RAMPAGE

RAMPAGE
Production: USA, 1987
Director: William Friedkin
Category: Serial Killer/True Crime
Richard Chase, the “Vampire of Sacramento”, was one of the more disturbing killers of the 1970s. Obsessed with blood, as a young man he began to enhance his diet with the raw intestines and blood of birds, cats, and dogs, and was briefly placed in a mental asylum after injecting himself with rabbit’s blood. In 1977 he was found naked and covered in gore after slaughtering and eviscerating two cows. Not long after that, he began to kill humans. Chase slaughtered a string of victims, including pregnant women, children and babies, and drained their blood before drinking it and smearing it over his body and face. When he was finally arrested, police found his apartment riddled with bullet-holes, soaked in gore, and scattered with both human and animal organs. Chase committed suicide in December, 1979. Friedkin’s Rampage matches the case of the Vampire of Sacramento in nearly every detail, changing only the killer’s name; he tries to interpret Chase’s blood-obsession in transcendental, quasi-religious terms, fills his narrative with visions and lucid dreams. In this way, Rampage sometimes recalls the director’s seminal The Exorcist with its elements of blasphemy and religious mania, its notion that psychology itself is somehow unholy. But the film was a commercial failure, and recut in 1993; the result was inferior to the original, and should be avoided.

Posted by Rictus-23

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