Night Killer Is a Trashy Film That Provokes Every Possible Emotion

Though it was released in Italy under the title Non Aprite Quella Porta 3 — which would have made it The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 for particularly fascinating and lax copyright law reasons — the 1990 film Night Killer is its own kind of riff on a then-contemporary icon. The quilt of a horror classic was made by husband-and-wife team Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi (Troll 2, Zombi 3 and Zombi 4), with some post-production and gore footage courtesy of Bruno Mattei (Terminator 2: Shocking Dark, The Other Hell). Not quite Bad Dreams or The Invasion — the respective champions of ripoff and quilt cinema — Night Killer is nevertheless a special kind of whatsit that any fan of horror or psychotronic cinema should be amped up for.

To start with, there’s no chainsaw massacre herein, and the plot unfolds in Virginia Beach, not Texas. Were you to look at the film’s key art, or the mask used by its knife-handed killer, you might assume this is a film determined to rip off A Nightmare on Elm Street — and you would not be wrong. The best ripoffs are masterful at the math of figuring out exactly how much of a narrative hook can be distilled down, and then using that reduction as a foundation for something truly weird. The film follows Melanie Beck (Tara Buckman, the mom from Silent Night, Deadly Night herself, here all Dynasty’d up with the biggest of hair and the best of eye makeup), who escapes a serial killer only to careen into a world of hidden secrets, traumatized families and unexpected relationship boundaries. It is truly, magically weird. 

At times, Night Killer provokes the question that only true masterworks of genre cinema can: “Is what I’m seeing really happening?”

Fragasso and Drudi made a DePalma-ish psychothriller, with Mattei’s complicating supernatural splatter serving as aesthetic frames and interludes for the entire experience, and the end result is like A Night Porter on Elm Street. It’s like 1996’s The Stendhal Syndrome, a mercenary exploitation film that manages to stumble into some deeply profound and evocative statements about metabolizing trauma and PTSD.

This is a trashy film that wants to provoke every possible emotion, and the fact that it manages to find genuine empathy amid the chest wounds and obscene phone calls and sexualized capers makes for an experience that just doesn’t happen very often in movies anymore. To see Night Killer in a theater is an opportunity for the ages.