The 1955 film is an abstract expressionist take on a dark and disturbing subject. Not for all tastes, but I find it entrancing. A masterpiece. The original sound track is brilliant, with music that was composed by George Antheil, an American avant-garde composer who lived from 1900 to 1959.Then some knuckleheads bought the rights to the film and decided it needed some histrionic narration thrown in here and there. The narration is a distracting annoyance and detracts seriously from the film. Many people on archive.org complained about this and despaired over what could be done. Several people claimed the narrator is Ed McMahon, the intro man for the old Johnny Carson show. I don't know how they came to this conclusion. One enterprising person created his own electronic musical soundtrack, but that eliminated all the original audio. So how can you watch it with the original soundtrack but without that imbecilic narration? I found a way.I ported the video file to an audio WAV file (using freeware tools) and opened it in Audacity, a wonderful tool for audio editing, also available as freeware. Whenever that annoying voice appeared, I selected that portion of the audio stream and set it to silent. Then I copied a nearby portion of sound from the original sound track equivalent in time and pasted it over the silent portion. I used VirtualDub (more freeware) to apply the modified sound track to the video. The resulting sound track is narration free! We have the original Dementia back! Find it at archive.org.

"Dementia"/a.k.a. "Daughter of Horror" is creepy fun. Nothing like you'd expect. It's surreal, like that part of "Glen or Glenda" where a room full of people mock poor Glen and then come at him with their fingers wiggling, only here it's scary instead of funny. The movie has no dialog, and if it did we'd probably die laughing. Marni ("King and I" "My Fair Lady") Nixon does the soprano obbligato throughout. There's an Orson Welles character in it, too. And a sofa with some laughing, half-dressed, blond broad out in a cemetery. Honest, I am not making this up.David Lynch has been borrowing from this one for years and none of us knew.

A wonderfully odd surrealist film made in 1953 that is reminiscent of the German expressionist films of the 1920s. A primly dressed young woman asleep in a dingy urban hotel room wakes up, puts a knife in her pocket and wanders the streets of a dystopian city filled with lecherous and violent men. A newspaper headline shouts of a stabbing. Is she responsible? In a flashback in a graveyard, we learn her father was a drunk who beat her. Her mother's sin was reading magazines, eating chocolates and seeing other men, which leads to her being murdered by her husband. In a way, the "horror" of the film is the ways women try to accommodate themselves to living in a male world. Women are prostitutes, downtrodden cleaning women, beaten wives or seductresses in this sick and unfair world. Perhaps the heroine's sin is simply the fact that she has the temerity that act out her anger at her fate instead of passively enduring it like the other women in the film. What's interesting to me is the fact that even though she's constantly characterized as being "evil" by the boorish male-voice over, she actually comes across as quite respectable and intelligent (maybe that's what ultimately makes her so threatening to the men). Daughter of Horror has low-budget, but creatively noir cinematography and a wonderful scene at a jazz club at the end. Daughter of Horror is truly avant-garde in the way it looks ahead to both the underground films of the sixties as well as the feminist movement.

DAUGHTER … is an old curiosity—conceived as a foray into a crazy woman's mind. The approach is impressionist, i.e. a boosted POV. It is impressing and pertinent. A surrealist exercise, In one of the previous comments here, I spoke about the poems as a cinematographic species of the silent movies.It predates the Quays; on the other hand, my surrealist dish is more like Fellini and Bunuel. DAUGHTER OF HORROR pertains to the same species, as an ambitious, averagely daring, ingenious ,overrated yet intriguing try; it predates the Quays, which means, again, surrealism in bolus.In the epoch, there was some controversy; but IMDb offers already this sort of historical tips, I believe.