Dementia, aka Daughter of Horror, is a 1955 film directed by John Parker.
It's not quite feature-length, clocking in at 54 minutes, and it is told without any dialogue. A woman wakes up from a nightmare in a dingy hotel room. She decides to pick up a switchblade before going out. She sees a newspaper headline that says "MYSTERIOUS STABBING", before a sleazy man who may or may not be a pimp ushers her into a car, where she sits in the backseat with a fat, rich man. The rich man takes her out clubbing, but she is plagued by a memory of the past, a memory of murdering her father....
This film was released as Dementia in 1955. In 1957, it was released as a re-cut version called Daughter of Horror, which added narration from a young Ed McMahon, several years before he got his gig as Johnny Carson's sidekick. Shelley Berman, who would later become a famous comedian, has a bit part as a beatnik in the jazz club.
Tropes:
- All Just a Dream: It turns out the film was a nightmare the woman had, which explains much of the bizarre surrealism.
- Book Ends: The film begins with a zoom in to the woman's hotel room from the street, and ends with a zoom out to the street from the hotel room.
- Catapult Nightmare: The film begins with the woman waking from a strange dream of being flattened by an ocean wave, bolting up catapult nightmare style. Then at the end she does this again, suggesting that the entire film was a catapult nightmare, or even a Dream Within a Dream.
- Chiaroscuro: The whole film takes place at night, as streetlights or cop car spotlights illuminate otherwise darkened streets and alleys, and the woman throws long shadows as she goes around.
- Disney Villain Death: After the woman stabs the man, she pushes him off the balcony. He plunges to his death.
- Domestic Abuse: A random moment in the seedy hotel where the woman lives shows a domestic disturbance call. After a woman pulls down the shoulders of her robe to show bruises, the cop takes away her surly boyfriend/husband.
- The Faceless: The weird man in the cemetery who shows the woman the graves of her parents never shows his face; instead, it's always hidden in shadow. The same is true of the crowd of oddly passive onlookers around the rich man's body.
- Flashback: Done in a bizarre scene that fits the film's Mind Screw surrealism. The woman sees her parents' tombstones in a cemetery, and is thrown into a flashback that actually takes place in the cemetery. Her father lies on a bed that is sitting there between the graves; he is shown to be an abusive drunk. Her mother is then shown lying on a couch, also in the graveyard. The father sees someone else's cigar next to the couch, realizes the mother has been cheating on him, and then shoots her. The woman that is the film's protagonist then kills her father by stabbing him in the back.
- Flashback Effect: The woman's flashback is introduced by a spiral effect as the film goes out of focus.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Debatable. Nothing in this Mind Screw movie confirms that. But the Book Ends in which she wakes up in a Catapult Nightmare, the fact that she's in the exact same place at the end as the beginning, how she takes a switchblade with her for no obvious reason, how the newsboy smirks knowingly as he points at the "MYSTERIOUS STABBING" headline, and how the detective is following her around for no obvious reason even before she kills the rich man—all this suggests the possibility that she's having a sort of Groundhog Day nightmare.
- Gross-Up Close-Up: The film focuses in on a close-up of the rich man's greasy lips as he munches on chicken drumsticks. The woman looks on in disgust.
- Jerkass: The rich man is walking the woman through the lobby of his ritzy apartment building, and a cleaning lady is washing the floor. The rich man then tosses aside his cigar butt right into the spot on the floor the cleaning lady is cleaning.
- Large Ham:
- Ed McMahon's narration is very hammy, with lines like "Do you know what madness is? Do you know what horror is?", delivered in a cheesy over-the-top manner.
- Lead actress Adrienne Barnett actually wasn't an actress, but was the secretary of director John Parker. She sometimes resorts to hammy, overly dramatic facial expressions, like when she's trying to show shock and fear after seeing the rich man's body outside the apartment building.
- Little People Are Surreal: Part of the film's Mind Screw surrealism includes a little person as the newsboy handing out papers. It gets even stranger when the little person draws his finger across the "MYSTERIOUS STABBING" headline and grins evilly.
- Male Gaze: Lampshaded when the rich man takes the woman out clubbing. There's a dancer on the stage, doing a number. The scene alternates between increasingly close close-ups of the woman's crotch as her skirt flies up, and increasingly close close-ups of the man's face as he leers hungrily.
- Mind Screw:
- The film is chock-full of weird surrealistic imagery. The cop who's chasing the woman doesn't seem all that serious about arresting her; it's more like he's content to trail behind her while smiling creepily. The corpse of the rich man is surrounded by faceless people who look on impassively, not even reacting as the woman crawls in between them and cuts the man's hand off with her knife. There's a weird moment after the woman throws the man off the balcony in which the butler, who saw everything, simply laughs approvingly. And when the woman enters the nightclub, the pimp simply throws a cocktail dress at her, and she's instantly wearing it. Much of this is eventually justified by the All Just a Dream ending.
- It's not clear what the woman's relationship to the rich man is or why the pimp ushers her into the rich man's car. Is the woman a prostitute? If she's a streetwalker, she isn't dressed for it. Is she his kept woman? Also, why is the detective, who is played by the same actor who plays the woman's father in the flashback, following her around before she's even done anything?
- Narrator: In the Daughter of Horror re-cut only, Ed McMahon provides narration that is both very over-the-top and almost completely unnecessary, as he's just telling what the audience can already see in a Narrating the Obvious manner.
- One-Woman Wail: The soundtrack is accompanied by a spooky "oh oh oh oh" wail. The vocalizing was done by none other than Marni Nixon, better known as a famous concert singer, and even better known as the woman who dubbed a whole bunch of A-list actresses in many of the big musicals of the 1950s and 1960s, like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961).
- Or Was It a Dream?: The plot of the film is just a nightmare the woman had. Except in the Daughter of Horror cut, the narrator actually says "Or was it?" The camera then shows the woman's necklace hanging out of a drawer. She goes to look, and sure enough, there it is—with the rich man's severed hand still clutching it.
- Police Brutality: It was necessary for that detective to intervene when the wino grabbed the woman in the alley and tried to force some liquor down her throat. It was not necessary for the detective to then beat the man senseless with a billy club, as both the detective and the woman laugh mockingly as blood pours down the wino's face.
- Silence Is Golden: The film is told without any dialogue, and also no title cards, only the "MYSTERIOUS STABBING" newspaper headline and the words "Father" and "Mother" on the gravestones. The Daughter of Horror re-release somewhat undercut this by adding narration, but the narration is wholly unnecessary.
- Sinister Switchblade: Before going out, the woman takes a switchblade out of a drawer, flicking it open and smiling strangely. Sure enough, she later uses that switchblade to stab the fat man in the gut.
