A widow deceives her late husband's mother and brothers into thinking he's still alive when she attends the yearly memorial to his drowned sister, hoping to secure his inheritance, but her cunning is no match for the demented, axe-wielding thing roaming the grounds of the family's Irish estate.
This was a tad eccentric but proved to me a very delightfully surreal horror film. In watching this, you immediately get the feeling the director has both interesting, out-of-the-ordinary ideas plus the balls to do things his own way. It's flawed, but definitely shows plenty of directing chops and potential for brilliance, just a few years down the road. A bona-fide, low-budget, American classic.
Coppolas version of Psycho, sort of
After the sudden death of her husband, an American woman (Luana Anders) keeps it secret and tries to ingratiate herself to the matriarch at the familys manor in Ireland in order to extort part of the inheritance. But theres a dark pall over the family after an accidental drowning seven years earlier, not to mention the specter of a psycho with an axe! William Campbell plays the strange brother and Mary Mitchel his fiancée.
Shot in B&W, Dementia 13 (1963), aka The Haunted and the Hunted, was the theatrical debut for writer/director Francis Ford Coppola after producer Roger Corman offered him to do a low-budget imitation of Psycho (1960) in Ireland with funds left over from his movie The Young R...
