Roger Corman is generally remembered as a net positive for movie history. As the legend goes, his American International Pictures gave an early break to a generation of actors, writers and directors who went on to reshape American cinema in the 1970s. The actual films, though, are often overlooked in favour of the legend. Vestron Video’s new Blu-Ray of Dementia 13 allows us a rare opportunity to look at one of the most consequential – a modest 68-minute proto-slasher that was also the first feature directing job for Francis Ford Coppola, future creator of the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now.

Actually, that’s not quite true. Coppola had previously directed The Peeper, an attempt to ride the “nudie-cutie” bandwagon Russ Meyer had kicked off with The Immoral Mr. Teas. That film was never released, and Coppola spent the next few years directing inserts for Corman. One of his assignments involved turning the Soviet science fiction film Nebo Zovyot into Battle Beyond the Sun, a process which Coppola wryly noted involved changing “a scene on a planet where an astronaut sees the image of a golden astronaut holding a golden torch of hope and humanity [into] two monsters fighting“. For all Coppola can appreciate the absurdity of these jobs, he isn’t embarrassed about or disdainful towards his time working for Corman. One of the pleasures of this re-release is that Coppola is all over it, recording a short but enthusiastic intro and a full commentary.

The simplest explanation for this is that Dementia 13 remains a tight piece of visual craft. It’s not The Conversation, but one might fairly ask whether that later film would be the masterpiece it is if Coppola hadn’t enjoyed this early, hands-on training in how to make a small-scale story gripping. The picture was conceived as AIP’s response to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, but in place of Hitchcock’s starkly modern, unsentimental horror we’ve got some ripe old spook-story ingredients: the contested will, the remote castle with one ominously locked room. The tone is much closer to the kind of giggly Gothic of James Whale and Curtis Harrington – or, indeed, one of the Edgar Allen Poe adaptations Corman was making at the time.

Two years later Mario Bava would fuse horror and whodunnit tropes and make something joltingly new in Blood and Black Lace. Dementia 13 has some proto-giallo moments, and the locked room – with its deafeningly creaky door and wind-up dolls that are mysteriously still active after being shut away for years – is a supremely atmospheric take on the Bluebeard myth. Unlike Bava’s lustrously colourful film, it’s shot in black and white, but it’s gorgeous nonetheless. The film looks like a million dollars – and the highest estimate for the film’s budget is $42,000, so for once that really is a compliment.

Coppola’s script isn’t as accomplished. I have to admit to antipathy for stories about wills, inheritances, dowries and the like; if your plot can be sorted out by a family court, it’s probably not going to hold my interest. But I might have engaged with the film a little more if I’d realised it was going to become a whodunnit. The killer only enters the narrative halfway through, in a still-strong poolside murder scene that probably accounts for this release’s 15 certificate on its own. Prior to that, the film is full of macabre overtones and foreshadowing but little actual sense of which direction the story will go in. Most of the clues to the film’s (surprisingly satisfying) resolution will go over the audience’s head, because the film hasn’t communicated to the audience they should be looking for clues yet. It’s worth questioning, too, whether it was worth Coppola’s effort to create an intricate murder plot for a film whose primary audience was teenagers making out in their cars. Presumably, Corman agreed, which is why he got another future auteur – Jack Hill – to splice in an extra horror scene.

Hill’s work is completely removed for this edition, which is half the reason why this director’s cut – unlike the similar re-edits of Apocalypse Now and The Outsiders – is about eleven minutes shorter than the original release. The other half of the reason is down to the removal of a deliciously silly prologue in which an actor playing a psychiatrist warns the audience that the following film might leave them with lasting mental scars. That, at least, does appear in the extras, reminding us that for all his philosophical literacy and soaring ambitions there is a part of Coppola that will forever be a showman. His last film Twixt took him back to Gothic territory, complete with interludes in 3D. It was also, like a lot of his recent projects, self-financed, which points up another reason why Coppola might look back fondly on his time in the Corman factory. Corman did, after all, stand proudly outside the studio system at a time when not many other film-makers did. It was this example, rather than learning how to stage a successful axe murder, that had the biggest impact on Coppola’s later career.

FIND POP SCREEN ON ALL GOOD PODCAST APPS

THANK YOU FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF DEMENTIA 13!