Good news regarding the availability of Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (featuring Dennis Hopper). This from The New York Times:
An upgrade also makes a dramatic difference with Night Tide, a slow-moving, richly atmospheric supernatural tale from 1961, closer in spirit to M. R. James than EC Comics, that was the first feature-length narrative directed by the avant-garde filmmaker Curtis Harrington. After circulating for years in poor, public-domain prints, the film has been reissued by Kino […] in a high-definition transfer taken from a print restored by the Academy Film Archive. A young Dennis Hopper plays a sailor on shore leave who falls under the spell of a mysterious woman (Linda Lawson) posing in a mermaid costume for tourists at the Santa Monica Pier. She’s good at her job and there’s a reason for it, though her boyfriends keep turning up drowned.
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Harrington himself was a fascinating figure with connections to classical Hollywood, the Los Angeles underground (he photographed Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment) and the occult leader Aleister Crowley — a connection underlined in Night Tide by the presence of the artist Marjorie Cameron, who believed herself to be a goddess conjured up by a Pasadena black-magic cult headed by her husband, Jack Parsons, and a pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard. Playing a water witch who beckons the heroine back to the sea, Cameron adds an element of the uncanny to “Night Tide” wholly beyond the reach of special effects.