Daughter of Horror (1955), by John Parker

When it comes to Halloween, I think Shakespeare captured it best in one of his lesser-known and yet still classic plays, Titus Andronicus:

Spooky scary skeletons, and shivers down your spine

Shrieking skulls will shock your soul and seal your doom tonight

Spooky scary skeletons, they speak with such a screech

You'll shake and shudder in surprise when you hear the zombies shriek

How do I talk about my favorite holiday on Earth? I have lived twenty-two Halloweens and with few exceptions the day, and surrounding month, is the one time I am guaranteed to be happy. In case you haven't noticed, I like horror, and for most of my life horror has been the spark that has allowed me to survive depression, anxiety, and all the horrors the world can heap on an individual. Jack-o-lanterns, ghosts and goblins, and indeed, spooky skeletons all represent the force that drags me back to this world and keeps me living in it. And so for the entire month of October, I'll be making a decade-by-decade journey through four of my absolute favorite trash horror films. So what I'm saying is...WELCOME TO SPOOKYWEEN!!!

(Insert celebratory music cue here.)

I found Daughter of Horror a year or so ago, and for a time made watching a twice-a-month tradition. I guess in a lot of ways the film shocked my conception of trash--though I'd found crazy-weird movies from eras before the '60s on previous occasions, I generally went forth with the assumption that Blood Feast had to break certain taboos before the deluge could start. Turns out, nope. People have always wanted to break with tradition, including the traditions that allow their films to be remembered and preserved by audiences. Shoulda known it from literature. That magical group of people who always press their beautiful, wonderful vision have always existed. The mid-1950s seem a time completely immune to trash, with their obsession with political correctness--the kind that tries to spare white suburbanites the vapors from the act of mentioning black people, not the kind that white suburbanites complain about today. Certainly a female-led movie about the agonies of poverty and mental illness would be beyond their scope, right? Wrong. Daughter of Horror began life as Dementia, a movie completely without dialogue. It was unable to find release until several years after its creation, and was released as Daughter of Horror with cheesy narration by Ed McMahon--this was the title under which I was introduced to it. The narration, I've found, does little to disguise the fact that this is a genuinely upsetting movie. And it never fades, no matter how many times I watch it.

As I said, Daughter of Horror contains no dialogue, and is largely a string of vignettes, though they do form a cohesive narrative. A young woman lives in a crummy hotel in a large, alienated city. She suffers from some sort of anxiety disorder and is prone to hallucinations. She travels through the city, witnessing muggings, child poverty, and domestic abuse, eventually coming across a scummy man who pins her to a light pole. He gives her what seems to be a pot joint (she squints and becomes more confused when she smokes it), and leads her into the limo of a rich fatcat, played by Bruno VeSota. Let me tell you, if you need a smarmy, corpulent jerk in your movie, Bruno VeSota is the way to go. He also played asshole greaseballs in The Undead, Daddy-O, Attack of the Giant Leeches, and A Bucket of Blood. He works magnificently here, and so every time I see those movies I think of this one. Anyway, we slowly learn that the young woman has always had an awful life. A cemetery flashback reveals to us that she came from a broken home, and she has been haunted by images of her father since she was a child. After a long sequence where the rich dude eats a huge dinner in front of her, without offering her a single bite, the young woman is nearly assaulted, and she murders her captor. Of course, this must not go unpunished. The rest of the movie is a relentless chase as the young woman struggles to elude a policeman identical to her father, who seems much too happy with the idea of arresting her. This is where the movie's imagery shifts from bizarre to outright cruel. The ending, of course, doesn't let up.

Watching this movie is like going through a tunnel of sound--cold, angry, stressful sound. And it gets louder and louder until, a mere fifty-five minutes later, it just stops. Like real mental illness, it is an assault upon the senses: deliberately confusing, painful, and traumatizing at all ventures. To envision a movie like this in 1955 is extraordinary. This is probably the only movie I've seen that does such a good job of capturing the fear of mental illness, the lack of peace--the impulse to always run, always hungrily desiring something better and never getting it, and feeling guilty for it, and feeling like the world will eagerly and desperately turn on you the first second it gets. The sense of never knowing what's real and what's just a dream in a hotel room. This is not glamorous, a la magic pixie dream girls. Mental illness is war and death. And this movie--independent of Ed McMahon narration--gets that.

Is it exploiting all this? Surely. But there is also something compelling about the movie from a feminist perspective. The villains of the movie are abusers--particularly abusers who are men. Abusive pimps, husbands, fathers. Male privilege, and male aggression, are the antagonists of the film. Though women are not portrayed in a particularly positive light, there is emphasis cast on the dark nature of men. In the 1950s this would have been an affront to a strong patriarchy, one which used the notion of political correctness to normalize and hide abuses both in public and behind closed doors. Actually, that still happens today, and we still have issues with talking about it. Don't know if Parker wanted us to talk about it, but I'm doing it now, so it seems to be something of an inevitable consequence.

It's hard for me to find faults in Daughter of Horror. It's actually one of the few movies that I would encourage being longer--seriously, it is only fifty-five minutes long. Apparently it was cut for its 1955 release, but I can't determine if the available versions retain those cuts. If they do, I really wonder what was in them and how much footage they entail. In any case, I am still content with the version we have, even if, as ever, I am upset by the potential implied by lost footage. (Talk to me about King Kong sometime.) 

I have nothing coherent to say about Halloween, save for the fact that I love it. The same applies to this movie. I love it. It's creepy and dark and it actually scares me. 'Nuff said.

See you next time, when Spookyween takes the '60s!