Dear Dead Delilah is one of those horror films that makes you want to write a thank-you note to every other horror film you’ve ever seen for trying, even just a little. It is a movie so proudly muddled, so clumsily plotted, so spectacularly weird, it feels like it was written in longhand during a barbiturate bender, stuffed into a shoebox, and then filmed entirely out of spite.
A Southern Gothic slasher with soap opera-level drama and Lifetime movie pacing, Dear Dead Delilah promises axe murders, buried treasure, and family dysfunction. It delivers on all of these — in the same way a derailed train technically arrives at its destination: late, upside down, and on fire.
Plot: Who Killed Whom, and Also, What Is Happening?
Set in 1968 Nashville — which still looks suspiciously like 1843 — the film opens with a prologue involving a young woman murdering her domineering mother with an axe. We are then time-warped 25 years into the future (which looks exactly the same), where a parolee named Luddy wanders into town and promptly stumbles into a football game, a dysfunctional family estate, and the world’s most cheerfully cursed plantation.
The matriarch of the crumbling house, Delilah Charles, is played by Agnes Moorehead, who is wheeled around in a motorized chair like a Southern-fried Bond villain with scorn for everyone and zero regard for her family’s feelings. It’s like watching What Ever Happened to Baby Jane if Baby Jane got rich, hated her kids, and kept a shotgun in her lap.
Delilah announces she’s dying, has hidden a massive pile of money somewhere on the property, and that whoever finds it can keep it. This, naturally, leads to everyone sharpening their metaphorical — and literal — axes.
One by one, family members and houseguests are hacked apart by a killer who may or may not be Luddy, or maybe it’s Richard, or maybe it’s just a sentient pile of exposition. Bodies are hidden, heroin is injected, gin is consumed, heads are lopped off, and a motorized wheelchair rolls ominously across the grounds like a Confederate Roomba.
The climax involves a resurrection from the dead (kind of), a shotgun blast, and the casual establishment of a home for unwanted children by the last two people standing — one of whom buried three bodies the night before and the other who overdosed on heroin but apparently got better.
It ends with a happy fade-out and soft music, like we’re supposed to feel good about anything we just watched.
Acting: Cues Forgotten, Accents Misplaced
Agnes Moorehead, to her credit, is giving a performance — capital P, underlined, sprayed in Southern cologne. In declining health during filming, she delivers her lines with the venom of someone who has been waiting 70 years to tell off everyone in the room and finally got the script to do it. Her final scenes, crawling out of a mausoleum to shoot the killer in the head, feel like Bette Davis doing John Wick cosplay.
Robert Gentry as Richard is the film’s murderous hunk, a character who swings from boring adulterer to deranged axe-wielding fortune hunter without warning or logic. He delivers his lines with the energy of a man who just realized mid-scene that he’s the killer.
Michael Ansara, Anne Meacham, and Dennis Patrick float through the film with faces that scream, “We were told there’d be air conditioning.” Everyone appears to be acting in a different movie, often at the same time.
And then there’s Luddy, played by Patricia Carmichael, who is perhaps the film’s emotional core — assuming you find it emotionally compelling to bury murder victims in your backyard with the solemnity of someone planting hydrangeas.
Direction & Pacing: Time Has No Meaning
Written and directed by John Farris, who clearly wanted to make Tennessee’s answer to Psycho, the film instead stumbles into Murder, She Wrote territory — but with more alcohol, worse lighting, and about eight more murders than anyone in this town should reasonably tolerate.
The pacing is positively glacial. Scenes drift in and out with no urgency. Entire subplots begin and vanish without explanation. At one point, two characters die, and nobody even notices for another 30 minutes. Characters wander the house, stare out windows, and mutter cryptic things like they’re all in the final act of a Tennessee Williams play that forgot to be good.
Even the murders, which should inject some life (or death) into the story, are slow, awkward, and about as suspenseful as a weather report. You can hear the musical cue winding up long before the axe swings.
Set Design & Mood: Antebellum Anxiety
The film was shot on location in Nashville, and the house is admittedly the best actor in the movie. Crumbling, dusty, and full of hidden corridors and decaying grandeur, it’s the perfect setting for a Southern Gothic horror — unfortunately, the movie never quite figures out how to use it.
Instead of building tension, the house serves mainly as a backdrop for long, confusing monologues, quiet adultery, and inexplicably casual corpse stashing. The entire estate is supposedly cursed, but honestly, the real curse is the editing.
Final Thoughts: The Real Horror Was the Runtime
Dear Dead Delilah is a film that tries to combine murder, mystery, melodrama, and Southern charm — and manages to make all of them worse in the process. It’s a slasher movie where the killer is obvious, the suspense is limp, and the survivors are somehow more morally questionable than the guy swinging the axe.
And yet, there’s something weirdly compelling in watching a movie that absolutely refuses to make sense. Like a fever dream with Southern accents and surprise decapitations, it keeps going long after it should have stopped — and then ends with a heartwarming epilogue about opening an orphanage, as if that somehow makes up for all the dismemberment.
★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 4 stars)
Come for the axe murders, stay for the wheelchair rampage, leave with more questions than you came in with.
