Why do serial killer films keep getting made ... and why do we flock to them?

By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

Also: A map from the Zodiac killer

Something in us craves to screen the exploits of monsters, to dive deep into their dark places and deeds -- just so long as we can depend on the moviehouse lights coming up afterward. What's the source of our fascination with cinematic serial killers, twisted souls possessed by demons and hellish visions? Why do we pay good money to cozy up to Lecter, Bundy and Dahmer?

A key to our unsavory appetite lies in the universal need to be somebody, for real or vicariously. Who doesn't want to be the star of his or her own show? Serial killers are often classic cases of personalities so crippled and impotent, they finally explode into nuclear rage and Grand Guignol spectacle -- destroying anyone who looks like the oppressor and/or the unattainable object of desire. The Other is objectified and dehumanized, reduced to playthings in a monstrous child's chamber of horrors.

So, then, it's not surprising that San Francisco's notorious Zodiac killer once confided to a newspaper reporter: "I am waiting for a good movie about me." Thirty-five years later, the fiend who offed folks as casually as Cheney shoots sitting ducks finally gets his wish -- sort of. David Fincher's "Zodiac" spotlights the journalists and cops teased and terrorized by the garrulous killer, until he finally went underground for good, identity forever unknown. You gotta wonder whether Zodiac will resurface to fire off a letter to the editor, protesting that he, not the men who fed on his fame, should have gotten top billing.

Let's get ready to shake hands with Fincher's devil by taking a nocturnal stroll through Serial Killer Land, as imagined in the movies and in the minds of monsters.

"Big deal, death comes with the territory. See you in Disneyland." -- Richard Ramirez, aka The Night Stalker 

We civilized types know how to keep our monsters caged, but in movies such as "Natural Born Killers" and "The Silence of the Lambs" we can vicariously let them out to play, exercising and exorcising our own darkest impulses. Because, let's face it, everybody has days when coping with other human beings is murder, when it seems like the only way to stand out, make an impression, be somebody is to get under the skin -- way under.

So you might say that we ride serial killer movies into a Disneyland of Death, where Mickey and Minnie Mouse metamorphose into, say, Mickey and Mallory, the media-made murderers in "Natural Born Killers," and where Goofy's likely to have a sweet tooth for human flesh.

Serial killers are addicted to the roller-coaster rush generated by their often intricately composed bloodbaths -- the theme parks and snuff flicks they dredge up out of fertile nightmares. We sometimes dream such dreadful stuff, too, and we're told the act of dreaming keeps us sane and civilized. Movies can also be like therapeutic dreaming -- and traveling mean streets with cinematic crazies, tapping into their toxic highs, can be practical magic.

"It was like a nightmare, I was in a movie." -- Jeremy Bryan Jones

In the minds of serial killers and the movies that feature them, murder is often a kind of performance art, 15 minutes of fame for a demented exhibitionist. Think of David Fincher's "Seven" (1995), in which John Doe's mild-mannered psychopath (Kevin Spacey) plays the role of self-ordained missionary abroad in an urban hellhole.

Doe's sermons -- on the Seven Deadly Sins -- are theater pieces, carefully designed so that the victim is forced to act out his vice to such a Dantean extreme, it's the death of him. The resulting "cinematic" tableaux, featuring horrific scarifications of human flesh, are presented as allegory, as much a pipeline to the divine as any Mayan priest's sacrifice.

We, as the audience, living in a world that often seems irreparably decadent and degraded, read Doe's mad preachments as our own disgust writ large. As consumers of Fincher's awful images, we take part in a mediated communion via mortified flesh and blood.

In "Seven," we eyeball bloated, bloodied, mutilated, starved corpses up close and personal. Probably no previous mainstream film rubbed audience's noses so deeply in the sheer, awful physicality of death. Part of the fascination of the serial-killer movie (as well as certain horror films) is getting a gander at what's under the skin.

In the real world, we dream of flesh that will stay fit and beautiful forever, but there's a dark side to that fantasy of immortality: What does our human suit look like, we wonder morbidly, when it's ripped and rotting? "Seven" spawned the popular CSI forensic dramas, which treat us to corpses in every state of close-up disrepair. And surely John Doe's fantastic tableaux inspired the gruesome gambits in "Saw" and the private torture chambers in "Hostel," where even a nobody can be a Michelangelo of pain.

Serial murderers tap into the uncensored, "magical" thinking of cavemen, children and lunatics: If you eat the brains of your noblest enemies, you will take on their powers. (Philosophically elevated and evolved, this magical exchange informs Christian communion.) Remember gourmand Hannibal Lecter dipping into a living man's brainpan in "Hannibal" (2001)? But in the earlier "Silence of the Lambs," Lecter possessed a far more exquisite appetite: He lusts for the flavor of Clarice Starling's tender soul as she serves him up her traumatic tale of screaming lambs.

