American International Pictures, the legendary exploitation studio run by Roger Corman, is famous not just for the speed of its productions (Little Shop of Horrors -- two days and one night of shooting), or its casts of aging stars and up-and-comers equally desperate for work (The Terror paired Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff), but for the directors who yelled "Cut!" for the first time while working inside Corman's speed machine. Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante and John Sayles are just a few of the future auteurs who got their start slaving for Corman; Dementia 13 was Francis Ford Coppola's turn.

Working as the location sound recorder on Corman's The Young Racers, Coppola had previously directed nudie cuties like The Bellboy and the Playgirls under a fake name and done some creative editing on some scifi footage purchased overseas by Corman. But Racers was shot in Europe and the penny-pinching Corman, who hated not getting his money's worth, suggested that Coppola -- who had been begging for more work -- stay behind in Ireland. It was 1963 and William Castle had seeded American audiences for stories of mysterious homicidal killers in movies like, well, Homicidal. In Italy, Mario Bava was in production on the Italian version of the slasher film, his giallo called The Girl Who Knew Too Much. But the movie that dragged these films into the mainstream was Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, which gave wholesome American audiences a cross-dressing, necrophiliac psychopath they could love.

Coppola pitched Corman his movie the next morning and, after getting the green light (and $20,000), he spent a couple of days writing the script, stole the actors from the now-completed Young Racers and got to work. Shot mostly on location and spiked with sweet underwater footage, Dementia 13 (what does that title even mean?) kicks off with a midnight boat ride that sticks in the mind of any who see it. Fat Jack Haloran hops in his rowboat for a midnight paddle, rockabilly-blaring transistor radio in tow. His wife, Louise (Luana Anders, sporting a peroxide blonde haystack on her head), hops in after him, ranting about his mother's will, which will leave the Haloran fortune to charity. She doesn't stand to inherit a penny, especially not after Jack keels over 30-seconds later with a massive coronary. Louisa hides his body and flies to Ireland to visit his spooky family in their spooky castle. Mom's a freak, one of the sons is a neurotic and the other is a dark, brooding macho man who looks like he can't decide whether he wants to kiss his fiancee or just slap her around. Louisa quickly worms her way into the heart of the family, pretending to have a psychic connection with Kathleen, the dead little sister who drowned in the castle's lake. Next come the axe murders.

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