Dementia 13 (1963)
Trivia
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Spoilers (1)
Francis Ford Coppola was assisting Roger Corman on the set of The Young Racers (1963) in Ireland. Corman allowed Coppola to use the same set, crew, and actors Luana Anders, William Campbell, and Patrick Magee for this film if he could shoot around the shooting schedule of Corman's film.
Francis Ford Coppola's first director credit, as "Francis Coppola".
The lyric in Tom Petty's song "American Girl" that goes "raised on promises" appears to have come from a line of dialogue in this film. Referring to another woman, Louise states, "Especially an American girl. You can tell she was raised on promises."
Director Francis Ford Coppola met his wife Eleanor Coppola during the making of the film.
American International Pictures would frequently make use of frozen dollars and cheaper European facilities by sending composers Les Baxter and Ronald Stein to record their scores in London, Munich, and Rome. In spite of The Terror (1963) having a very small budget, Stein was able to use the 90-piece Munich Symphony Orchestra to record the score for that movie. Furthermore, whilst in Munich, Stein cut costs even further by juggling the recording sessions to squeeze in the scoring of Dementia 13.
Mary Mitchel, who plays Kane, would go on to work with director Francis Ford Coppola behind the scenes for most of her career, mainly as a script supervisor.
American Zoetrope produced a new 4K restoration of DEMENTIA 13 in 2018, adding the long-missing opening prologue which featured the D-13 test sequence. This new restoration has been screened in a few film festivals, but hasn't been released on DVD or Blu-ray.
The sculptures are credited to Edward Delaney (1930-2009), who was a noted Irish sculptor, responsible for many public monuments.
Francis Ford Coppola's billing as Francis Coppola wouldn't be the first time. For his films Apocalypse Now (1979) through Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), he went by Francis Coppola again.
Submitted to the British Board of Film Censors by Regal Films International (as The Haunted and the Hunted) and passed with an "X" certificate on 17 July 1964. Regal didn't manage to secure a general release on the major circuits, but distributed the film to many cinemas as an optional booking, sharing the bill with The Crawling Hand (1963). Both films opened in London on 2 November 1964 at the Prince of Wales (ABC) Harrow Road and the Broadway (ABC) Hammersmith. The Monthly Film Bulletin reported that The Haunted and the Hunted was going out at 73 minutes (6579 feet), rather than the original running time of Dementia 13 which was stated to be 81 minutes.
Spoilers
During an interview with Ben Mankiewicz on TCM, Roger Corman stated that whilst the film's title was originally "Dementia", he discovered that there was another film by the same name, Dementia (1955), so he wanted to alter it. He thought to himself that the number 13 was typically thought of as a scary number, and "Dementia 13" sounded good. He called up Francis Ford Coppola and asked if he could add something to the script about a character having something bad happen to him at the age of 13 that would influence him to become a killer later on in his life. This would justify the addition of the number. Coppola agreed to do this.
