For over fifty years, Francis Ford Coppola has been a towering, and often controversial, figure in American Cinema. His filmography is one of the most legendary of all time and includes some of the greatest movies ever made like The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979), and more. It also includes wild swings—One from the Heart (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)—which sometimes paid off, but sometimes did not. This year, his forty-year-in-the-making passion project Megalopolis finally hit screens for the general public after a festival run that provoked a mixed critical response to say the least. It is a gigantic movie made on a huge budget with vast, and sometimes impenetrable, ideas. His very first film, however, was a much more modest project, made on a minuscule budget, and…it was a horror movie.

Dementia 13 (1963) is very much a...