A Night to Dismember (1983)

Interesting facts

A Night to Dismember is a 1983 American slasher horror film, produced and directed by Doris Wishman. The film stars pornographic actress Samantha Fox as a psychotic young woman, recently released from a psychiatric institution, who is driven to kill by an ancestral curse. It was the first and only foray into the horror genre for Wishman, who mainly directed and produced sexploitation films.

Production

The screenplay for A Night to Dismember was written by Judith J. Kushner, and the film conceived by Wishman in the wake of the success of slasher films such as Halloween. In order to secure financing, Wishman made a trailer for the film using stock footage and snippets shot specifically for advertising.

Filming took place in New York in 1979, with many of the locations being the private residences of Wishman and her friends and family. Portions of exterior filming (such as the forest scenes, and the sequence in which the two boys are murdered in the graveyard) in Westchester County.

Some of the cast members were friends or family of Wishman; Miriam Meth, who portrayed Vicki's mother, was Wishman's cousin, who later worked as a makeup artist on Days of Our Lives. Miriam's house was used as a filming location as well, with her own character's death sequence being filmed in her garage.

The special effects were provided by Les Lorrain, visual effects by John A. Bezich; cinematographer Smith's son, Chris, also helped contribute special effects.

According to Wishman, several reels of the film were destroyed while in the possession of Movielab, a photo processing studio Wishman had hired to process the film. By some accounts, the reels were destroyed in a fire, while Wishman claimed that a "disgruntled employee" destroyed them when the company went bankrupt. Wishman estimated that the incident left her with "less than half-a negative" of film.

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