With his last theatrical film, Twixt, now almost 10 years in the rearview, and as his struggle to mount his dream project, Megalopolis, continues, Francis Ford Coppola has been intent on revisiting and re-cutting his prior films. Perhaps, as The Godfather Coda implies, the 82-year-old is attempting to make sense of his legacy and life via the most immediate means at his disposal. There’s something poetic and poignant to that notion, especially for a daring filmmaker once given to literally betting the farm on new projects. In this vein, Coppola has now jumped far back into time to re-edit and re-release Dementia 13, the low-budget shocker he shot for producer Roger Corman as his directorial debut.
Those sifting through Dementia 13 for auteurist Easter eggs may be disappointed. The 1963 film, written and directed by Coppola at the age of 21, feels far more of a piece with Corman’s work than with even Coppola’s most eccentric future productions. Coppola had worked with Corman on films leading up to Dementia 13, which was produced using leftover resources from a prior production, per Corman’s custom. As Coppola says in the new audio commentary he recorded for this disc, Corman wanted another Homicidal, William Castle’s riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Or, as Coppola puts it, Corman wanted a “rip-off of a rip-off of a rip-off.”
What Coppola cooked up was a delirious and eerie blend of Psycho with the claustrophobic, neurotic family vibes generally emitted by Corman’s Poe Cycle. As in Psycho, there’s an inciting crime, initially presented as the thrust of the narrative, that leads the audience down into a deeper quagmire of madness. The setting is an Irish castle, where Lady Halloran (Eithne Dunne) continues to mourn Kathleen, the young daughter who died in a lake seven years earlier. Lady Halloran’s grown sons, Richard (William Campbell) and Billy (Bart Patton), appear to more or less tolerate their mother’s neurosis, while Louise (Luana Anders) attempts to manipulate her to change the family will. The offspring are to get nothing, though Louise, who has dumped the third Halloran man, her husband, into the lake after he suffered a heart attack, wants a piece of that old-money family action. Her aim, murkily defined by Coppola, is to pretend to be someone capable of reaching Kathleen where she resides in the beyond.
Louise is slim, blond, and attractive—very much in the Janet Leigh mold—and her scheming is brutally curtailed by a madman. Staging Louise’s murder, the young Coppola utilizes a variety of Hitchcockian motifs and imagery. Louise is killed as she’s arising from the family lake, attempting to plant Kathleen’s toys for a deception, so that Coppola may have her die in water, as Janet Leigh’s character died in a shower in Psycho. At one point, we even see Louise’s hand grabbing grass on the shore in a death rattle, just as Leigh’s, well, you get the picture.
Derivations aside, it’s an effective sequence, especially arriving as it does so suddenly after a less-expected shock: When Louise dives into the water to plant the artifacts, she finds at the bottom of the lake a memorial to Kathleen that appears to include the girl’s well-preserved corpse. Such an image, authentically unforgettable, suggests that Coppola was moved by the even more indelible underwater scene in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter.
After this point, Dementia 13 becomes a mystery, though the identity of the killer is too obviously tipped off early in the game. Yet Coppola’s flair for atmosphere, and for odd character detail, invests the film with a ghoulish undertow. The filmmaker is especially adept at exploiting the moldy blacks of the black-and-white cinematography to conjure a gothic atmosphere. Images of brackish water, particularly the terrifying pitch-black nothingness of the lake in the opening scene, connote this family’s long-festering malignancy. Coppola also uses dolls and mannequins in a totemic fashion that would appear to have influenced the giallo movement, and Patrick Magee’s bizarre performance as a family psychiatrist suggests a knowing riff on the smug doctor who appears at the end of, yes, Psycho.
As with The Godfather Coda, Coppola’s cut of Dementia 13 is shorter than the original theatrical version. Most obviously, a second murder scene has been removed, as Corman wanted it inserted to juice the proceedings up, and a few other nips and tucks have been made to bring the film’s running time down to 69 minutes from the original 75. The total effect of the director’s cut isn’t much different from the original version though: Dementia 13 has always been a chilling and confident horror mixtape, fashioned by a man who was a few years away from consecutively producing four of the most famous of all American movies.
Image/Sound
As someone who missed the prior Blu-ray reissue of Dementia 13, courtesy of HD Cinema Classics, and who has only seen the film on YouTube and via a five-dollar DVD pulled out of a Walmart bin, I found the transfer on this Vestron Video release to be remarkable. It’s beautiful without suggesting an artificial polish of a rough-and-tumble item. Blacks are lush (though there’s some mild crushing) and the whites have a newfound clarity. Facial and architectural details are revelatory, as quite a bit of information was lost in prior transfers. (The underwater scenes are now, via their tactility, more chilling than ever before.) The two audio tracks—a historically accurate mono as well as a new DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1—most importantly render the actors’ voices much richer and expressive as well as simply audible, clearing up the muddiness of many past presentations. The score and assorted sound effects are also quite a bit more visceral, allowing the film to re-announce itself as a sturdy micro gothic.
Extras
A Dementia 13 test scene and an introduction by Francis Ford Coppola are negligible, but the director’s new audio commentary compensates quite nicely for this package’s slimness. Coppola waxes nostalgic about working for Roger Corman, about buying a trim sports car with his first earnings as a writer, as well as his crush on leading lady Luana Anders, who became a dear friend before dying young. This commentary underscores the Proustian nature of Coppola’s revisiting and re-editing of his prior work, suggesting a titan in winter taking stock. As always, Coppola is engaging and unpretentious, and also offers the scrappy nuts-and-bolts details that are common of shooting movies for next to nothing, such as his hammering out of the script a day before shooting, or his doubling for a body in the water because the actors understandably didn’t want to subject themselves to the cold.
Overall
Vestron Video’s gorgeous restoration of Dementia 13 finally allows one to savor the unexpected gothic intensity of Francis Ford Coppola’s debut film.
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