The Driller Killer

Year:  1979

Director:  Abel Ferrara

Screenplay:  Nicholas St. John

Starring: Abel Ferrara, Carolyn Marz, Baybi Day, Harry Schultz, Allan Wynroth

Running Time:  101 minutes (96 minutes theatrical release)

Genre:  Drama, comedy, horror

New York City, the late 1970s:  Reno Miller (Ferrara) is a struggling artist who lives with his girlfriend Carol (Mark) and her lover Pamela (Day), in a cramped, cluttered apartment.  Reno is working on a painting that will make him a lot of money, providing that Dalton (Schultz), the gallery owner who commissioned the piece, likes it.  Unable to pay his rent or bills, Reno knows full well that this is really his one chance, but is overcome with anxiety that he is reluctant to actually finish the piece.  To make matters worse a punk band have moved into the flat next door and practice loudly day and night.  Desperate for some peace and time to think, Reno takes to wandering the New York streets, where he becomes disgusted by the large numbers of people living on the streets, and terrified that he may very soon be joining them.  Eventually Reno snaps, and takes to the streets armed with a power drill, embarking on a killing spree targeting the unhoused population of New York.

After spending the 1970s making short, experimental films and a pornographic film, this marked the (relatively) mainstream debut of controversial auteur Abel Ferrara who becomes something of a cult figure in the '80s and '90s with exploitation films such as Ms .45 (1981), more mainstream crime dramas such as King of New York (1990) and The Funeral (1996), the hugely controversial Bad Lieutenant (1992), as well as science-fiction horror film Body Snatchers (1993), and bizarre vampire film The Addiction (1995).  More recently he has turned to making more experimental films in Italy and documentary features.  Those coming to The Driller Killer expecting grisly thrills may be disappointed because, while it is violent and gruesome, it isn't really as gory as the title and advertising promise, with the exception of a couple of very gruesome scenes, including a notorious scene where one unfortunate gets drilled in the head.   It's also a long time before any murders are committed.  Before then there are long rambling arguments and discussions, and a lot of punk music, as well as a gratuitous lesbian shower scene.  There are a lot of scenes of the band playing, and you could take out all the murders and have, basically, a punk comedy-drama.  This is an obviously very low-budget film filmed in an almost documentary style on the streets of New York, with much of the dialogue being so badly delivered and recorded that it is difficult to make out what the characters are saying.  Ferrera is a very good visual director and there are some scenes of unexpected beauty, and his talent does shine through at several points.  However, acting is not one of his skills.  Ferrara plays the lead role (under the pseudonym of Jimmy Laine) and seems to be spending the film doing a Robert De Niro impression.  The rest of the performances can be politely described as enthusiastic, with Carolyn Marz delivering by far the best performance.  The film does work as something of a time capsule of the underground scene in late 1970s New York.  Unusually for a horror film, Reno Miller's main trigger for his rampage is his financial woes rather than sexual frustration, also unusually almost all of his victims are men.  When it comes to the female characters it is left unclear whether he attacks them or not.  The Driller Killer does have it's unexpected place in film history due to it being almost singlehandedly responsible for the notorious "video nasty" scare in Britain in the 1980s.  Not the film itself but the gruesome VHS cover which depicted a close-up of the head drilling scene and the charming tagline "The Blood Flows in Rivers... And Still the Drill Keeps Tearing Through Flesh and Bone."  When this appeared in video trade magazines in the early 1980s, Conservative politicians clutched their pearls in horror and, by the mid '80s even such relatively innocuous films as The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Evil Dead (1983) were legally unavailable in Britain.  The recent film Censor (2021) is a good look at the video nasty period.  

Abel Ferrara is The Driller Killer

 

"Rosemary's Baby" by Ira Levin

Year of Publication:  1967
Number of Pages:  229 pages
Genre:  Horror

This book is an interesting and entertaining slice of urban horror.  Rosemary Woodhouse and her actor husband, Guy, move into a New York apartment building with a long and sinister history.  Before long, however, they have settled in and befriended the nice elderly couple next door, Minnie and Roman Castevet.  Rosemary is ecstatic when she falls pregnant.  However her pregnancy is a particularly difficult one, as she finds herself crippled with agonising pains and also noticing that her husband is acting very strangely, and her neighbours are taking a very strong interest in her and her baby.  Rosemary quickly comes to suspect that she is at the centre of a bizarre and powerful occult conspiracy.

With this book, Satanic horror and the occult moved out of English mansions and mouldering castles and moved into modern day Manhattan.  The fantasy elements take place among an immediately recognisable contemporary backdrop.  The book was written and set in the mid-sixties and there are numerous references to the culture and events of the time.  This was very new at the time, before authors such as Stephen King anchored their ghostly imaginings with pop culture references and brand names.  The novel was a major best-seller in it's day, in no doubt helped by it's modern day references.  However, reading it now nearly 45 years later, it feels quite dated.  The book is very much a product of it's time, and some of the attitudes and language are quite un-PC  by modern standards.

The book is well written and well paced.  The horror elements are mostly downplayed for the majority of the book, with hints and insinuations cropping up here and there.  It's a novel of urban paranoia, pretty early on the reader comes to believe that pretty much everyone is against Rosemary, and nine times out of ten they are.  Here you have every reason to be suspicious of your neighbours, your husband and your friendly neighbourhood doctor, who comes so highly recommended.  One of the central set-pieces in the book is a memorable and skillfully written sequence where Rosemary believes that she is dreaming about being raped by the Devil (or is she dreaming), which collides with other dreams and memories to create a powerfully disturbing sequence.  There is also a lot of humour in the book, a lot of which does read like a weird kind of Woody Allen style New York comedy.  There's not a million miles between humour and horror, and both are very difficult to pull off well, and even more difficult to blend as well as the book does.  Another major theme in the book is religion.  Guy describes himself as an atheist and Rosemary describes herself as an agnostic, but the novel makes it clear that deep down she is a good small town Catholic girl.  There are a couple of references to the "God is Dead" controversy that was going on in the late sixties.  That may be so, the book says, but his opposite number is just getting started. 

Many people will know Rosemary's Baby best from the acclaimed 1968 movie version, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow as Rosemary and John Cassevetes as Guy.  The movie is remarkably faithful to the book, and fans of the movie will probably enjoy the novel and vice versa.  Ira Levin once stated that at one point in the book Guy makes a reference to buying a shirt after seeing it advertised in The New Yorker magazine and Polanski rang him up and asked Levin what issue of the magazine the shirt had been advertised in, and Levin had to admit that he had just made it up.

Ira Levin published a sequel, Son of Rosemary, in 1997.