The Strangler

A technician working in a hospital laboratory is a beaten-down, solitary man nobody pays attention to. The relationship with his bedridden mother at home is suffocating him. Past a certain point that suppressed anger spills outward, and a series of murders targeting nurses begins in the city. The police are looking for a connection. Burt Topper's film was made in the shadow of the real serial killings in the news at the start of the sixties. Its strength is Victor Buono's performance, which turns the man into neither a monster nor a victim but holds him somewhere between the two. The violence is not shown on screen; its consequences are. It is a low-budget, short, dark production that sits closer to criminal psychology than to horror.