'Night Tide' (1961) – Curtis Harrington.

'Night Tide' is a rather splendidly surrealistic, endearingly whimsical, doom-tinged romance betwixt handsome naïve young sailor Johnny (Dennis Hopper), and the breathtakingly beautiful Mora (Linda Lawson) who meet adorably cutely, and not long thereafter their budding courtship, and increasing intimacy very soon becomes darkly entwined with delectably strange events, all sinisterly set against the garish carny vitality of the waterfront amusements, fun houses, dingy beatnik dives, and the corrupted, brine-weathered austerity of Venice Beach, and its myriad eccentric denizens that lend additional colour to writer/director Curtis Harrington's sublimely melancholy, quasi-mythical Mermaid melodrama about this 'vortex of evil' that surrounds the mesmerising Mora, and the macabre fate that inexorably befalls all her young lovers! The weird fragility of Harrington's elegiac film is perfectly represented in a young Dennis Hopper's endearingly earnest, emotionally raw performance as the strongly beguiled sailor Johnny, whose burning love for the profoundly mysterious Mora makes for genuinely affecting, nightmare-tinged drama, whereby the skewed, off-beat dreamy atmosphere of 'Night Tide' is eerily redolent of 'Carnival of Souls', and 'The Witch who came from the Sea', taking the eerily entranced viewer deep into a sinister squall of psychological strangeness you shan't soon forget!