The Mischievous Mind of the Errant Girl

Dementia (1955)
directed by John Parker
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

If ever a film was better suited to the names of its leads, I haven't seen it. Phantasm, perhaps, though that was so much later. Adrienne Barrett plays simply "The Gamine." Richard Barron is "Evil One." Unlike Sunrise, in which the characters' names imply the clean-slate simplicity of myth, Dementia is even more primal in its vocabulary of crude shadows and fears, with no sounds except the occasional inference of laughter, of footsteps in the dark, of an ocean wave cresting on the shore of some half-remembered nightmare. The wailing chorus of every fifties late-night sci-fi mystery (the same soundscape that seeing the little kid watch The Thing from Another World in Halloween brings to mind) is my new go-to for what I want people to hear on the film that gnaws at the mind's eye of my subconscious. If that strikes you as strange, it's exactly the impression the unique and imperative Dementia imparts.