Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture Vol. 17 (Maniac)

So perverse that it continues to shock and offend viewers 90 years after its release, Dwain Esper’s Maniac is a deranged retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” in the guise of an educational film on mental illness. This no-budget thriller by self-taught filmmakers has a wildly fragmented style. Its intrusive use of title scrolls, stock footage, and gratuitous nudity make it one of the first true underground films (with a gruesome wink at the eyeball-slicing scene of Un chien andalou). Maniac is presented here in a new 4K restoration, from the original camera negative and other 35mm elements preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and is presented in cooperation with Something Weird and the Sonney Amusement Enterprises Film Collection.

• Audio interview with director Dwain Esper and screenwriter Hildagarde Esper
• The true crime short films of Dwain Esper and Louis Sonney: You Can't Beat the Rap, The Last Hour of Killer Mears, The March of Crime, and The March of Crime (2nd Ed.)
• Audio commentary by Bret Wood, author of Marihuana, Motherhood, and Madness: Three Screenplays from the Exploitation Cinema of Dwain Esper
• Original theatrical trailer
• 2024 Re-release trailer
• Trailers for Dwain Esper's The Seventh Commandment, Narcotic, and Marihuana: Weed With Roots in Hell