The Nerve of That Guy: At a Halloween Party with Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981)

“All women do is laugh and sing and say the word ‘pussy.’”

This is my first Abel Ferrara movie, but he is one of those directors whose name immediately conjures an inescapable reputation – even if, in my relative ignorance, I’m not 100% sure what that reputation is. And Ms. 45 is a notorious title, even if, similarly, I’m not quite positive what it’s notorious for.

It seems sort of appropriate that this should be my first foray into Ferrara’s filmography, as it is also not quite his debut feature. He made an actual porno, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, in ’76, and the bizarro slasher Driller Killer two years before this.

I haven’t seen Driller Killer, but Ferrara himself once allegedly said, “If I paid to see a movie called The Driller Killer and this was it, I would punch the director in the fuckin’ head.” Which is to say that it is, by all accounts, a most unusual slasher.

Similarly, Ms. 45 samples from, explores, and diverts elements from two other subgenres that were popular at the time – and that already had a lot of overlap. These are vigilante pictures (and, specifically in this case, so-called “rape-revenge” films) and movies that, so far as I know, don’t have a particular name but can be summarized as “cities suck shit.”

Describing latter-day entries into the “cities suck shit” subgenre Seven and Saw, Bluesky user @toomanymouths dubbed the nameless city in which both take place as “New Crapsack.” And while Ms. 45 obviously takes place in New York, “New Crapsack” also still seems appropriate.

In her feature debut, a roughly seventeen-year-old Zoe Tamerlis is shackled with the unenviable task of holding the center of the film without ever speaking more than a single word. Her character Thana is a shy garment worker in New York City, who can’t speak for reasons that are never addressed. When she is raped not once but twice in a single day on her way home from work, it begins a gradual descent that culminates with her stalking the streets with the eponymous .45, killing any man who hits on her – which is all of them.

Despite its obvious genre trappings, like Driller Killer before it, Ms. 45 is a hard film to pigeonhole. It has scenes more unsettling than many horror pictures. Sometimes, these are things that are happening to Thana – sometimes, they are things she is doing to other people. Sometimes it’s things other people are doing to themselves.

Tamerlis beautifully sells Thana’s journey from self defense to vigilante murder to serial killer, bringing the audience along as protecting herself morphs into punishing pushy, sexually entitled men and then just to killing all men she sees, full stop. And the trajectory makes sense, not only within Thana’s now fractured psyche, but within the logic of the movie that Ferrara has made, which takes place in a world where literally every single man Thana encounters is a leering, catcalling, touchy-feely creep at best, and a violent rapist at worst.

Are there “good men” in the world of Ms. 45? It doesn’t really matter. This isn’t a movie about moralizing, any more than it is a “good for her” film about justified female rage. It’s a whirlpool that pulls the audience down along with Thana. Whether or not there are decent guys around doesn’t matter much once we are caught in the undertow. The place where Thana was going to end up, an avenging angel of death in a slow-motion Halloween party massacre, was always inevitable.

Even if Ms. 45 isn’t necessarily a “message movie,” however, there’s a surprising awareness at work of the many ways in which women contend with aggression, coercion, objectification, and violence on a daily basis, similar to John Carpenter’s Someone’s Watching Me! from just a few years before. Ms. 45 may be hard to lock down as a horror movie, but the mere experience of existing as a woman is definitely presented as a subject of horror within it, on multiple levels from the mundane to the traumatic.

It says something that Dario Argento puts the words of his critics in the mouth of one of the victims in Tenebrae (1982), even as the author stand-in character proves to be culpable in that film’s crimes. It says something that he cast his own daughter as the rape victim in his brutal 1996 film The Stendhal Syndrome. Similarly, I think it says something that Abel Ferrara himself plays Thana’s first rapist, a masked, anonymous assailant who drags her into an alley and, after he finishes, tells her that he’ll be back.

In all those cases, the authorial identification is telling, but what it tells, I couldn’t say for certain. Let someone who has done more digging explain it. (It’s worth noting that Ferrara also plays the eponymous killer in Driller Killer.)

Leaving aside its themes – whatever they may be – Ms. 45 is a movie as mesmerizing as it is, at times, unpleasant. Tamerlis gives a haunting, magnetic central performance, and Ferrara choreographs a number of stunning sequences. Meanwhile, the script never lingers too long on any one aspect of the story, so that the moment you start to get comfortable with where things are heading, they are already moving on.

It’s a film encrusted with the grit and grime that may have only ever existed in exploitation movies about New York. (By the time I visited New York, it was already after 9/11, and it no longer looked much like this, if it ever did.)

Ms. 45 was newly released on Blu-ray and Ultra HD by Arrow as part of their October slate. And, given that I knew next to nothing about the film going in, the timing seemed perplexing. However, now that I’ve seen it, it makes sense. Ms. 45 is set during the run-up to Halloween, and culminates in a killing spree at a costume party on the 31st – a fact which barely constitutes a spoiler as, from the moment the costume party is mentioned, you know that’s where this all has to end.

The shootout at the costume party is one of those aforementioned high points of a movie that honestly has relatively few low points – a slow-motion bloodbath that plays out a little like a more restrained version of the prom scene in Carrie. And it means that you can watch Ms. 45 in October, if you feel like it, without violating any of the rules of Halloween.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.