So, a Francis Ford Coppola movie with significant action taking place on a boat. That would be Dementia 13 (aka The Haunted and the Hunted), the director’s first mainstream movie (if we’re ignoring sexploitationers The Bellboy and the Playgirls and Tonight for Sure).
Make me something that’s a bit Psycho-esque was producer Roger Corman’s instruction to Coppola, who had already been working with Corman in Ireland on 1963’s The Young Racers. There was money left over from that film, so Corman gave it to Coppola, and lent him the cast and crew from The Young Racers to make his film. The only significant other instruction was that the finished movie needed to have sex and violence in it.
The boat, you’re wondering. The action starts there, with a husband and wife in a rowing boat arguing about the husband’s rich mother’s will. You’ll get nothing if I leave you, threatens the husband, who has obviously had it up to here with his wife’s scheming. Then, first shock death of several, the husband, scant seconds in, has a heart attack and, without much further ado, dies.
What now for the cunning Louise, who has soon heaved his weighted body over the side?
Fabricating a story that husband John is in New York working, she decamps to Ireland to visit his family in the ancestral pile – where an overwrought matriarch controls two cowed sons and keeps alive the memory of a daughter who died in tragic circumstances years before.
Louise is far from welcome, but then no woman is good enough for Lady Haloran’s boys, and here Coppola, who also wrote the screenplay, starts to spin a nicely wrought gothic chiller with rank family relations at its centre and Louise as the interloper trying to insert herself into the matrix.
That is, of course, a shadow of the Psycho plot but Coppola goes more explicitly into the realm of Hitchcock by dropping in a scene where Louise encounters wet jeopardy, stripping down to her underwear to go swimming in the lake at night (sex being one of Corman’s two stipulations) before a shock development also faintly reminiscent of Psycho (violence being the other).
Shooting lasted just nine days and, with this in mind, it is really remarkable what Coppola has pulled off. This film has great atmosphere, with spooky black-and-white visuals and Ronald Stein’s score in particular stands out, pulling everything together with discordant notes and moments of proper orchestral grandeur. He also did the score for Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told, another cult item from the 1960s.
The largely unknown Luana Anders is particularly effective as hard-hearted, gold-digging Louise, the Janet Leigh read-across, and Mary Mitchel also makes an impression as Kane, fiancée of son Richard (William Campbell).
Representing Ireland are two stalwarts of the Abbey Theatre, Eithne Dunne, as the superstitious, snobbish, controlling mother, and Patrick Magee as the family doctor who turns detective to solve the mystery of the suddenly AWoL Louise and, unwittingly, the riddle behind the death of the little girl.
It’s not all good. It’s obviously done on the cheap and there’s not time to correct odd bits of duff acting, or scenes that don’t quite work, but the good stuff is very good and there are some lovely, creepy touches here and there, with Coppola also, just for local flavour, shooting a scene in a local pub full of Irish characters. It adds nothing to the story whatsoever but it gives the film an expansive, expensive feel it otherwise wouldn’t have.
Corman wasn’t in love with the “finished” product. It was too short and there wasn’t enough sex or violence in it, he complained. If you see a scene in which a man has his head separated from his body with an axe, then you’ll see how Corman got round the problems, by getting in another director to add the bits he wanted. Jack Hill got no screen credit for his additions, which are obvious – the lighting is crude compared to Coppola’s.
Coppola paid for the film to be restored in 2017 and, though it’s shorter because he left out the additions, though the original publicity-chasing “D-13 Test (see poster above), which Corman added as a preamble to the film proper, is included as an extra. That’s the one you want to watch. What’s a beheading between discerning film lovers, after all, and the improvements to the picture and sound are really worth springing for.
Dementia 13 ak The Haunted and the Hunted – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
