(Continued)

"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.

Next: More Serial Killers