DEMENTIA 13

US, 1963, 75 minutes, Black and white.
William Campbell, Luana Anders, Bart Patten, Mary Mitchel, Patrick Magee, Eithne Dunne.
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Francis Ford Coppola was twenty-two and working with producer-director Roger Corman on his small-budget film The Young Racers. Filming was in Ireland. Coppola asked Corman for some money and two weeks’ shooting time on the sets of The Young Racers – and wrote, produced and directed Dementia 13.

It is a textbook horror film – mysterious castle, mysterious identities, a contested will, the mother of the family demented after the death by drowning of her daughter seven years earlier, the emergence of an axe-murderer and the cast diminishing one by one.

The film is in many ways amateur – but also gives cinematic signs of the writer and director Francis Ford Coppola would become. Within ten years he had received Oscars for his screenwriting, This Property is Condemned, Patton (Oscar winner) and had begun to direct with The Rain People, Finian’s Rainbow, You’re a Big Boy Now. After the success of The Godfather he made The Conversation, one of the top films of the 1970s, as well as the sequel Godfather II. In 1979 his Apocalypse Now was released. Perhaps he has not achieved as much as he did in the 1970s but many of his films are excellent examples of the genres that they work in, especially Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Rainmaker from the John Grisham film. (Coppola also met his wife Eleanor on the set of this film.)

1. Was this a good horror film? Why? Was it merely conventional or did it have imagination? How seriously should it have been taken?

2. Comment on the styles and the atmosphere: the Irish castle setting, the use of the lake?

3. Comment on the devices and characters used in the film and the type of person - the mother, the hero, the villainess, the mysterious doctor, the psychotic son. Were these characters merely types or were they developed in their own rights? Did the characters make the film interesting?

4. What did the director presuppose in his audience response? How did he calculate his effects for maximum audience response? in sympathy, in interest, in being frightened, in being mystified?

5. How was the Halloran family established and the mystique about the family? The people arriving for some mysterious purpose? The relationship between Kathleen and her mother etc?

6. The character of Louise - as from the new world, brash, intruding, the tricks she played, her plan? The irony of the new world being defeated in the murder?

7 Richard as a conventional hero?

8. Justin Caleb - as a sinister character, as suspicious, Patrick Magee's voice?

9. Billy as the obvious innocent - yet the murderer? Were the reasons for his killing Kathleen plausible? His subsequent murder? His going berserk in the end?

10. How successful in macabre suspense was this film? Was it enjoyable horror? (Why are horror films greatly enjoyed?)