Is Travis Bickle a monster?

This question occurred to me the last time I watched Taxi Driver. I’ve seen it many times before, but I keep returning to it because there’s something about it that always escapes me. The film’s antihero, an unstable Vietnam vet who drives a taxi at night because he can’t sleep, is still, after all these years, an enigma. As played by Robert DeNiro in a career-defining performance, there’s something inscrutable about Travis—some deep well of pain behind his eyes, some menace coiled behind his empty smile.

Taxi Driver bears many influences—John Ford’s The Searchers, film noir—but ultimately I think it’s a psychological horror movie about the making of a monster.

It’s the colors I always remember about Taxi Driver, the neon lights reflecting off the puddles in the streets as Travis wanders New York in his cab. The people of the city swirl around him and he watches with disgust, dreaming of a day when all the “filth” will get cleaned up.

Travis makes a few sad efforts to reach out and make contact with humanity. He goes on a few dates with a beautiful blonde, but then makes the mistake of taking her to a porno movie in a disgusting theater. He becomes obsessed with a young prostitute, with the idea of saving her—but she doesn’t seem to want saving. A discussion with a fellow cabbie named Wizard reveals that Travis wants to do ˆ—but what?

“I’ve got some bad ideas,” he confesses—but he cannot express whatever horror lies dormant in him, waiting to be uncoiled. At the end of the scene, a snare drum leads the score. Drums of war? The horrors of Vietnam coming back to haunt Travis?

The film turns darker as Travis becomes increasingly unhinged from reality. He buys guns; he works out; he follows the senatorial candidate that his ex-girlfriend works for. All of it building to a lurid conclusion that, though not exactly violent by today’s standards, still retains its capacity to shock.

Taxi Driver is perhaps the best examination of the mind of the lone killer, the quiet man who turns suddenly violent. In an age of mass shootings, this theme is still quite relevant—yet if Taxi Driver is indeed a horror film, as I think it is, its ability to horrify lies in its refusal to name exactly what pushes Travis over the edge. Critics have speculated about Travis’s problem: theories include loneliness, PTSD, fear and hatred of the other.

Yet these explanations do not satisfy. Ultimately, Travis is driven to violence by all of these forces—and none of them. This is exactly what makes the film so horrifying. What is it that lies inside of Travis? What does he see when he drives through those streets at night? The closest he comes to naming it is in the aforementioned scene with Wizard—but the horror in Travis’s soul is, ultimately, unnameable.

Filmically, Scorsese gets the closest to putting his finger on what’s amiss with Travis in a scene after the disastrous date at the porno theater. Travis calls her to apologize, and the camera gradually pans to the right to reveal an empty hallway—empty, and leading to an immense darkness. It’s deeply unsettling.

Ultimately, Travis finds some measure of redemption—but what is really happening in this scene? And what is it that Travis sees in the rearview mirror? What horrors still chase him?

We may never know.

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Beyond Horror seeks out creepy, unsettling, or downright terrifying movies that lie just outside the horror genre. Click for more in the Beyond Horror series.