holding a lantern and wearing a tight nylon mask completely covering his features, shines a light on the grave of the young woman's parents. They enact a violent scene, the father a fat, sleazy, drunken oaf; the mother is a jewel-bedecked "lady of the night."

It doesn't end well.

To tell you more would spoil the picture. Some scenes stand out powerfully, images that swirl up out of the shadow and murk of the mind that this film is representing, but, to be frank, the point never quite coheres and somehow gets lost. However, that is not to say it is a bad film or one to be missed. The soundtrack is eerie horror swirls that sound as if a vocalist was trying to imitate the sound of a theremin, and then there's jazz here, too. 1955 swung, baby, even for surrealistic little shockers.

The ending is a ghostly little sudden volt of surprise that leaves the viewer wondering if it was all a dream, or the ghostly walk of a revenant condemned to, eternally live out her Hell as retribution for bloody transgressions. She awakes to walk through the hour of events. Will she awake similarly, again and again?

The viewer is left wondering.

The director has given us glorious black-and-white images to mull over though: long shadows and laughing faces, underlit expressions in the gloom, the stock-still images of a flower seller and a trio of detectives that could almost be representational mannequins with blacked-out mugs, all images that would be worthy of a David Lynch. Other images are seedier, lending the picture the cheapjack quality of films of that era that explored similar, occult themes.

There are other, more shocking aspects to the film, and it seems it was partly suppressed due to censorship of graphic violence and bloodletting. If there is a theme here, it is the suppressive ghost of guilt catching up to someone suffering the illusion of denial. The Gamine is threatened on all sides by dint of being a woman--when she tries to fight the illusion of her weakness, substituting laughter at violence, the celebration of jazz clubs, by fleeing the ghost of rigid male authority, which wears the face of her father, she is laughed at by the faceless throngs who point fingers and all blend into ONE. But what of the mysterious medallion? What of the severed hand? We are never quite sure what the depths of this particular dream hope to convey. In the end, the tidal wave takes her.

Like a cinematic "kiss from a lover in the dark" (to paraphrase a line from Stephen King's magnum opus book-length fright film essay Danse Macabre) Dementia is not a film you'll want to pass up. And it's so short, it's not as if you'll be sleepwalking through it.