Greetings gentle readers, welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s an experimental horror film from the 1950s: Daughter of Horror a.k.a Dementia.
Broken Pencil says:
Fifty years on, Daughter of Horror (or, Dementia) is for me the granddaddy (or is that grandmother?) of indie horror. This film represents what independent truly stands for: reshaping existing forms into something wholly unique, and innovation with one’s limited resources. Its story is full of visceral horror, a chiaroscuro canvas out of film noir, and a fragmented dream-like structure owing more to underground experimental films than anything else in American narrative cinema. If you can imagine a marriage of B-movie horror directed by Fritz Lang and Maya Deren, then one gets a sense of this film’s unique feel.
The Nitrate Diva says:
Directed by the obscure John Parker and written by Z-grade producer/director Bruno Ve Sota (although there’s some debate as to who really deserves artistic credit), this oily, shoestring-cheap horror-noir contains not one line of dialogue. Yep, we’re dealing with a strangely contradictory silent film with a soundtrack. Apart from a few diegetic sounds—essentials like sobs, screams, laughter, and gunshots—you mostly hear a ghoulish atonal score by modernist composer George Antheil, filled with foreboding jazz and the occasional soprano wail.
LaLa Film says:
For Daughter of Horror is not a film easily forgotten. No dialogue is spoken during its 54 minute running time, although, unlike the original Dementia, we have a melodramatic narration, chewed up and spat out by Ed McMahon, later to enter the American television hall of fame as Johnny Carson’s sidekick for 30 years of The Tonight Show. The narration was a sop to the censors, concerned audiences wouldn’t be able to fathom the onscreen events, and though McMahon adds a certain brutal giddiness to proceedings, pronouncements such as “Let me show you the bed of evil you sprang from!” and “Guilty! Mad with guilt and the devils who’ve taken possession of you,” often detract from the film’s serious intent.
My take: This is an odd little film. It’s not a great film, although I can see it’s charm for the horror aficionado who cares about the history of the genre. Some of the scenes are a bit silly in my estimation, like the fat guy sucking fried chicken off the bone accompanied by eerie music. The fact that it was censored says a lot about American culture in the 1950s; today it would be considered utterly harmless. It was originally released as Dementia but the censors squashed it and two years later it was re-released as Daughter of Horror with a voice over by Ed McMahon to guide the viewer through it’s maze of imagery.
Directed by: John Parker
Written by: John Parker (there is some controversy as to whether it was written by the producer (and fat guy) Bruno Ve Sota)
Notable actors: Shorty Rogers
Plot (Spoilers!):
The movie starts with a young woman awakening from a nightmare in a seedy hotel room. Wandering onto the street, she buys a newspaper headlined “Mysterious Stabbing”. Her smile indicates this means something to her.
She wanders into an alley and is accosted by a drunk. The cops arrive and beat the drunk as she makes her escape. Next a pimp approaches her and convinces her to get into the car of a wealthy man. While she rides, she recalls murdering her father after he shot and killed her unfaithful mother.
The wealthy man gives her the tour of the city’s night life and then takes her to his luxurious apartment. After consuming a rich meal, he makes his moves on her. She stabs him with a switchblade and pushes him out of the window. Grasping wildly, he manages to rip the pendant off of her neck. She races out of the building to recover her jewelry. She finds the corpse but it has the pendant locked in a death-grip. She saws off the dead man’s hand to retrieve it.
She runs through the city streets, gawked at by anonymous bystanders. The cops reappear and a detective with her father’s face follows her with a spotlight. She runs around the corner and dumps the hand into a flower girls basket.
The pimp has returned and now pulls her into a wild jazz club. The cop enters behind them. The crowd begins to laugh at her maniacally and the corpse of the wealthy man appears in the window and points to her with his stump.
The woman collapses and passes out. She awakens back in her tawdry hotel room. Dazed, she opens her top dresser drawer only to discover the bloody hand.
Grindhouse before there was a grindhouse. Cheap, sensationalist, disjointed, and bloody. The perfect metaphor for today’s discriminating culture.
A guilty pleasure.
For awhile our library’s AV section had a display titled “Do you like horror movies?” to which my hearty response was “no.”
But I guess that’s a minority view and even the great Pauline Kael liked to talk about them.
Me I prefer dog movies. Recent example: The Friend.
I love this Sunday morning feature, semper loquitur, even if I never watch any of the movies. (I often intend to but then it slips my mind.) The movie suggestions you come up with are just fascinating—they’re nothing I’ve ever heard of before, definitely not the American Film Institute (AFI) Top 100.
Thank you! I strive to keep it interesting.
“not the American Film Institute (AFI) Top 100”
fortuntately!
it has nothing to do with art in any serious context but product promotion
Considering what films are out there and that there used to be such things as serious critics and film historians it´s not even funny but simply embarrassing to still publish such a list. Actually film business is an excellent mirror for state of empire…
https://www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-movies-10th-anniversary-edition/
Film business is the soft power arm of the Empire. The most effective propaganda is the one not presented as such.
Hey Semper Loquitur I too thank you for this feature, so far nothing I’ve ever heard of and I’m enjoying seeing new things, at least new to me. Not today’s though, horror is not for me.
Someone recently shared this site with me, I don’t know if you know it? The Cave of Forgotten Films – https://rarefilmm.com/
Seems like he is no longer curating but there are 100s of films indexed and linked to.
Thanks!
Apparently British Film Institute did a 1080P transfer to Blu Ray which is considered better than the previous Kino 480i DVD version. But this BFI release is region B so you have to be able to finesse that here in the US. There is a region A Cohen release but not as good. Unfortunately the BFI release has a minute and a half of censor-ordered cuts compared to the DVD.
We worked around the region locks by purchasing a dvd player that plays all regions. These machines are not very expensive and definitely worth it for all of the ‘foreign’ films you get to watch. There are several available on E-bay most of the time.
Software players like VLC can bypass these region locks although that is not usually a problem for the many discs I get from the library, foreign or not. In fact playing movies on the computer–disc or file–is about the only way I do watch movies since the software players give complete control over the visual fine points and can sharpen 480p DVD which often needs it.
Once rendered by the computer I have a video projector but lately watch a lot of movies on my laptop. It still looks big if you are sitting close.
Typically the standard setting on flat screen TVs is way too contrasty and kills the shadow detail or “gamma.” The high contrast can be graphically pleasing but is not optimum photography. Just ask Ansel.
Thanks for interesting lineup of movies, semper loquitur.
My neighbor in Mineral King likes to show movies on his deck, and seeing as we have no electricity, you need a quiet generator, a 9 foot high fold up white screen unfurled and an internet projector and you’re in business. just add popcorn.
Their son was in Russia for a year, so one summer it was all Russia themed films, such as The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming, From Russia with Love and The Hunt For Red October.
Before say the turn of the century, I was at least a once every fortnight visitor to a movie theater, and my walk-in theater in Mineral King has seen probably double good old time movie theater visits since the turn of the century, we’re talking of a score of 15 to 7.
Why’d I fall out of love with the movies?
A couple of reasons, obviously the content largely turned to pure dreck, often CGI or gun violence looming large along with assorted mayhem and slim plot lines.
The other reason is different altogether, in that before the internet came along, movies were an excellent lubricant in facilitating conversations-as everybody had the same shared experience in what was loosely the social media of its day.
Once the internet got going is really when going to the movies became old hat.