Serial Frank Zito (Joe Spinell) prowls around New York, brutally scalping young women before attaching their hair to the mannequins in his collection. The slasher movie Maniac (1980) intermittently drops viewers into his voyeuristic point of view as he stalks these hapless victims. His heavy breathing seeps into the film’s sonicscape. A voiceover of his frenzied, disjointed internal monologue briefly gives viewers an insight into his erratic mental state. Frank’s unsettling demeanor — while driving his date to a restaurant, he abruptly diverts course and takes her to his mother’s grave instead — and the graphic scenes of bloodletting he engages in makes it hard to spend even 88 minutes in his presence.
Snuffing out any last sliver of escape, however, Franck Khalfoun’s 2012 Maniac remake doesn’t just force viewers to watch Frank (Elijah Wood) commit gruesome crimes; it makes us an active participant in them. Almost the entire film is shot from the killer’s perspective, trapping the audience inside his head. “You really have the opportunity to maybe feel the [nausea] of committing crime rather than glorifying it,” said Khalfoun in an interview.
