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This chapter introduces the topic of serial homicide, exploring the development of this academic field. Difficulties in defining ‘serial killing’ are considered in relation to the numerous definitions and different criteria upon which they draw. Thereafter the study of female serial killers is explored and the different types of approach to making sense of women who engage in such crimes are critically considered. Thereafter, the case of Mary Ann Cotton is introduced and contextualised within existing understandings of female serial killers – the chapter concludes that existing approaches are limited in the amount of light they are able to shed on this particular case.

This chapter offers a critical overview of the serial killer film, especially in the light of the subgenre’s intense cultural significance during the 1980s and 1990s and its subsequent descent into relative insignificance after 9/11. While pondering the larger questions of why and how horror film archetypes drift in and out of the culture’s focus of attention, it also demonstrates how the serial killer film, though often pronounced dead, has instead managed to spread throughout a field of cultural production much larger than that of a strictly defined and narrowly circumscribed cinematic genre. The chapter argues that the serial killer has even made a comeback with recent high-profile productions directed by auteurist filmmakers such as Spike Lee (Summer of Sam) and David Fincher (Zodiac).

This chapter assesses the British serial killer cinema. British cinema has been noticeably reticent about depicting its serial killers. Aside from Jack the Ripper, who has appeared in many films since the 1920s, British killers are not nearly as ubiquitous as their Hollywood counterparts and where they are depicted they are often allied more to realism than horror. Like all areas of the crime film, British serial-killer cinema is inextricably linked to Hollywood; however, it also strives to distance itself, drawing on quintessentially British histories, images, and texts. The chapter looks at three films where serial killing is the main thrust of the narrative: Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger (1927), Richard Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place (1971), and John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986).

This chapter situates the American gothic in post-1960 cinema and TV by exploring the distinctly American lineage of the modern serial killer. Landmark films chart seismic shifts in post-classical American cinema after the success of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), American Psycho (2000), and Dexter (2006-13). This Drawing upon the influence of real/reel American serial killers (Ed Gein, Ted Bundy), this chapter argues that the serial killer embodies the counter-narrative American Dream: the consumerist and consumption-driven American nightmare.

This chapter explores ways in which the available discourses of the exceptional murdering subject that have been sketched out so far in this book are a particularly problematic fit in the case of Aileen “Lee” Wuornos, a lesbian prostitute and victim of sexual abuse who killed seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. It is examined here how the label of “serial killer” was debated with regard to Wuornos, and how it was at times rejected, and at times adopted as a badge of agency and of selfhood by Wuornos herself who continually sought, like those around her, to make sense of herself through her crimes. Her discourse alternated between assertions that her killings were acts of self-defense and statements that interpret them as a proud bid for recognition via the evocation of the “cold-blooded” serial killer.

This chapter looks into the legacy of Fritz Lang's M. It examines how Lang's portrayal of a serial killer as protagonist went on to influence subsequent horror films and serial killer thrillers. It also describes how Lang innovatively used abnormal psychology as a source of monstrosity in place of the supernatural or mad science, which was popular with horror cinema in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The chapter outlines ways M influenced everything from the emerging serial killer thriller subgenre to film noir through titles like Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and Hangover Square (1945). It discusses how Lang continued to explore M's themes in his own later films and how they influenced more contemporary depictions of serial killers in both art-house cinema and mainstream horror films.

This chapter draws heavily on the misadventures of the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, from Ridley Scott's film Hannibal. Reflecting the hunger of American audiences for the further misadventures of Hannibal Lecter, took this film to a record-breaking $58,000,000 on its opening weekend in the United States. Such massive public interest in Lecter had of course begun with his appearance in Thomas Harris's best-selling novels Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Hannibal (1999). This chapter further illustrates that the iconic Lecter's true significance lay in the ways he allowed contemporary audiences to engage psychologically and socio-culturally with the historic traumas of the Reagan years while exposing the ideological mediation of that trauma by all aspects of the culture industry. The violent murderer has been a recurrent figure in the mass cultural imagination of the United States since the earliest days of the republic. He has come to the forefront of the popular imagination at times of political, social or economic dislocation; and his outrageous deeds and fantasies have allowed for a timely re-examination of one of the core paradoxes of American social life.

