Aroused (1966)

Aroused is a trashy, sexploitation, horror, oddity from the mid sixties that must have influenced William Lusting for his 1980 cult splatter flick Maniac. There is just to many coincidences between the two films for him not to have been inspired. Aroused is a story about a sex-maniac with a really bad Norman Bates type mommy complex (sounds like Frank Zitto eh) who roams the city streets of New York at night looking for prostitutes to cut up. The main difference between Frank and the Aroused killer is that in this film they specify that the sex maniac is a necrophiliac. In Maniac we know that Frank is a bit of a necromancer but he seems to just prefer to keep the dead. Although the killer never scalps his victims in Aroused, he does sleep with a bunch of mannequins. Its just one comparison after another with these two movies. For me the one thing that really links the two together is the surreal endings of both films. In Maniac its almost more of a nightmare, shot through wide angle lenses, where Franks victims and mannequins come back to life to punish him and bring him to a gory end. The ending for Aroused is shot almost identical but instead of the victims coming back to life, there is a group of prostitutes who surround him in his bed and stab at him with knives and eventually castrate him. Aroused may not be the greatest in the sexploitation or the horror genre but it has very impressive elements from both and it is definitely worth watching for anyone who is a fan of Maniac.