RetroClips

Dwain Esper built a career selling lurid B-pictures as public-health warnings, padding each one with fake “educational” title cards on mental illness to dodge obscenity laws while delivering exactly the shock content the cards claimed to warn against. Maniac -- a barely-coherent riff on Poe's “The Black Cat” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue” -- is the most notorious example: a deranged Maxwell, hiding inside the identity of the mad scientist he murdered, catches a cat and eats its eye. Film historians generally agree the eye was a rigged prop rather than a real animal's, but the scene became exploitation cinema's most cited party trick regardless.