The Driller Killer: Ferrara's No-Wave Debut

There are two Driller Killers. One is a rectangle of cardboard: the 1982 UK videocassette sleeve, a screaming man with a drill bit entering his skull, which the Director of Public Prosecutions put on the list and which did more to shape British attitudes to horror than any film released that decade. The other is the actual film, which is a slow, sour, frequently boring portrait of a painter in Union Square who cannot pay his electricity bill.

I came to the first one long before the second, which is the standard order of operations for anyone raised in Britain in the 1990s. The tape was contraband by reputation. The film, when I finally sat through it, turned out to be about rent.

The Driller Killer is Abel Ferrara’s first feature under his own name, released in 1979, written by Nicholas St. John and shot by Ken Kelsch. Ferrara stars as Reno Miller under the pseudonym Jimmy Laine, the same alias he used in front of the camera on Ms. 45 two years later. Reno lives in a loft with two women, Carol and Pamela, played by Carolyn Marz and Baybi Day. He is working on a large painting of a buffalo. His dealer wants it finished. A no-wave band called Tony Coca-Cola and the Roosters moves in downstairs and rehearses at all hours. Reno acquires a portable battery pack for a power drill and begins using it on the men sleeping rough in his neighbourhood.

The film is about money

Strip out the drill and this is a piece of no-wave downtown realism about being broke in a city that has decided artists are no longer worth housing. The bills arrive. The phone gets cut. The dealer applies pressure and then applies more. Reno’s whole world consists of demands he cannot meet, and Ferrara stages the economic squeeze with a specificity that the horror material never quite matches.

That is the film’s real texture, and it is also its structural problem. Ferrara spends long stretches on the domestic arrangement — the loft, the arguments, the band, the roller-disco interlude — and the killings arrive as intrusions into a film that is more interested in whether Reno gets paid. Some viewers experience that as the picture’s peculiar genius. Others experience it as ninety-six minutes of waiting for something to happen. I have been both viewers at different ages.

The economics behind the camera match the economics on screen. Ferrara, St. John and Kelsch had come up together making short films and one hardcore feature under assumed names, and they assembled this one out of favours, borrowed rooms and a cast largely composed of people who were around. The band exists because a band was available. The loft exists because someone had a loft. That method has a cost — the film wanders whenever it stops needing to — and it has a benefit that money cannot buy, which is that nothing in the frame was built for the frame.

What holds it together is the sound. The band is genuinely, aggressively bad in a way that is clearly intentional, and Ferrara lets their rehearsals bleed under everything, so the film develops a permanent headache. Joe Delia’s score works the same seam. By the time Reno starts drilling, the film has spent an hour establishing that he lives inside a noise he cannot switch off, and the violence reads as an attempt to make the city quiet.

Why the cheapness works

The craft argument for this film rests on a single decision: Ferrara shot the streets rather than dressing them.

The New York in The Driller Killer is a documentary of Union Square in 1979 with a horror plot walking through it. The men Reno kills are shot in real doorways, under real scaffolding, in a city that had roughly seven thousand people sleeping rough downtown and no apparent intention of doing anything about it. Kelsch’s photography is grainy, underlit and frequently ugly, and the ugliness is load-bearing: it collapses the distance between the film’s subject and the film’s method. Both are running out of money.

Compare it to the studio horror of the same year and the gap is instructive. A well-lit film has to invent its threat. Ferrara points the camera at a place where the threat is already ambient, and then asks who the threat is actually aimed at — which is the film’s most uncomfortable idea, because Reno is a man with an apartment killing men without one, and the picture knows it. There is a bleak joke running through the whole thing about a painter who fears becoming destitute and responds by murdering the destitute.

The drill itself is a good bit of low-budget design. A blade needs a swing; a drill needs proximity and time. Ferrara can hold on a face for as long as he likes because the weapon is slow, and the Porto-Pak battery on Reno’s back turns the whole apparatus into a piece of equipment — a tool, carried to a job.

The staging of the violence is defined by what it refuses. Ferrara does not stage the killings as set pieces. There is no build, no stalk, no music sting; a man is in a doorway and then Reno is on him. The film treats each death as an errand. That flatness is the most genuinely disturbing thing in it, and it is entirely a function of a director who could not afford suspense and worked out that he did not need it.

The ancestor

Everyone reaches for Taxi Driver (1976), and there is a family resemblance in the city and the drift into violence. The truer ancestor is Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and the whole strand of apartment horror where the flat becomes the mind. Reno’s loft does exactly what Carol’s flat does — it stops being a place and becomes a condition.

The other genuine relative is Andy Milligan’s grimy New York cheapies of the previous decade, films shot in real rooms by people with no money at all, where the poverty is the aesthetic. Ferrara is far more talented than Milligan, and he inherits the same method: shoot what you have, and let the shortfall become the mood.

The descendants are easier. Every subsequent film about a downtown creative cracking up in a loft owes something here, and so does the entire strand of grubby New York horror that follows. Basket Case came three years later with a comparable budget and the same instinct to let Times Square do the production design. Street Trash took the same city and the same population and pushed the whole thing into a Reagan-era cartoon. Ferrara’s film is the sober one, which is a strange thing to say about a picture named after a drill.

The case against

It is genuinely slack. The middle act sprawls, the two female leads are given almost nothing to play beyond exasperation, and the roller-disco sequence exists for reasons known only to 1979. The film’s ideas about class and violence are present, and they are also unexamined enough that a viewer could reasonably accuse Ferrara of using homeless men as available bodies while gesturing at a critique of exactly that.

The film’s relationship to its own title character never resolves either. Ferrara wants Reno as a sympathetic figure crushed by a city, and he wants him as a monster, and the picture keeps swapping between the two without ever putting them in the same scene. Ms. 45 found the solution: give the protagonist no interiority at all and let the audience do the work. Here the interiority is constant and thin.

Reno is a hard watch for the wrong reasons too. Ferrara’s performance is committed and monotonous, a sustained mumble that flattens the descent into a single note. Ms. 45 fixed this problem by casting an actor who could carry a film in silence.

And the notoriety has done it no favours. A generation was told this was one of the most dangerous films ever made, sat down expecting an atrocity, and found a slow character study with about four minutes of gore in it. The BBFC eventually passed it fully uncut in 2002, which tells you roughly everything about what the panic was actually made of. I have written about that whole episode in the video nasties panic and what the BBFC was really afraid of, and The Driller Killer is the clearest case in the file: a film prosecuted almost entirely on the strength of its packaging.

Where to find it: restored editions from the boutique labels have been in print for years and are worth it, because the film is dark in the literal sense and the old tapes turned half of it into mud. It also drifts through the horror streaming services.

The verdict: it is a lesser film than its reputation and a better film than its reviews. Watch it as a first feature by a director who worked out within two years exactly what he had been reaching for, then watch Ms. 45 and see him land it. For the wider list, the video nasties: ten that earned the panic is where I argue about which of the banned films deserved the attention. This one does, for reasons the DPP never understood.

Spoilers below

Reno’s collapse is total and the film gives it no shape. He finishes the buffalo painting; the dealer rejects it; the last professional door closes. From there the killing turns inward on the people who know him, and the film’s final movement has him waiting in Carol’s apartment for her husband, in her bed, in the dark, before the picture simply stops on a freeze frame.

The refusal of an ending is the most no-wave thing about it. There is no arrest, no reckoning, no last-reel reversal that reframes the violence as anything other than what it has been: a broke man with a tool. The film ends because it has run out, which is the same reason Reno started.

Whether that is rigour or exhaustion depends on the day you watch it. On a good day it looks like the only honest ending available to a film with this much contempt for catharsis.