The Driller Killer

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. The Sunday Times reproduced it. It became the emblem of the entire panic, and the film behind it is a scrappy New York character study.