Believe it or not, William Lustig’s notorious horror classic Maniac recently celebrated its 40th Anniversary! Starring the inimitable Joe Spinell and boasting astonishing effects work from Tom Savini, Maniac tells the tale of Frank Zito (Spinell), a vicious serial killer terrorizing New York while collecting the scalps of his predominantly female victims. It’s a powerful movie, buoyed by Spinell’s incredible performance and the film’s marvelously seedy grindhouse aesthetic.
While Maniac has hit home video over the years in many formats (most recently with a wonderful Blu-ray edition released by Lustig’s legendary distribution company Blue Underground), the film will be seeing what promises to be its best and most comprehensive release to date on May 26th, with a new two-disc, 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (also available on that day will be Blue Underground’s 4K Ultra HD release of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie).
In advance of this release, Mr. Lustig was kind enough to sit down with Bloody Disgusting to chat about the film, Joe Spinell, and why the upcoming 4K disc will be a must own for fans.
Bloody Disgusting: Maniac just reached its 40th anniversary. It’s widely considered to be one of the greatest slasher movies ever made, there have been several home video releases, there has been a well-regarded remake, and there’s even a comic book featuring a crossover with Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper! Not to mention we now have an Ultra High Definition 4K Blu-ray release of the film coming up soon. Looking back on Maniac, what is it about the film, do you think, that is most responsible for its success and longevity?
William Lustig: “Joe Spinell. Joe Spinell could read the phone book and you’d want to watch him. He’s so interesting. He’s just got this magnetic presence. I’m not the only one – if you look at his resume, you’ll see that he’s worked with directors multiple times. They all know that this guy is just somebody that you don’t want to take your eyes off of.
“I’ll tell you, his friends at his funeral – do you know Sonny Grosso? Sonny Grosso was Eddie Egan’s partner in The French Connection. Roy Scheider depicted him. I’m with Sonny at the cemetery, and most of the people had already departed. We were there for a moment, and I remember his words to me: ‘We just buried a million laughs.’ That really sums up Joe, at least for his friends. ‘Buried a million laughs.’
“He really had an interesting perspective on life. He was a load of contradictions. I miss him very much. Of all the friends who have passed away, people I’ve known…I miss him. I miss him frequently.”
BD: Revisiting the film, I was reminded of being a younger horror fan in the late 80s and 90s and being struck by how quickly film critics would attack any horror film featuring female victims as being misogynistic. Certainly that accusation was leveled against Maniac and even its remake in 2012. A relatively recent review even called the original movie “notoriously misogynistic”. What is your response to that sort of charge about this film, and what would you say to, perhaps, younger genre fans who haven’t yet seen the movie due to any misgivings they may have about its content?
Lustig: “We weren’t women-haters who made the movie. We were just following the tradition of the horror-thriller. We really didn’t see having men as being his primary victims. If you look at serial killers of the 70s – [that] was the golden age of serial killers. You had John Wayne Gacy, you had Henry Lee Lucas, you had David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy. You had all of these interesting serial killers in the 70s. What we were thinking is, we were doing a kind of compilation of them. With the exception of John Wayne Gacy, the victims of these serial killers were primarily women. It would have been disingenuous of us to do anything else. It was just reflecting what was going on at the time. What we did with Joe was, we kinda made him a compilation of these various serial killers.”
BD: There is a lineage of this particular type of onscreen psychopath dating back to Norman Bates, who I see shades of in Frank. But with Frank, you and Mr. Spinell gave that character a humanity that a lot of slasher movie villains rarely have. How important was that aspect of the film when you were making it?
Lustig: “Very. We thought about that. Joe saw these people as tortured souls. And we wanted to add that to the movie. That he was a guy who was operating on a compulsion that he couldn’t control. It does date back to Norman Bates, it dates back to Peeping Tom. The idea is that the monster is within us. It’s in the guise of somebody who is seemingly normal. We weren’t making a Jason or Michael Myers.”
BD: Speaking of humanizing Frank – Anna (Caroline Munro) plays a huge role in helping the audience see Frank as a human being. She allows him to be almost normal, in a way, if only briefly. When it all goes bad, which of course it has to, it sends Frank spiraling. If Frank had never met Anna, do you think he would have wound up attempting suicide? Would we have wound up at the same ending?
Lustig: “The whole thing about suicide or what…I kind of wanted the film to go off the rails in the last section. I don’t know if she drove him to it – I don’t think so – I just think he was snapping for whatever reason. Something snapped for him at the cemetery, and he went kind of over the edge.”
