The Driller Killer
The Driller Killer is a 1979 American psychological horror film directed by Abel Ferrara. It is one of the 72 films on the Director of Public Prosecutions' video nasties list, and it was successfully prosecuted for obscenity.
Ferrara's debut, and mostly a film about being broke in New York. The sleeve got it prosecuted.
Sign in to track what you have survived.
Abel Ferrara's first feature under his own name, made for around 20,000 dollars, with Ferrara himself playing the painter who cracks.
Most of it is not a horror film. It is about rent, a landlord, a punk band rehearsing through the wall at all hours, and an artist whose gallery will not pay him. The drill sequences are almost incidental and there are fewer of them than the reputation suggests.
What put it on the DPP list was the sleeve: a close-up of a drill entering a forehead, in colour, on the shelf at eye level in every video shop in Britain. It ran as a full-page advertisement in film and video magazines and drew a large number of complaints. It became the emblem of the entire panic, and the film behind it is a scrappy New York character study.
Banned, seized, prosecuted
DPP 72 · successfully prosecuted
The sleeve, a drill entering a forehead in close-up, was reproduced in the national press and became the single emblem of the whole panic. It is fair to say the artwork was prosecuted more than the film was.
UK now Passed 18 uncut in 2002
Rate this film
No ratings yet. Score it on the five axes and yours will be the first.
Sign in to rate this and add it to your shelf.
Trailer
The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
Australia
Germany
Finland
UK
USA
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
Written about
- Cannibal Holocaust and the fifteen seconds still banned
Cannibal Holocaust carries an 18 certificate in Britain with fifteen seconds still cut, one slow animal killing held out under the 1937 animal cruelty Act.
- The video nasties panic, 1982 to 1984
How a gap in British licensing law produced a moral panic, a list of 72 films and two video executives in prison.
Discuss with AI
Open a chatbot with a question about this already typed out. Useful for a second opinion, a plot detail, or working out which cut you are holding.
Adjacent
WATCHcultKiller Nun
Anita Ekberg as a morphine-addicted nun in a hospital. Nunsploitation with an actual performance in it.
WATCHcultDon't Go in the House
A man with a flamethrower and a steel room. The mother is the point and the film knows it.
WATCHknownManiac
Joe Spinell wrote himself the lead and Tom Savini blew his own head off on camera.
WATCHobscureExposé
The only British film on the DPP list. A novelist, a typist and Fiona Richmond in a farmhouse.
WATCHcanonThe Sixth Sense
The twist made it famous and the film does not need it. It is about a boy nobody believes and a marriage that ended.
WATCHcanonEraserhead
Five years of weekend shooting, and it is about being a father and being terrified of it.
- Next in Extreme / Transgressive: Killer Nun (1979) →
- Next in Psychological: Killer Nun (1979) →