Dementia 13

Dementia 13 (1963)

Are you afraid of death by drowning? Have you ever attempted suicide? Have you ever thought of committing murder?

A scheming widow hatches a bold plan to acquire her late husband's inheritance, unaware that she is being targeted by an ax murderer who lurks in the family's estate.

Date of release
1963-09-25
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (201)
Runtime
1h 15m
Genres
Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Director
Francis Ford Coppola

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $42K
  • Filmed in: Ireland

Dementia 13 is a 1963 horror thriller film written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola in his feature film directorial debut, and starring William Campbell, Luana Anders, Bart Patton, Mary Mitchel, Eithne Dunne, and Patrick Magee. The film was produced by Roger Corman for his company The Filmgroup, and released in the United States by American International Pictures during the fall of 1963, as the bottom half of a double feature with Corman's X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes.

Production

Francis Ford Coppola worked as a sound man on Corman's The Young Racers (1963), a racing film which starred Campbell and Magee. That film was shot in several different countries, and after production was completed in Ireland, Corman still had $22,000 (equivalent to $231,000 in 2025) of the film's allocated $165,000 (equivalent to $1,735,000 in 2025) budget remaining.

Coppola wrote a brief draft story idea in one night. The next morning, he described to Corman the most vividly detailed sequence: a half-naked woman ties several dolls to the bottom of a lake, then surfaces to find herself at the feet of an axe murder: "axed to death!", Coppola exclaimed. Corman was impressed enough to immediately provide Coppola with the $22,000 for the film.

Coppola's friend Al Locatelli served as the film's art director and helped Coppola write the final script in three days, uncredited. The speed at which the screenplay was completed resulted in unrealistic, "stilted" dialogue that Campbell recalled as being very difficult for the actors to speak.

The majority of the American actors in the cast were friends of Coppola's from UCLA, and many of them paid their own way to Ireland for the opportunity to appear in a film. Most of the Irish cast members were from the Abbey Theatre and were paid strictly minimum wage salaries. Eithne Dunne received approximately $600 (equivalent to $6,300 in 2025) for her performance. The cast and crew lived together in a farm house located outside of Dublin.

Dementia 13 was one of several Roger Corman productions veteran B-movie character actor Campbell appeared in, but it was the first that was completed on such a small budget. Coppola had convinced Campbell (and his The Young Racers co-star Patrick Magee) to appear in the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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