Abel Ferrara’s debut feature, The Driller Killer, arrived at the end of a decade in which life in New York City had been reinvented on screen. Released in 1979, it comes ten years after Midnight Cowboy had helped to start the American New Wave’s re-evaluation of the city. Subsequent films like The French Connection, Mean Streets, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon had attempted to present the truth of New York, beyond the tall buildings, famous figures, and iconic imagery. In the 1970s, it was a city in economic and social crisis, and directors like Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, and William Friedkin were able to capture the tension under the surface.
Consequently, Ferrara’s first film was not exactly treading new ground in its gritty, claustrophobic, and messy representation of the late ‘70s New York. It is in many ways a fusion of the films that came before, with its depiction of poverty, violence, and the vibrant art punk scene.
However, its uniqueness is in its fresh exploration of the slasher genre, which it combines with these quintessentially ‘New Hollywood New York’ elements. The film expands and progresses previous attempts to explore contemporary character studies in the city, taking the violence displayed in other New York films to its logical conclusion.
The Driller Killer stars director Abel Ferrara as artist Reno Miller. A chillingly mysterious opening scene sets the tone for the character’s status within the city's ecosystem: the screen flashes red before cutting to the interior of a Catholic Church. A nun enters, talking about an old man (the first of many nuns in the filmography of Ferrara). Reno follows the nun, joined by his girlfriend Carol. He is told that a confused old man had a piece of paper with Reno’s full name written on it, and so the convent thought Reno may be able to identify him.
The camera stalks the protagonist as he approaches the front of the church where the old man is seated. The sound of organ synth and blood-red lighting sets a disturbing tone that does not let up for the rest of the film. Ferrara’s opening instantly recalls Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) in its use of religious symbolism with violent undertones. This scene’s tension reaches its climax when the old man grabs Reno’s hand, startling him, and leading him to run out of the church and into a taxi.
Following this suspenseful and spiritual opening, the film shifts into gritty realism, as the two characters enter the streets of New York. Having been unsettled by the experience in the church, he dismisses his girlfriend’s suggestion that the man could’ve been his estranged father, branding him a “degenerate”, a “bum”, and a “nobody”. Reno and Carol are driven through traffic to the sound of punk rock, as we get our first look at its busy streets at night. Carol then enters a packed nightclub, which bookends the opening of Ferrara’s film. She brings Pamela, their third roommate, back to the car, and their night ends. The intersection of existential fear and urban realism becomes a key element in Reno’s emotional spiral into violence.
At the center of Reno’s emotional and spiritual inner battle is the balance between his financial security and artistic expression. He and his two roommates are struggling to pay the rent, as Reno has been unable to finish a painting. One of the ways that Ferrara’s film is most successful is in its representation of this artist’s struggle: the pursuit of creativity whilst being denied the necessary means to live. Reno clearly feels a need to create something, but this creativity is being stifled by the responsibilities that exist within the real world. No longer is he painting in order to fulfil his artistic desires, instead he must finish his newest piece to pay the rent.
The emotional stress results in violence. Reno’s brutal killings can be read as a replacement for the artistic expression he has become unable to produce. The murders become his new outlet for creativity. His brush is replaced by another tool – the drill – as he paints his victims with their own blood. The suppression of Reno’s natural artistic instincts therefore becomes the driving force behind his violent outbursts. This builds on films like Taxi Driver (1976), which saw violence as an unfortunate outlet for disturbed individuals in a restrictive and claustrophobic environment.
However, in the slasher genre, Ferrara doesn’t have to gradually build toward a violent shootout. His protagonist’s killings can happen throughout.
This procession is matched with a return to the style of filmmaking from the opening scene. Many of the slasher sequences employ the suspenseful camerawork, unsettling music, and bold red lighting that characterizes the first scene in the church. Moments in which Reno experiences flashbacks, hallucinations, and violent visions share a similar visual style. The church scene, at its core, is about identity. Whether or not it was his father, Reno was walking toward the man, wondering if he was about to discover something about his own identity. This is mirrored by scenes that depict Reno’s unraveling of his own identity, as he begins to define himself not as a painter, or an artist, but as a violent killer. Reno Miller is an individual in need of some means of definition – his shift into violence becomes a way to bridge the gap between creativity and creation.
Crisis of identity is a key theme of many New York City films in the New Hollywood era. In Midnight Cowboy, Jon Voight’s character (Joe Buck) struggles with his perception of himself. His ‘cowboy’ identity becomes weakened, as he comes to represent the failure of American symbols of masculinity in mid-century urban environments. This theme also appears in films like Taxi Driver and Mean Streets.
The Driller Killer lifts the lid on life as a struggling creative in the big city. While other representations of this lifestyle have glamourized or romanticized it, Ferrara finds a balance between what he considers to be the positives, and the soul-crushing negatives. On the one hand, life in the New York City art and punk world in the 1970s is portrayed as lively. With the fictional band No Wave living below them, the characters are clearly at the center of the contemporary music scene. Because of this, they receive the benefits of the chaotic nightlife, freedom of lifestyle, and artistic influence that comes with being a part of an urban sub-culture.
However, this is at odds with the suffocating settings in which the characters live and breathe. The three of them rent a small, claustrophobic apartment, where noise from neighbors is an inevitability. Reno begins to feel restricted by the lack of space. Rather than appreciating the vibrant atmosphere, Reno finds himself unable to concentrate on his work. Another reason for lashing out.
In many ways, Reno’s inability to find success as an artist leaves him locked outside of the art scene he lives right alongside. It is significant that he is always able to hear No Wave, but unlike the others in the building, he never goes down to see them. Instead, he tries to finish his piece. His artistic impotence operates as a barrier to his entry into the scene. He must focus on his financial needs before enjoying the freedom that life in New York may offer him. In this way, despite being able to see, and hear, the scene he wants to be a part of, Reno is socially alienated.
This theme is further explored through Ferrara’s use of inserts from a documentary he was filming about homelessness in New York City. There are a number of sequences that show homeless people on the streets, and these are often either explicitly referenced, or at least alluded to, when Reno eventually takes to the streets to murder. He seems to have some kind of connection with the homeless people he encounters; he talks to them, he shouts at them, eventually he attacks them, but in many ways, he is represented as a social outcast in the same way as they are while walking the streets with his drill. Ferrara’s film centers around the tough life on the streets of New York, and although he is not homeless, Reno’s failure to pay his rent means that he is getting closer and closer to joining them.
In this way, The Driller Killer reinvents the slasher by dragging it into the realism of the ‘70s cinema of urban life. In addition, its representation of “the slasher” is atypical of the genre, with the film’s protagonist taking up the role of both victim and villain. In the early slashers of the late 1970s, this was innovative, moving the genre away from one-dimensional jump scare and chase flicks into a realist assessment of the violence bubbling under the surface in stifling environments. Ferrara was able to combine the worlds of New York City directors like Martin Scorsese, with the slasher themes that defined late 1970s Hollywood horror cinema. This hybrid offers fans of the New York Cinema a perfect climax of effective scares and meaningful commentary.
Its legacy is visible throughout the genre, with New York City horrors like Maniac Cop (1988) and Italian-American The New York Ripper (1982), which all draw on Ferrara’s innovative use of the city.
-Luke
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