Elijah Wood stars in Maniac, a remake of the original made in 1980 (which I have not seen). I’m a big fan of Elijah Wood and his work here made for one of the most effective horror movies recently released.

Frank is a very disturbed young man, molded by an abusive childhood where his mother subjugated him to things a child should never see. With mommy issues galore, Frank takes it out on women he stalks in the night, killing, then scalping them to keep as a trophy.

Using a rather unique first person perspective that is pulled off extraordinarily well, we are literally put into the head of a psychopath. We come out of his head only for brief moments which makes for a really tense and disturbing horror experience. While we don’t hear Frank’s thoughts, we do hear everything he says. He’s often fighting with himself, so it doesn’t take much inference to figure out what he’s thinking.

Elijah Wood is really terrific, giving Frank a real emotional core of a person who just never had a chance. He’s so mentally disturbed, just struggling to hang on to some sort of normal life. He manages to make a living by restoring mannequins and when he meets Anna, he thinks he might actually see a light at the end of the tunnel. He desperately wants to have a relationship but constantly snaps into a murderous state, haunted by flashbacks to his childhood and the physical torture of migraine headaches. There’s a war in Frank’s head and the audience is a witness to it all.

This is a tough movie to watch and the visual effects are very, very well done making the horror seem all that much more real. Really great editing, this must have been a tough film to pull off the page and put onto the screen in such an effective manner. I think this is a real standout for horror buffs.