The 1970s were a gold mine for hagsploitation and Southern Gothic grittiness, but The Killing Kind occupies a strange, lonely corner of that subgenre. It’s not just a thriller; it’s a suffocating character study directed by Curtis Harrington, a master of the macabre and the misunderstood (see: Night Tide and What’s the Matter with Helen?).

Harrington was a pioneer of New American Cinema who transitioned into the studio system without losing his avant-garde sensibilities. In this film, he creates a palette that feels as damp and stagnant as a basement. He doesn’t rely on jump scares; he relies on the inherent wrongness of the domestic space. The boarding house is less a sanctuary and more a terrarium where resentment festered until it became lethal.

Terry (John Savage, The Deer Hunter) was forced to participate in a gang assault and served two years in prison, losing his sanity. His mother, Thelma (Ann Sothern, so many roles, but also the titular voice of My Mother the Car), runs a boarding house for old women who all gossip about the strange nature of their relationship; if you didn’t know the truth, you would think they were a married couple, not a son and his mother.

Thelma wishes that the victim of the assault, Tina (Sue Bernard, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), were dead. So Terry runs her off the road. He hears how his attorney Rhea Benson (Ruth Roman, whose slate of movies in the early 70s was absolutely wild between this, The Baby and Impulse) didn’t protect him enough, so he kills her too. He even kills new tenant Lori (Cindy Williams, who was commuting between the set of this film and The Conversation), and they move the body out in full view of their suspicious neighbor, Lori (Luana Anders, Night Tide).

Speaking of that librarian next door, the same character appears in 1980s The Attic, which was also written by Tony Crechales and George Edwards.

The true monster of the film isn’t necessarily Terry’s fractured psyche, but the umbilical cord that was never cut. The film dances on the edge of the Oedipal complex, making the audience deeply uncomfortable with every shared meal and whispered confidence between mother and son. It suggests that while society broke Terry, his mother is the one who shaped the shards into a weapon.

Also, to those who worry about cat murder, yes — a cat does die in this. It was a real cat in that scene, but it was sedated by a vet. The one in the dumpster is an actual euthanized cat, but it was not killed for this production.

Sadly, this movie had poor distribution and was lost for a few years. How exciting is it that we live in a world where films get found and we can find them ourselves so easily?

You can watch this on Tubi.