BD: I’m hoping you can humor me a bit here. I just have a few questions about some of the film’s trivia. First up – I just saw this debate raging again on Twitter not that long ago, so I’m hoping you can put it to bed. The film’s poster – erection, or bulge? Did you have any say in the marketing, and what went on the poster?
Lustig: “I vote for erection! No, but I was brought in after the artwork was completed. The distributor, who happened to be three blocks from my apartment in New York, called me in late in the day. They said ‘Come on in, we got the artwork for your movie in.’ And we all go there, including Joe, and Joe was like ‘There’s an erection!’ It was so funny. I didn’t say anything, other than ‘Holy shit! Are you really gonna put this out?’ Not only the erection, but you have this bloody head, you got him standing in blood with a dripping knife. It was pretty out there for the time!”
BD: In your filmography, we have Maniac, and we have Maniac Cop. Are the two set in the same universe, and if so – might Frank Zito and Matt Cordell have ever crossed paths?
Lustig: “No! It was totally separate. It was totally separate.”
BD: Given the film’s gotcha ending, it seemed as though a sequel was inevitable. Might there have been any further Maniac movies – be they sequels to that first film, or maybe even other films bearing the “Maniac ” moniker like Maniac Cop?
Lustig: “Here’s what happened. Joe wanted to do a sequel to Maniac. I didn’t want to do a sequel, but I didn’t want to stand in the way of Joe doing one. To make a long story short, we made a deal with the producer to license the sequel rights to Maniac so Joe could go forward with it. Literally, three weeks before shooting, Joe died.”
BD: Would this have been Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie, from the promo reel that was shot?
Lustig: “It was kind of like that. I don’t know that I ever read the script. I think it was something like that, but I’m not really sure.”
BD: Let’s dive into that 4K release. What can fans of the film expect from this release that they haven’t already gotten from the previous Blu-ray?
Lustig: “Let me tell you something. About two years ago, my producing partner stumbled across the original negative of Maniac. Something we had lost. It was really a heartbreak for me, because the negative we had for Maniac was forty years old and was badly deteriorating. I was always kind of depressed that my movie wouldn’t exist anymore.
“So we found the original 16mm camera negative, and all of it was scanned at the highest bit rate possible. That’s how we did that Blu-ray. While we’re were doing the Blu-ray, we always had it in our minds – ‘Do we do a 4K? Do we not do a 4K?’ We really didn’t know where the market was going, and we didn’t see any other genre films with the exception of Suspiria coming out on 4K. Everybody was downplaying it, saying ‘Ah, there’s not enough of a market for it!’ Even our manufacturer was saying ‘Why do you guys wanna do 4K? There’s no business in it. There’s not enough people that want it.’
“But my gut told me that if we start doing it, other people will start doing it. So, I made the decision to go out and take a gamble, and put that and Zombie out on 4K. I know I own the company and it’s my movie, lets put that out there, but I gotta tell you – Maniac looks spectacular on 4K disc. It really does. I’m looking at it, I’m going ‘My god, it looks like I shot the movie yesterday!’ It still looks filmic. It’s not like it looks like it was shot on video or anything. But it was just amazing to me. I was really quite surprised at how good it turned out. So I’m excited about the release of Maniac on 4K. We’ll have a separate Blu-ray disc in there, which has all the special features [from the previous release], plus there are some that are on the feature disc itself. It’s got everything, except it doesn’t have the CD soundtrack. And we upgraded the audio on it and Zombie to Dolby Atmos!
“It was enormously expensive to do! But, I took the position that I own the film in perpetuity, the same with Zombie. So if I was gonna take a gamble, I’ll take a gamble on these two titles. Because if they don’t go out the door strong, I have an unlimited amount of years to recoup my money.
“Funny enough, they have [done well]. The early indications are that the sales are surprisingly strong. They’re probably about the same as what we did on that Blu-ray release so far.”
BD: Any final thoughts on Maniac?
Lustig: “You know, I was 24 years old when I made the picture. I really did the movie…it was all instinct. It wasn’t like I had a great depth of knowledge. It was a kind of a movie that I made, just having watched countless movies. It’s funny, I made the movie, and I don’t remember overthinking it. I just wanted to make a movie that would be enjoyed by the audiences I sat with on 42nd Street. That was my simple goal. I wanted to make a movie that delivered what the audiences wanted on 42nd Street. And I achieved it, I have to say. And for that, I’m happy.”
In addition to this chat, Mr. Lustig also noted that The New York Ripper and The House by the Cemetery will be the next 4K releases coming down the pike from Blue Underground.
Maniac and Zombie will be available in 4K Ultra HD on May 26th.
Special thanks to William Lustig for his time.
