An artful bit of Freudian hokum, Dementia looks strange today. But, the sole feature from writer-director John Parker must have looked as if it dropped from Mars in 1953, when it began a two-year battle with the New York Board Of Censors. Featuring no dialogue, some grisly violence, more dime-store psychoanalysis than a shelf of self-help books, and noirish cinematography, it occasionally resembles a lost collaboration between Ingmar Bergman and Ed Wood. The diminutive Adrienne Barrett stars as a young woman prone to disturbing fantasies and violent impulses whose nocturnal wanderings take her through streets in which every man appears to be a sexual threat. After an overweight sophisticate with an uncanny resemblance to Orson Welles picks her up, she flashes back to a possibly imagined murderous incident from her past, an event that eerily foreshadows the remainder of her evening. Equal parts psychological abstraction and horror-influenced exploitation film, Dementia combines Z-grade surrealism (a bed… in a cemetery?) with claustrophobic storytelling in a way that's sometimes silly, sometimes powerful, and always memorable. A precursor to Carnival Of Souls and Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Dementia has rarely been seen in its original form since its 1957 acquisition by another distributor who trimmed its already brief 57-minute running time, re-titled it Daughter Of Horror, and added narration by a not very spooky Ed McMahon. (Sample line: "Enter the tormented, haunted, half-lived life of the insane!") Nicely restoring the original, this new video version presents both cuts of Dementia, a fascinating, daring, wonderfully overwrought relic that deserves its one-of-a-kind tag: It's the first and only example of avant-garde horror for the beat generation.