This chapter considers the serial killer road movie through a comparison of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (USA, 1987) and Sightseers (UK, 2012). After outlining the importance of mobility in conceptualizing the serial killer, it establishes the historical specificity of the serial killer road movie as an anti-humanist inversion of the road movie belonging to late capitalist society. The chapter seeks to show how the combination of serial killer and road joins two modern mythologies, understood here within the different contexts of American independent cinema and British comedy. The chapter considers how mobility characterizes the killers in both films as radically other, yet expressive of something essential to the place from which they emerge. Considering respectively the importance of the post-industrial decay of Henry and the eccentricity of British manners in Sightseers, the chapter outlines the different meanings of the road in British as opposed to US culture, and the special narrational position of remove that cinematic mobility can produce.

This chapter examines the trope of uncanny teens using extraordinary abilities to track and stop serial killers. Using the framework of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, it unpacks the ways these teens use supernatural skills to “do what the adults cannot: identify and track a serial killer,” leading to atypical forms of maturation. The essay establishes how these teens often operate outside the law and outside conventional understandings of relationships to themselves and other people, creating a more complex, uncanny version of coming-of-age for readers to grapple with in this sub-genre.

This chapter discusses the other serial killers in the cinema before Hannibal Lecter. In 1959, the writer Robert Bloch was inspired by the gruesome case of the Wisconsin mass murderer Ed Gein, with his keepsakes of bones and human skin. He transmuted elements of the Gein case into the phenomenally successful Psycho (published 1959), reconfiguring the real-life Gein as the chubby, unprepossessing mother's boy Norman Bates, who dispatches a variety of victims in gruesome fashion. Subsequently, Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of the novel (1960) laid down the parameters for a variety of genres: the serial killer movie, the slasher film, and the modern big-budget horror film which utilises above-the-title stars rather than the journeyman actors who had populated such fare previously. But above all else, Hitchcock and his talented screenwriter Joseph Stefano created a template for the intelligent, richly developed, and charismatic fictional serial killer in their version of Norman Bates. Hitchcock's film was to influence a generation of film-makers and writers; among them Thomas Harris.

Although people are understandably disturbed by the idea of pure evil, they are mistaken to replace it with ideas about sickness and cure. The language family associated with pure evil, or sheer wickedness, focuses not on the sick human being, but on the rationally functioning nonhuman being: the superhuman or the subhuman who has little choice but to be wicked. Even so, wickedness and mental illness (or sick! sick! sickness) have a tendency to fuse at their extreme points. This chapter considers the interrelation between sickness and wickedness as it applies to, among other things, serial killers, medical and nonmedical conceptions of sickness, personality disorders (or ‘personal’ disorders), and the relation between moral blameworthiness and mental illness.

This chapter focuses on research evidence, and problems associated with the conceptualization of sexual murder. The historical and contemporary focus on serial murder has had a disproportionate influence on research on sexual murder and here we focus on the vast majority of sexual murders that do not involve serial killings. Evidence regarding the national prevalence of sexual murder of women is reviewed along with issues of definitions, lifecourse of offenders, comparisons of rapists and sexual murderers, personality problems and psychological profiles, media coverage, murder of sex workers, the nature of the relationship between perpetrators and their victims as well as the contexts and circumstances of sexual murders.