In contrast, the lumpen Jame Gumb (Ted Levine) from "Silence" is a creature of more superficial tastes: Rather than consuming female-ness, he dreams that dressing up in their skins will shape-change him into womanhood. One of Hannibal's lesser acolytes, Gumb can't measure up to true son Frances Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) in "Manhunter" (1986).

Dollarhyde's towering "Tooth Fairy," cleft-lipped and white-haired, invades other people's living spaces, bent on devouring a world denied to him. Through carnage and photography, this disinherited son consumes the lives of others -- "home movies" of happy families. Fattening himself into monstrous godhood, Dollarhyde gets off on wielding the power of life and death over his Brady Bunches.

"If I killed them, you know, they couldn't reject me as a man. It was more or less making a doll out of a human being ... and carrying out my fantasies with a doll, a living human doll." -- Ed Kemper

"If one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is." That's a typical Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter aphorism, underscoring the serial killer's transition from impotent nobody to star and director of his own movie. It's the monster's sick imagination that sets the script in motion, animates or freeze-frames the hapless mannequins he's cast in his snuff flick.

Like Hitchcock, homicidal directors like Lecter see their actors as little more than "cattle," raw materials to be manipulated into masterful mise-en-scene. Out in the dark, we safely regress, permitted to indulge in amoral selfishness, shedding for an hour the burdensome responsibility of being supersensitive to others' needs and desires.

Consider "May" (2002), an isolated child who grows up so locked inside herself that she sees other people only as living dolls to keep her company. Imagine how she grooves on her potential boyfriend's amateur movie, featuring two lovers whose kisses and caresses turn cannibalistic. Afterward, snuggling in his arms, the literal-minded May tries to lovingly bite off the filmmaker's finger. (What do we mean when we burble over lover or child, "You're good enough to eat"?)

Rejected, May recalls her mother's advice -- "If you can't find a friend, make one" -- which might be the mantra of any number of lonely artists. Soon this loco seamstress is collecting beautiful body parts. Adding one of her own eyes -- talk about a closed circuit, returning one's own gaze -- May sews up the mess to make a life-sized doll, a Frankenstein monster who'll choose her as its bride in her own private horror movie.

As "The Stepfather" (1987), Terry O'Quinn ("Lost") translates a brutal childhood into an almost infantile obsession with casting an ideal family. Director and star of his own remakes of "Father Knows Best," he's kind, loving, handy around the home. As easily as shedding an outgrown skin, the eternal stepfather shaves, goes bushy or bald, changes costumes, wives and jobs. (The small hairs rise when this bad actor falters for a moment: "Who am I here?") Inevitably, each domestic drama disappoints the insanely demanding director and he has to cut the cast -- literally -- and move on.

What terrible freedom, to turn real life into movies we control! To play in a dollhouse of our own making!

"People like me don't come from films. Them films come from people like me." -- David Harker

"Natural Born Killers" (1994) conjures up a nonstop phantasmagoria of pop-culture imagery, charged with creating and nourishing sociopaths Mallory and Mickey (Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson). The killer kids of Bonnie and Clyde, who craved to have their lives memorialized in poetry and song, these white-trash lovers are legends in their own fevered minds, fast-food for fans, media, cops -- anyone who fantasizes being bigger and better. In short, they are a species of American Dream -- conspicuously consumed by their avid admirers in the movie and by many of those who watch "Natural Born Killers."

In "Man Bites Dog" (1992), that media-generated symbiosis devolves from satire into black-and-white horror. A scruffy film crew documents the life of a serial killer -- a daft charmer who chats up the camera, canoodles at home with mom and gramps, casually knocks off postmen and old folks, drops bodies into a quarry while cheerfully lecturing on how much weight is required to deep-six a midget, a child, a woman.

Slowly, the filmmakers are sucked into the game. (And aren't we as well, getting off on the jolly carnage?) Giving up the safety of bloodless voyeurism, they begin to take part in their subject's unspeakable rapes and murders. These hapless documentarians are downscale versions of the Robin Leach-like TV commentator (Robert Downey Jr.) in "Natural Born Killers," who bites off more of Mickey and Mallory's fatal glamour than he can chew. This nasty little movie's a caveat on the way we've come to see violence as video, harmless fun happening in some virtual reality.

Is it really so far-fetched to imagine Mickey and Mallory, Hannibal Lecter, John Doe, Son of Sam, Jeffrey Dahmer, et al., as salivating contestants on a Swiftian "American Idol" show -- each showing off his or her distinctive talents as butcher, making mincemeat of snarky Simon?

"Look straight at me, you will see yourself." -- Charles Manson

Serial-killer movies such as "Man Bites Dog" and Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" (1997) force us to ask ourselves how much horror we can safely swallow. How deep can we go into the darkness before there's no chance of a therapeutic return?

In "Funny Games," a couple of teenaged serial killers get off on using a family for sadistic blood-sport, luring our repulsed yet fascinated gaze. Then suddenly one of the torturers turns to the camera, looks us straight in the eye and inquires whether we're having fun, what we'd like to do next. We're rudely shocked out of movie-house dark into the glare of self-examination: Is it OK to get off on watching violence, if it's not real? Are we responsible for our taste for "pretend" pain? What's the distance between our eye/I and that of the killer?

