Maniac (1980) is the unsung emperor of the stalker/slasher subgenre. It’s a gritty, low budget exploitation movie from the golden era of horror, and follows all the standard conventions of a stalker/slasher film: you have a disturbed male protagonist that kills a number of attractive women with a sharp implement (a typical phallic penetration metaphor for his own sexual inadequacies blah blah blah), and you have visceral, ultra-real violence, the effects of which are courtesy of Tom Savini (see Dawn of the Dead/Day of the Dead for reference of the man’s genius).
