This chapter focuses on William Lustig’s exploitation slasher Maniac (1980), the sort of trashy cinematic experience that Franco Casetti in Screening Fears neglects to mention. As a wry comment on the criminal, socially transgressive, and “diseased” elements of the 42nd Street theaters, Maniac disputes Casetti’s contention that cinema functions to screen away the unpleasantness of the audience’s empirical realities for a short time. This chapter argues that the film refigures these elements as the root cause of its title character’s sexual impulsiveness, idiotic vocables, and sicko murder methods, all of which seem to stem from a cryptococcal infection and the formative neurophysical trauma resulting from it. His episodes of delirium, dementia, and intracranial tension, in short, indicate the workings of a severe scalp-brain fungus.