Maybe not horror, but there’s plenty of killing. Never heard of this until it showed up on Criterion – the only feature by a famous New York photographer and starring Carol Kane as an office worker who goes over the edge among layoffs and cutbacks, sleazy coworkers and computerization. Sending all employees to work from home with new apple laptops, this horror is familiar to me. Everything is cool here, from the opening titles (projected onto stairways and such) to the toy piano music (by John Lurie’s brother Evan). Widely disrespected movie – at least it played Locarno in competition with The Mirror and Winter Sleepers.

The office is a magazine publisher, run by large-haired asthmatic Barbara “Hannah Arendt” Sukowa, who will be killed when Kane loads a butane cartridge into her inhaler. Molly Ringwald and Jeanne Tripplehorn and Jeanne’s bf Michael Imperioli are the bitchy in-crowd, mocking the homebody Kane, whose editing work is grudgingly respected. First killing is the accidental electrocution of computer guy David Thornton (of High Art, another magazine-office movie the following year), then Kane brings his body home to liven up the basement a little, and decides he needs companions. Soon she’s proceeded from righteous vendettas to random murders – an office boy gets a food processor blade to the neck, a couple of girl scouts unwisely accept an invitation into the house. Imperioli is the would-be hero who discovers Kane’s madness, but he gets slashed, and she burns the place down and escapes, on to the next office – perhaps yours.