Dementia

Dubbed “the quintessence of gruesomeness”, this noirish psychological horror follows a young woman’s nightmarish evening through Los Angeles.

Dementia’s nightmarish framework portrays a young woman known only as “The Gamine” wandering Los Angeles’ Skid Row after dark. Hounded by anonymous men and shadowed by news headlines screaming of a killer on the loose, her journey drifts between dream and waking nightmare. Emerging from a sleazy Hollywood hotel, she moves through a succession of sinister nightspots as her psyche begins to unravel.

With its haunting avant-garde score, stark noir mise-en-scène and near-total absence of dialogue (although the cries, screams, and laughter express more than words could do), John Parker’s singular film compresses an extraordinary amount of unease into just 55 minutes. Cited as one of the first Freudian American horror films, Dementia was deemed too disturbing for its time — banned by the New York State Board and dismissed as “inhuman, indecent, and the quintessence of gruesomeness.” Today, it stands as a uniquely unsettling cinematic artefact.