The 1955 film Dementia is advertised, in garish print on the DVD box, as the strangest movie ever released theatrically (according to Variety, I guess). I felt obligated to rent it, even though it looked terrible, so I could see for myself if it was, indeed, the strangest. Not only was the DVD blurb wrong, the film was a rather straightforward primer on Freudian psychology that was full of some really great noir-influenced shots. The fact that it was shot by longtime Ed Wood cinematographer William C. Thompson, who was blind in one eye, is... actually quite interesting, because its primary value now is for its impeccable cinematography.

The film contains no dialog; the only sound is an eerie score that features a young Marni Nixon (the great singer who sung Natalie Wood's and Audrey Hepburn's parts in West Side Story and My Fair Lady), footsteps and other sound effects, and people laughing or crying. The story follows a young woman called "The Gamine" (director John Parker's secretary, Adrienne Barrett, who is not a good actress), who, as a result of mistreatment by her father—seen in a cool flashback/dream sequence in a cemetery—and a bunch of other leering creepy men, takes up a switchblade and goes on a killing spree of sorts. She's given plenty of targets, because every male in the film is portrayed as a potential sex offender. She is pestered by a slimy pimp-type called "The Evil One" (Richard Barron, who is not a good actor). Turns out he works for an overfed rich man (Bruno VeSota), who strongly resembles Orson Welles. I felt slightly queasy by the time the film was done with him. Not that it's grisly violence or anything; he's just disgusting. We see him leering at every woman he sees, with a sense of entitlement that physically assaults them. He takes the Gamine to his apartment, where we have to endure him eating barbecue chicken before she offs him in one of the most spectacular and stylish death scenes I can remember. Soon the cops, led by a detective who is played by the same man who played her father, are on her tail.

The film is shot through with noirish details; it drew heavily from German Expressionist school that produced The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The rich man's death scene is only one of several breathtaking compositions. One great early sequence was shot in the same colonnade that Orson Welles used in his Touch of Evil. Noir is heavily influenced in turn by Freud, and no film has ever been as obvious about it as this one. You have everything: abusive, incestuous familial relationships; a fetishist (see how the Gamine fondles her knife, and how tightly the rich man clings to her gold pendant); the father as the ultimate family authority figure, and the use of the same actor to play the paternalistic policeman. An unintentional aspect of the film is how funny it is to us, now that Freudian imagery is so much a part of our culture.

The story of the film, like so many others, is at least as interesting as the film itself. It was shot in 1953 by John Parker, using his rich mother's money; he had solicited Preston Sturges's support for it, but to no avail. Between 1953 and 1955, he submitted it ten times to the New York censors, who turned it down over and over because it was basically a textbook example of what they wouldn't allow: murder, incest, prostitution, drug abuse, etc. He eventually got it released in a single art-house theater in New York in late 1955.

In 1955, the film was reedited and retitled Daughter of Horror, and an unbelievably terrible narration was added, featuring a young Ed McMahon as an apparent demon scolding the Gamine from beyond the grave. It's 100% psychobabble, and it's completely useless, telling viewers things that they could easily figure out by themselves (like intoning in his deep voice that the cop has the face of Gamine's father). I have to share this quote: "For this is a place where there is no love, no hope...in the pulsing, throbbing world of the insane mind, where only nightmares are real, nightmares of the Daughter of Horror!" The film isn't very long, but that would be interminable. Somewhere in there it was lost for something like 30 years, and film people wondered if it had ever actually existed—a clip and a poster featured in the theater scene in the original The Blob were the only real evidence, since practically nobody had ever seen it.

And the plot thickens: the Internet Movie Database trivia page for writer/director/producer John Parker says that he doesn't exist: John Parker was a pseudonym for Bruno VeSota, who played the Wellesian fat rich guy... paging Dr. Freud!