Like Psycho

It took until October was in double digits, but I've finally started watching horror movies, having now ticked off two in two days. (I watched The Dead Don't Die on October 1st, but that wasn't to feed the Halloween horror beast, rather just to review it, on the first day after its September 26th release I was able to see it. If it had been to feed that beast, it would have left it seriously hungry.)

Today I want to discuss the first, though I could easily see a second post forthcoming to vent the vitriol I feel toward the Pet Sematary remake.

That first movie on Thursday night was Dementia 13, and it's the film that finally made me understand what Roger Corman was all about.

It wasn't Corman's name that attracted me to this 1963 film, though it would have; when I came across it among the horror selections on Kanopy, a cursory review of its details told me that it was among the first films ever made by Francis Ford Coppola, and that got me in the door.

But I noticed Corman's name as producer in the credits, and it whetted my appetite. I familiarized myself with the Corman schlock aesthetic during my 2011 month series Getting Acquainted, in which I singled out a cinematic talent I was unfamiliar with and watched three of his or her works during the month. (You can read my Corman piece here.) And schlock horror is particularly appetizing to me in the month of October, as last year I used Kanopy to watch both The Driller Killer and Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. Corman was not associated with either of those movies, though he should have been.

I knew Corman was all about producing popular genre movies at the lowest possible cost and the highest possible volume. What I didn't realize until Dementia 13 was how much he was trying to capitalize on the specific popularity of an existing property, an understandable third leg in the tripod of his approach that I hadn't considered before now. You know, kind of like The Asylum does today.

Specifically, Dementia 13 is his Psycho, and as nakedly as one could imagine.

Okay, about to go into SPOILERS for this movie. (And for Psycho, though I can't imagine you haven't seen that.)

Both movies start with a female protagonist who is effectively on the run (or who becomes so pretty early on). In Dementia 13 it's in the first scene, as gold digger Louise Haloran (Luana Anders) and her husband, an heir to his family's fortune, are rowing out to the Irish island on which his family lives. Like Janet Leigh's Marion Crane, she's blonde, though that may not be a hugely compelling similarity. More compelling is that she's neck deep in a scheme that endangers her life, here trying to convince the family that her husband, who has died of a heart attack on the boat ride, is not actually dead. (She dumped him and let him sink to the bottom of the bay.) This wasn't just a random occurrence that she reacted to poorly; in his dying breath he tells her that she won't get her share of the fortune if he's dead, indicating that he knows her affections for him are not on the level. She similarly responds to his death throes with a "You're not dying on me you bastard" bedside manner, but it's too little too late.

Where she really shares something in common with Marion is that she'll be dead before the movie is even halfway over. In a way that is a mirror image of the Psycho shower scene except by the banks of the water rather than in a shower stall, Louise is hacked to death by a man (we assume it's a man, though we can't really see the person's face) wielding an axe. And as in Psycho, we see only flashes of the crime, letting the audience imagination do the rest. (Which, of course, was also a convenience for someone with Corman's low budget.) The most recurring image is her bloody hands vainly clutching at the grass on the banks as she slips into her watery tomb.

Unlike in Psycho, we don't actually know who the killer is for the lion's share of the movie. Coppola and Corman retain that as a mystery. I can't remember if there was ever a time when I didn't know Norman Bates was the killer, though maybe that's just because I knew so much about the movie before I saw it. Anyway, there are about five candidates who it could be. When the killer is ultimately revealed, he has Norman's same type of overt placidity, which masks his darker urges.

Finally there is the dead female character who functions as supernatural red herring. In Psycho it's obviously Mrs. Bates, but here it's Louise's husband's sister, Kathleen, who drowned when she was a child. That's the reason Louise and John were headed out to the island, to participate in a bizarre annual ritual marking the girl's death. Although she has been dead for decades, we see her body on a couple occasions, almost as if it were freshly deceased, or in some state of suspended animation. The reveal at the end that it was a wax recreation of the girl is similar to the reveal of the skeletal remains of Mrs. Bates in her rocking chair.

Perhaps if I had known that Dementia 13 was conceived as a ripoff of Psycho -- Wikipedia says flatly "The producer wanted a cheap Psycho copy, complete with gothic atmosphere and brutal killings" -- I might have judged Dementia 13 more harshly as I was watching it. Perhaps also if it had been some anonymous hack who directed it, rather than the eventual director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, I would have seen it more clearly as a hack job and not the creative seeds of a future master of the form. But the truth is that those creative seeds are there, and I do think you can appreciate a movie more as emblematic of the style -- either the early style (Coppola) or the trademark style (Corman) -- of a particular cinematic voice. Dementia 13 looks a bit different as the product of auteurs other than Coppola and Corman, but it isn't the product of those hypothetical other auteurs.

Besides, the general contours of Psycho are effective in Psycho, and they are effective in a "cheap copy" as well.