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The Driller Killer

In the rotting underbelly of late-1970s New York, a broke painter named Reno Miller (played by the director himself) is being crushed by unpaid rent, a chaotic loft shared with two women, a neighboring punk band that rehearses all night, and the art world’s cold rejection of his work, until he snaps, takes a power drill to the streets, and starts punching holes in the derelicts who haunt the Bowery. Shot guerrilla-style on 16mm in Abel Ferrara’s own neighborhood, this raw, blackly comic slasher was his first mainstream feature (after a porno) and instantly announced the arrival of one of American independent cinema’s most uncompromising voices: a filmmaker obsessed with Catholic guilt, urban decay, outsider artists, and violence that feels both nightmarish and documentary-real. Banned as a “video nasty” in the UK, The Driller Killer remains a feverish time capsule of pre-Giuliani New York and the moment Ferrara found his savage, unforgettable style.

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