Maniac and the Forgotten Films We Love to Hate

You might be surprised, as I was, to discover that Wikipedia has a page dedicated to “films considered to be the worst ever made.” Well, maybe not…Wikipedia has a page on everything. And on this list are some biggies: Troll 2, The Room, The Last Airbender. Those are what I call Loved Unloved Films. Films so bad that they become cult classics or survive in the culture as definitive examples of a bad movie.

What about the many other Unloved Unloved Films? Ones that, when we finished watching them, if we even bothered, immediately escaped from our memories. They deserve some love too. For the sake of the Unloveds, It’s time to change the narrative and shift the spotlight.

Which brings us back to Wikipedia. The first film chronologically on the list is the 1934 exploitation horror film Maniac. Naturally, I had to watch it.

But before we talk about Maniac, we have to talk about Hollywood. Specifically, the Motion Picture Production Code, or the Hays Code (we can thank Wikipedia for this too). The Hays Code was enforced from 1934 to 1968 to control what people would see on-screen. It prohibited profanity, suggestive nudity, graphic or realistic violence, sexual persuasions and rape. It also created rules for crime, costume, dance, religion, and morality. Any films produced before 1934, like Maniac, exist in film anarchy. Anything goes….

And anything certainly does go in this one. Directed by Dwain Esper, one of the grandfathers of the exploitation genre, Maniac features a zombie kidnapping a resurrected woman and assaulting her, a scientist-impersonator popping an eyeball out of a living cat and eating it, and an unnecessarily long scene of women in a dressing room. All this under the guise of an informational film about mental illness.

The story follows an ex-vaudeville impersonator named Don Maxwell who works as an assistant to Dr. Meirschultz, a mad scientist obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. When the doctor urges Maxwell to inject a woman’s corpse with a resurrection serum, Maxwell, fearful of being implicated in the doctor’s madness, instead shoots and kills Meirschultz. In a desperate attempt to cover up his crime, Maxwell assumes the doctor’s identity by taking on his mannerisms, wearing his clothes, and even sticking on a fake beard.

Maxwell then slowly descends into mania. He accidentally creates a zombie, has zany interactions with his neighbors, and manipulates his wife. If the plot sounds incoherent, that’s because it simply is. The film meanders from scene to scene with little connection between and instead favors grotesque imagery and pseudo-scientific monologues.

Throughout Maniac, intertitles appear on screen, quoting psychological theories in an attempt to legitimize the outlandish plot. These excerpts reflect the film’s exploitative approach to mental illness, using it as a sensational backdrop for horror. The film reduces its characters to stereotypes of crazy behavior intended to shock and thrill audiences.

On the performance side, Bill Woods’ performance as Maxwell is unnerving and unintentionally comical. In the style characterized by early sound movies, his speech mixed with dramatic flourishes adds to the chaotic energy of the film in a nonsensical way that’s more likely to make you cringe than be horrified.

The real star of the show is the oddball direction and editing. Esper employs a range of experimental techniques, including superimposed images of rats, cats, and hellish faces, as well as frenetic, disjointed transitions—giving Maniac a nightmarish quality. It’s clear that Esper was trying to create something unsettling and avant-garde, but the result is a strange mix of art-house ambition and technical incompetence.

Maniac is a film best viewed as a bizarre cultural artifact rather than a coherent narrative. While it fails by conventional filmmaking standards, its outlandish performances and peculiar style ensure its place in the annals of bad cinema. It’s a true example of early horror at its most chaotic and experimental, and for that reason alone, it remains a fascinating, if deeply flawed, piece of cinematic history.