This chapter introduces the term 'serial killer', which refers to someone who murders people one at a time and was reportedly coined by FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler in the 1970s. It recounts how the term 'serial killer' came into vogue around the time of the release of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which featured the hunt for a serial killer called Buffalo Bill. It also reviews a number of serial murderers that have been called 'vampires' by the press, such as Peter Kürten who was charged with nine murders and was dubbed 'The Vampire of Düsseldorf '. The chapter discusses movie vampires, who tend to leave trails of drained corpses behind them, which qualify them as serial killers. It refers to Martin's youth in the film Martin, which marks him out as a missing link between Dracula and teen-orientated vampire movies, which would exploit the vampire's bad-boy appeal for younger audiences.

This chapter presents an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972). Frenzy, more than any of his previous films, reflects Hitchcock's abiding fascination with the English murder. The stereotypical notion of the city as a playground for serial killers is explicitly referenced in the dialogue more than once. However, sex and murder are not the only appetites that need satisfying in Hitchcock's film. Frenzy is stuffed full of references to food, some more glaring than others. Although the reputation of Hitchcock's penultimate film has improved considerably in recent years, it is still disliked by many. The explicit scenes of violence against women are too much for some while other commentators find the peculiarly old-fashioned setting to be risible and a clear indication of a director in decline. Hitchcock had always pushed the envelope when it came to sex and violence and, crucially, sexual violence. Ultimately, Frenzy reflects a number of trends in the British cinema of the early 1970s.

This chapter examines Chabrol’s fascination with ‘human beasts’ or ‘monsters’ through the following (overlapping) motifs: the serial killer, the automaton and the female killer. Through detailed film analysis and close attention to techniques, it shows how Chabrol uses these figures to rethink the boundaries and concepts of normality. Although he often provides a detailed social and ideological framework within which to problematize the human beast, class and gender are misleading keys and causality is ultimately blurred to the point of opacity. The closer one gets to the monster (sometimes literally, through the use of close-up shots), the less one understands it. Case studies of the following films illuminate how Chabrol explores film grammar to convey the complexities of human nature and the fragmented, opaque nature of evil: Le Boucher; Landru; Les Fantômes du chapelier; Violette Nozière; La Demoiselle d’honneur; Blood Relatives.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how Thomas Harris's novels Red Dragon (published 1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988) represented a double whammy that permanently reconfigured the crime fiction genre (and, as a by-product, the entire field of horror fiction). Harris has long since gone beyond being merely a topflight writer: he is now a brand, and his sanguinary serial killer novels are the defining works of the genre. The subsequent successful films of the books performed a concomitant shift in popular crime/horror cinema. Jonathan Demme's film, in particular, inaugurated a change in thriller cinema. The real success of the movie lies in the casting of Jodie Foster, impeccably incarnating the out-of-her-depth Clarice Starling, and Anthony Hopkins, masterly as the urbane Hannibal Lecter. Above all, the film (like the novel) is intelligent, a sharp contrast to most contemporary Hollywood fare.

This chapter explores the use of the murderer as protagonist, which is one of the themes that positions Fritz Lang's M as an important entry in early horror cinema. It compares M with Alfred Hitchcock's film The Lodger in 1927, which are radically different in their protagonists as Hitchcock keeps the identity of his killer a mystery, while Lang reveals his immediately. It also explores how Peter Lorre's portrayal of Hans Beckert not only shaped his career but went on to influence future sympathetic serial killer characters. The chapter discusses Beckert as the undeniable focus of the film and stands as a lone individual character in an essentially nameless mob. It describes Beckert's character as a sort of victimised antihero that is hunted and persecuted, while also serving as the vilest of antagonists.

This chapter analyses films connected through their depiction of serial killing in contemporary Italy, which are usually categorised within the giallo filone. These are shown to demonstrate a variety of ways in which filone cinema was characterised by tensions between cosmopolitanism and parochialism, in turn providing further insights into how particular filoni sought to capitalise on a preoccupation with the recent past. The giallo's broader obsessions with past traumas, fragmented memories and the unravelling of supposed facts are thus placed in the contexts of Italy's contested recent past, illuminating the extent to which wartime memory weighed heavily on the 1970s present.