"Sensual ecstasy becomes supernatural terror!" screams one of the original taglines for Night Tide (1961), a description that belies the content of this moody B-movie curiosity. Audiences expecting a cheap, exploitative monster movie must have been surprised, or terribly disappointed, to instead find a quiet, eerie, expressive, black-and-white melodrama that's closer in spirit to Freaks and Cat People than Creature From The Black Lagoon. In his first leading role, after bit parts in Rebel Without A Cause and Giant, a fresh-scrubbed Dennis Hopper plays a naive sailor who falls in love with a carnival mermaid (Linda Lawson) on the Santa Monica pier. His suspicions are aroused, however, when he discovers that her past two boyfriends have mysteriously disappeared and that she may, in fact, be a descendant of the sirens. With its lunar cycles, awkward ocean metaphors, ritualistic conga dances, and accurate tarot-card readings, Night Tide is loaded with enough flaky mysticism to stock a crystal shop. Every carny on the pier warns Hopper that he's in grave danger, but, despite a few tense moments, writer-director Curtis Harrington is more interested in crafting dream-like textures than generating any real suspense. Night Tide has the trappings of a low-budget horror film, but it's better seen as a love story with unusual complications, a fitting and worthwhile tribute to the haunting poem that inspired it, Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee."