‘Maniac Cop’ is a Failed Revolution
An older white woman drives down a New York City street, her car spewing fumes from under the hood. She pulls over and enacts the classic horror trope of turning the key in vain, the engine non-responsive. A police cruiser pulls up behind her, its lights reflecting in her rearview mirror. A look of terror crosses her face. She turns the key again, and pumps the gas—nothing. She is trapped. An officer, face unseen, walks slowly toward her car, closer, closer. He reaches her window and raps, twice, sharply. She frantically digs into her purse. “You’re not gonna get me,” she exclaims and puts one bullet through the head of a cop.
Maniac Cop—the 1988 horror flick largely forgotten by all but the most avid slasher fans—is full of scenes like this, scenes that, removed from the film’s larger context, feel shocking in their blunt politicism. It is a film that, if it were released today, would almost certainly be the target of conservative opprobrium. It would be vilified by Tucker Carlson and boycotted by the sort of folks who think our government is run by Antifa. And yet, on its release, it landed as a dud.
The New York Times gave it two devastating paragraphs, calling it “amateurish.” Variety said it was “disappointing.” The Washington Post described the script as “undernourished and…obvious.” None of these august publications felt the need to dive into the film’s politics.
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Granted, I am approaching Maniac Cop in 2023, and after the Black Lives Matter movement, for a few brief moments, shook the nation from its complacency before being corporatized and neutered. I have the benefit of some hindsight here, not to mention the benefit of the clearly defined concept of “copaganda,” media portrayals of policing that erase racism and police violence. But even still, a white lady shooting a cop in the head? That’s a statement!
The thing is, Maniac Cop is filled with setpieces like this. The movie announces its intentions with its opening scene, in which a police officer, face obscured, slowly gears up for battle. Set to a soundtrack of screeching violins, the camera lingers on the tools of policing, one by one: a belt, handcuffs, a nightstick dropped into place with a bang, and a loaded gun. The unknown officer pins a badge to his chest. “Cordell,” it reads. His badge number, like a ticking time bomb, is 4321.
In another horror movie, this scene could feature Freddy’s razored glove or Jason’s machete. The viewer is immediately asked to contextualize law enforcement through a horror lens. These are instruments of violence, meant to kill and maim. They don’t become less deadly when a cop wears them instead of, say, a maniac.
Maniac Cop is not a great movie. It’s not even a particularly good one. But damn, it is interesting.
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The Cordell of the opening credits is Matthew Cordell, an NYPD officer—a brave choice to use a real police department in a real city—who, we later learn, was convicted of some crimes, imprisoned in Sing Sing, and then murdered by the inmates he helped put there. As you may imagine, death was not the end for him, and he is resurrected as the titular maniac cop, an unstoppable killing machine still outfitted in the familiar blues of New York City police.
It is telling that, based on this straightforward description of the film’s story, you really cannot tell if Cordell is meant to be a hero or villain. It is that dichotomy—between bourgeois respect for policing as an institution and the horror of unrestrained state violence—that Maniac Cop explores.
I returned to Maniac Cop after the murder of George Floyd, and after a few years spent studying and writing about issues of police violence and misconduct. Frankly, I was amazed no one had yet dug it up for a politically-focused reappraisal, as it is such a curio: a densely ideological piece on a topic of serious current interest by filmmakers known for politically provocative horror. (Screenwriter Larry Cohen and director William Lustig also made the “zombie Marine” flick Uncle Sam, and Cohen directed the anti-capitalist horror satire The Stuff).
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It’s important to remember that police violence, and the public discussion thereof, is not something that emerged from the ether in the 2010s. In New York City, a series of police killings punctured the public consciousness throughout the 1980s, including the murder of an elderly, disabled Black woman named Eleanor Bumpurs, who in 1984 was blasted in her own apartment with a 12-gauge shotgun by NYPD officers; and Michael Stewart, a Black 25-year-old arrested for graffiti on the L train, hogtied, beaten, bound, and sent to a hospital to die. Just three months after Maniac Cop premiered, NYPD officers responded to squatters and punks posting up in Tompkins Square Park by, quite literally, starting a riot, beating anyone in the park’s perimeter with nightsticks, including bystanders and members of the press.
But at the same time, police violence and accountability were not a national discussion in Reagan’s America, where all the air was already taken up by discussions of allegedly spiraling crime and disorder. Maniac Cop came out at the height of the War on Drugs, itself a sort of horror movie, and just two years after Reagan signed into law the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 that radically increased prison time for drug offenses and allocated billions of federal dollars to law enforcement. In 1988, the year Maniac Cop was released, Congress passed by overwhelming margins, and Reagan signed, a bill that established so-called “Byrne JAG” funds, a grant program designed to send hundreds of millions a year to local police departments, and one of the main causes of today’s overstuffed PDs. Between 1980 and 1992, America’s prison population more than doubled.
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In this environment, Cohen and Lustig decided to build a horror movie around a countervailing fact that for some, police are already specters of menace, a fear borne of life experience, over-policed neighborhoods, and direct experience with racism. Maniac Cop would push back against the dominant narrative, that more policing is always a good thing. As one Black character says, he’s “seen plenty of friends murdered by cops, shot in the back, shot when they didn’t have a gun or knife,” and “cops like killing – that’s why they’re cops.”
