The mid-1970s were a time when horror cinema flirted with the unseen — the intangible spaces between science and spirituality, psychology and the paranormal. Ray Danton’s Psychic Killer (1975) is a fascinating, if uneven, artifact of that cultural moment, where the anxieties of post-Vietnam disillusionment met the popular fascination with the occult, parapsychology, and the power of the mind untethered from the body.

Based on the novel The Killer Inside by Mardi Rustam, the film follows Arnold Masters (Jim Hutton), a wrongfully institutionalised man who learns the ancient art of astral projection and proceeds to exact vengeance on those responsible for his suffering. It’s a premise steeped in the decade’s obsession with transcendental revenge — an idea that pain, repression, and injustice could manifest as supernatural liberation.

Danton, better known for his acting than his directing, crafts a film that hovers between drive-in pulp and metaphysical inquiry. The astral projection sequences, with their spectral double imagery and off-kilter editing, gesture toward something headier than the average exploitation film, though the execution never quite escapes its grindhouse trappings. Still, Psychic Killer taps into that 1970s preoccupation with unseen forces — from Carrie to The Exorcist to The Fury — suggesting that the mind itself was the new frontier of horror.

Hutton’s performance adds unexpected melancholy, his vengeance driven less by malice than by a desperate desire for release — from guilt, trauma, and the body itself. Julie Adams and Paul Burke provide sturdy genre support, though the film’s episodic structure and inconsistent tone often dilute the tension.

Yet for all its flaws, Psychic Killer endures as a strangely poignant entry in the occult horror canon. Its blend of parapsychology, revenge thriller, and low-budget surrealism makes it a spiritual cousin to Patrick (1978) and The Medusa Touch (1978), exploring how psychic phenomena became a metaphor for repressed rage and moral imbalance.

Half a century on, Psychic Killer stands as both a relic and a reflection — a film that captured the 1970s hunger to look beyond the flesh, even if what it found there was merely the echo of human cruelty.

The Prognosis:

A curious, hypnotic slice of 1970s occult cinema — not wholly successful, but undeniably of its time and temperament.

• Saul Muerte