Maniac

Maniac opens with Frank Zito spying on a young couple on a moonlit New York beach. He sneaks up, slits the man's throat, strangles the woman, and scalps her. He returns to his cramped apartment — crowded with women's mannequins he dresses and arranges like companions — and nails the fresh scalp onto one of them, muttering to the figures as if they were his abusive, long-dead mother.

Frank prowls the seedier corners of late-1970s NYC for victims. He picks up a prostitute and murders her in a hotel room. He follows another woman alone through deserted subway tunnels, corners her in a stairwell, and scalps her too. Each trophy goes home to the mannequins, with whom he carries on disjointed, plaintive monologues about not being abandoned again. Brief flashbacks paint his mother as promiscuous, neglectful, and abusive — she died in a car accident years earlier but dominates his psyche entirely.

In Central Park one afternoon, Frank notices Anna D'Antoni, a fashion photographer, taking candid shots. She inadvertently photographs him. Tracing her through her business card, he visits her studio and presents himself as a shy admirer rather than killing her. Anna is intrigued enough to spend time with him, even introducing him to one of her models for an upcoming shoot. Frank tries to sustain a fragile normalcy around Anna while still tracking and murdering a woman from her circle on the side, scalping her and adding her hair to his collection.

He eventually invites Anna to dinner at his apartment. She notices the mannequins and, putting a jewelry item together with one of the recent killings, realizes who Frank is. He lunges, sobbing about being left behind, and tries to restrain her. Anna fights back, stabs him, and escapes — leaving Frank bleeding and unhinged.

In a haze he travels to his mother's grave in a cemetery. He hallucinates his mother rising from the earth to attack him, dragging him down. He flees back to his apartment, where the mannequins seem to come to life. They transform into the women he killed and tear him apart in a frenzied tableau, ripping his body to pieces in his own bed.

The film cuts to the next morning. Police force open the apartment door and find Frank dead on the bed — apparently intact, with a self-inflicted knife wound — surrounded by his mannequins. In the final shot his dead eyes seem to snap open, leaving deliberately ambiguous whether anything supernatural happened or whether the entire breakdown took place inside his ruined mind.