Dementia 13
1963 · 75 min · Horror
Dementia 13 (1963), the first real feature by Francis Ford Coppola, made for Roger Corman on leftover money in Ireland. Watch the full movie free online.
An Irish family gathers at the castle for the annual memorial to a drowned child, and somebody starts working through them with an axe. It is a Psycho knockoff and it knows it, but the underwater sequence is the work of someone who was going to be very good.
Coppola was the sound man on Corman's The Young Racers. When that wrapped in Ireland, Corman handed him the twenty-two thousand dollars left over and told him to make something gothic with a killing in it. Coppola wrote it fast, pre-sold the European rights behind Corman's back to raise another twenty thousand, and shot at Ardmore Studios and Howth Castle with UCLA friends who paid their own way.
Nine years later he made The Godfather.
This film has an audio description track, written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. There is nothing to switch on — the description is in the film’s own sound, so pressing play is the whole of it.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
Is Dementia 13 public domain? The rights evidence — the copyright registration, the renewal search and the sources we checked, written out in full so you can check them too.
Watch it here
This is our restoration, with the audio description track mixed in. There is nothing to switch on: press play and the description is in the sound. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is counted.
The same film without description, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Every film here that carries audio description — what description is, who it is for, and how ours are made.
How this print was restored
This copy of Dementia 13 was restored here, from a print that had been through a good deal before it reached us. The work finished on 2026-09-25. Every step is listed below, because a re-encode passed off as a restoration is worth nothing and the only way to tell them apart is to say what was done.
- 284 described cues across a 74 minute 50 second runtime, filling 24 minutes 35 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 32.9 percent of the film -- at 177 words per minute.
- Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.
- The original soundtrack was repaired from the Archive copy: rumble filtered below 60 Hz, loudness matched in two passes. No picture restoration on this pass.
- Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.
The print we started from is here, so the before and after can be compared.
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