Decades of copaganda have attempted to deaden us to the indisputable fact that to be a cop is to be a professional purveyor of violence. Cops have an actual monopoly on physical force— the sole humans legally vested with the ability to harm, injure, and even kill. Unlike anyone else you see on the street, a cop can pummel you, cuff you, or shoot you. Even if they broke the rules that loosely bind them, their punishment, if it happens at all, will be slight. If fired, they will simply move to a different jurisdiction. They are professionally unkillable—bureaucratic zombies. Who else but police can terrorize simply by standing next to a stopped car and asking, “How are you today?”
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The trick of Maniac Cop is making the image of a police officer horrifying even to those predisposed to find law enforcement a comforting presence. And so Cordell himself must be an exaggerated version of what makes all cops horrifying on some level. Many of Cordell’s kills take their inspiration from the sort of everyday encounters civilians have with police: a traffic stop turns into a fatal nightstick beating, a woman seeking protection from muggers has her neck snapped. Cordell targets not criminals, but law-abiding citizens. Thus the viewer is placed in a position of imagining a traffic stop that could turn into a fight for survival, a situation many Americans actually do face today.
And Cordell is much more than a rogue cop. He is Death in a blue uniform. He has not just a monopoly on force, granted to him by the law, but also a monopoly on life itself, being unstoppable and seemingly invincible. Not only is he immune to the manmade laws that bind the rest of us, he is immune to death. He is not just a bureaucratic zombie, but an actual one.
The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has analyzed Freud’s so-called death drive not as the desire to die, but to become undead, beyond life, and thus unkillable. In that sense, all zombie movies are simultaneously nightmares and wish fulfillment. Maniac Cop might be the most extreme version of this. As Cordell slices and dices society’s underclass, clad in a uniform signifying, to many, respect and authority, he is terrifying in part because he represents the raw id, the verboten desire to eliminate anyone who disturbs an idyllic, law-abiding life.
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Thus Maniac Cop tries to connect the threat of violence—horrifying to some and comforting to others, depending on who’s on the receiving end of the threat—with that distressing notion that we as a society have created this certain type of person to dole out such threats without repercussions. In an in-film news report, a white man vocalizes this idea, saying with a mix of awe and fear, “Cops like you to be scared of them, that’s what makes them men, real men.” Another white man claims cops “gotta shoot you to get respect.”
I note the race of the film characters because it would be foolish not to. Maniac Cop uses race to further its central goal of making police scary to everyone, not just those who are historically the subject of most police violence. Most of Cordell’s victims in the film are white. The police commissioner, a cynical man who offhandedly remarks that many NYPD officers are mentally unwell, and who is eager to distract from the idea that a cop could be committing these murders, is Black. One white woman—not the one who goes so far as to kill a police officer, as described above—emphatically tells a reporter that she told her kids, “You see a cop, you cross to the other side of the street.”
I want to call Maniac Cop a success, if not as a film—it is entertaining, but often quite boring—then as propaganda. Indeed, after I watched it, I thought its point of view was clear. But apparently, it wasn’t clear enough, because a seemingly large segment of Maniac Cop’s viewership has chosen to read the film in a more comforting, conservative way, and one that preserves their own preconceived notions of policing.
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Here’s how Wikipedia describes the character of Matt Cordell: “an officer who was unjustly imprisoned in Sing Sing for police brutality and closing in on corruption in city hall.” In a 2020 reassessment of the film, a reviewer for Decider claimed Cordell “was a good cop” who only went bad in death, a claim echoed by other reviewers. As I researched Maniac Cop, I realized that for many viewers, Cordell was a hero on a misguided revenge mission. But they reach this conclusion only by warping the film’s own words, grasping at straws to preserve the character of a living Officer Cordell.
Yes, the movie does briefly mention that Cordell was targeted by City Hall when he stumbled on some sort of corruption. (This is kept vague, and only clearly stated by a cop character portrayed specifically as a jackass, and has become central to most people’s understanding of Maniac Cop is astonishing.) But it also goes out of its way to make sure we know Cordell was nearly as brutal in life as he is in death.
His girlfriend emphasizes his rage against “dealers” and “junkies,” cementing his status as a soldier in Reagan’s drug war. Another officer says Cordell believed, “Shoot first, ask questions later.” We are shown a series of headlines about Cordell’s career: he “KILLS rapist,” he “KILLS THREE” in a terrorist raid, a “Mafia chief” is “SLAIN by CORDELL!!” By all accounts, Matt Cordell was an NYPD officer who enjoyed killing people – it’s just that, in life, he killed the “right” people.
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Here, we see how decades of copaganda have warped people’s views of policing. Cordell was a “good cop” because he didn’t obey the rules. He was the quintessential rogue, the hotshot, Dirty Harry. His brutality was in service of a greater cause, that cause being the comfort of the white bourgeois who, they assume, would never see themselves at the other end of Cordell’s pistol, no matter what laws they broke. Ironically, viewing Maniac Cop through this lens makes its horror much more mundane, and functionally no different from any zombie film. Cordell is scary not because he’s an undead cop, but because he’s just…undead, and death has corrupted the soul of a decent man. It creates distance from the truer, deeper horror the film is trying to get across, that policing is an inherently frightening concept. It turns Maniac Cop into Law & Order with a slasher twist.
Maybe this sort of interpretation was inevitable. Maybe Lustig and Cohen could never have crafted a movie that simultaneously prevented viewers from indulging in their fundamental conservatism, while also making a broadly popular horror movie. The pull of capitalist ideology is so strong that, as Giles Deleuze believed, it cannot be shaken by capitalist logic. But Maniac Cop certainly gets points for trying.
Maniac Cop is streaming now on Peacock, AMC+, and other streaming services.
Categorized:Editorials
