But for as much as I loved Evil Dead, I couldn’t justify putting it ahead of Franck Khalfoun’s Maniac remake. Not only does it outshine the original in every sense, but Khalfoun turned the horror world upside down with this one. Striking upon a lot of the same points as Evil Dead, especially how Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur’s script approaches the material in a completely unique manner, this year’s Maniac sent chills up my spine which still haven’t gone away.
Setting aside the brutally realistic kills and blood-soaked scenes, there are two huge reasons why this remake works so well – the choice to film in a first-person point-of-view format and the casting of Elijah Wood as main character Frank. The POV camera shooting brought you up close and personal to Frank’s sick addictions, forcing you to literally be an accomplice, and Wood’s performance should win him some kind of award. Seriously. Such a gut-churning performance of horror brilliance needs to be acknowledged by some higher authority, as Frank was one of the scariest monsters I’ve witnessed in years. His circumstance is not fully his choice, as his unstable mind is partly to blame, but that unpredictability makes him all the more terrifying.
There are a lot of horror films still to come, but damn, it’s going to take a real blockbuster to knock Maniac down a peg come my end of the year recap.
