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.