Marihuana, motherhood & madness

by Dwain Esper

Marihuana, Motherhood & Madness features the complete shooting scripts of three Depression-era films directed by independent filmmaker Dwain Esper, prominent in the exploitation film industry for his daring, low-budget movies about taboo issues like sex, drugs, and insanity. The screenplays included are Modern Motherhood (1934), a social commentary on liberal marriages, sexualy transmitted disease, and abortion; Maniac (1934), a treatise on mental illness delivered in a B-grade horror-movie format; and Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell (1936), a "drug scare" film in which a few puffs set an innocent high-school girl on a downward spiral to become a heroin-addicted, drug-pushing kidnapper.