Back in the day of surrealism and silent movies, Luis Buñuel started his avant-garde flick "An Andalusian Dog" (1929) with a visceral image that's still hard to sit still for: a screen-filling eye -- stretched wide open -- sliced by a razor. Buñuel's razor assaults the passive gaze, forcing us to confront and take responsibility for the dreams and nightmares we visually consume.

"Take your worst nightmares and put my face to them." -- Tommy Lynn Sells

So what's to be brought away from movies about serial killers, if we keep our eyes wide open?

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung would have agreed with Buñuel's recipe for sanity; he advocated diving into our shadow selves with eyes wide open, exploring the dark, nightmarish places where we stash everything we must repress for the sake of living civilized lives in the company of others.

Often, it's a detective or psychiatrist who takes the nasty trip into a killer's broken brain for us, saving us from having to plumb the dark alone. Catharsis comes courtesy of these secret sharers, often at great cost to them. In "The Cell," a child psychologist (Jennifer Lopez) literally goes questing inside a serial killer's (Vincent D'Onofrio) mind, role-playing archetypal mother, warrior, and savior in the face of all his demons.

The film's richly baroque theater-in-the-round, where mythic dramas play out, might also be seen as holy ground where good and evil contend -- or just a grabby video game with a man's salvation as the prize. Depends on your point of view, the degree of your enlightenment.

In any case, supping with the devil requires a long spoon.

In "Manhunter," detective-profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) nearly loses himself in the black hole that is Hannibal Lecter. And the sumptuous film "In Dreams" (1999) puts a cruel twist on the dreamquest, which begins when a child-woman (Annette Bening) unravels in a familial psychodrama: She suspects her husband has been unfaithful, and she's jealous of all the attention he pays to their daughter.

Trying to stay in the light, she projects all of her Grimm fairy-tale impulses toward child-murder and mayhem onto a red-headed stranger (Robert Downey Jr.). Trouble is, her doppelganger, hungry for a mother/lover, takes on a monstrous life of his own -- which he'd like her to come share. There's no exit from "In Dreams," just an endless hall of mirrors -- reflecting infantile lust and terror.

One way to avoid getting snared on the way to epiphany is to incorporate both light and dark, seeker and destroyer, in one character. TV's "Dexter," forensic detective and serial killer (Michael C. Hall), is a brilliant amalgam of charming sociopath and angel of justice. We can have our cake and eat it, too, identifying with Dexter's righteous purpose as well as his bloody acting out.

Trained by his cop dad to focus his urge to kill on sinners deserving of death, Dexter spends his professional hours tracking down killers without a cause. Last season, this weirdly sympathetic hero discovered that a murderer who dismembered women's bodies and then artfully arranged their parts was blood kin, a more radical version of himself. Even a serial killer must have a dark side!

"Possessing them physically as one would possess a potted plant, a painting, or a Porsche. Owning, as it were, this individual. ... Since this girl in front of him represented not a person, but again the image, or something desirable, the last thing we would expect him to want to do would be to personalize this person. ... Chattering and flattering and entertaining, as if seen through a motion-picture screen." -- Ted Bundy

However loathsome many found Bret Easton Ellis' novel, the film of "American Psycho" (2000) nailed a spiritually and emotionally bankrupt world in which yuppie mannequins such as Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) move to the tune of killing consumerism.

Like the murders in "Seven," the whole of "Psycho" is an indictment of the deadly sins, particularly the sin of gluttony. Ironically, no matter how much Bateman consumes, he loses existential weight and identity -- until he isn't there.

Bateman's clique of perfectly groomed and suited young men compete for the snazziest business card, yet they can't remember one another's names from moment to moment. And their women are little more than "tits, a hole and a heartbeat." Conversations sound like commercials and clichés, and the emptiness of character is camouflaged by brand names and labels.

When his juiceless world drives Bateman mad, he axes one of his clones and chainsaws chicks as though they were so much meat, all the while keeping his white apartment antiseptic as a morgue. Even in the midst of god-awful murder, he has nothing to say for himself, reciting verbatim music reviews about the careers of Huey Lewis and the News, Whitney Houston, et al.

Is this yuppie zombie trying to make an impression? Really trying to get inside someone else? Or is he just trying out newly purchased household tools? In the sharp-toothed satire of "American Psycho," Bateman's horrendous attempts to draw blood and cause pain may be the fantasies of a benumbed Everyman, encapsulated in dehumanizing consumerism.

So let's face the hard truth: The gods and monsters we dream up in fantasies and flicks 'r' us, down deep. And it only follows that if we deny the Lecters and Dexters their pleasure in the dark, they may not rest in peace in the light of day.

What are your thoughts on serial-killer films? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com

In addition to her regular contributions to MSN Movies, Kathleen Murphy reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.

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