Maniac

Maniac (1934)

He menaced women with weird desires!

An ex-vaudeville actor is working as the assistant to a doctor who has Frankenstein aspirations. The ex-vaudeville actor kills the doctor and decides to assume the identity of the dead physician.

Date of release
1934-09-11
TMDB
4.0 / 10 (60)
Runtime
51m
Genres
Horror
Director
Dwain Esper

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: The Black Cat

Maniac is a 1934 American independent black-and-white exploitation horror film directed by Dwain Esper and written by Hildagarde Stadie, Esper's wife, as a loose adaptation of the 1843 Edgar Allan Poe story "The Black Cat", with references to his "Murders in the Rue Morgue". Esper and Stadie also made the 1936 exploitation film Marihuana.

Production

The film was shot on a minuscule budget of $7,500, according to the film's financier's son, and like many of director Dwain Esper's films was self-distributed on the exploitation roadshow circuit. After initial disappointing returns (and no reviews in the media of the time), the film was retitled Sex Maniac with great success. It became notorious for a scene in which one character strangles a cat and then eats its eyeball.

The footage that is superimposed over the scenes where the actor (having shot the mad scientist) is descending into madness, while bricking his victim inside a wall, originated from the 1922 Danish-Swedish film Häxan.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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