Serial killers in films: a bloody slash at entertainment

Watching the morally ambiguous Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story brings back the question of our fascination with serial killers. Jack the Ripper, the killer supposedly responsible for a series of brutal murders in the East End of London in 1888, hit the nail on the head (apart from the unfortunates he ripped apart) with his apocryphal quote of giving “birth to the 20th century” in his ‘From Hell’ letter.

The murders coincided with the mass production of newspapers and there is a theory that the letter signed “Jack the Ripper” was coined by a journalist to boost circulation — some things never change. And thus the tradition of a catchy name for a serial killer was born. The fact that the murders were not solved has kept the legend alive spawning a whole industry of books, television shows, movies and walking tours.

Foggy beginnings

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s first films, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) is based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 novel, The Lodger, inspired by Jack the Ripper. A critical and commercial success, The Lodger set the template for the Master of Suspense’s future works.

Hitchcock returned to the serial killer cinema with the celebrated Psycho (1960) and his penultimate film, the under-regarded Frenzy (1972). Psycho is based on Robert Bloch’s eponymous 1959 novel, in turn inspired by the heinous crimes of the ‘Plainfield Ghoul’, a serial killer Ed Gein.

Inspired casting

Though in the novel, Norman Bates, the murderous proprietor of the Bates Motel, is not very attractive, by casting Anthony Perkins as Bates, Hitchcock indulged in an inspired bit of counter-casting. The audience’s sympathy is all for the young man, who is being nagged by his scary mum. And that made the final fruit cellar revelation much more shocking apart from the fact that the star, Janet Leigh, dies early on in the film in the celebrated shower scene.

Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack with the jangling shriek of string instruments (appropriately called ‘Murder’), the close-ups and extreme close ups, the razor sharp cuts and the final drain-to-eye dissolve, made the scene one of the most iconic three minutes in the film.

Scream queen

Psycho is also considered as laying the template for all slasher films to follow. Incidentally Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, made her debut fighting yet another iconic serial killer, Michael Myers, in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Curtis played the babysitter Laurie Strode, targeted by Myers in his expressionless mask. Curtis is still playing Strode, in the 13th instalment of the franchise, Halloween Ends, which is releasing soon.

While slasher films are mainly about sex, sadism and savagery, there are also the puzzle-kind of movie, where law enforcement officers have to solve the elaborate clues laid out by the killer to save the last victim. This is a variation of the Final Girl theme, where the good, virtuous girl screams and is saved while the naughty girls are all sliced and diced in a variety of interesting ways.

The puzzle-kind of serial killer movie offered double the thrill as the hunter was also being hunted.

Famous five

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) changed things around once again for the slasher flick. By winning all the five major Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director (Jonathan Demme), Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally), the film added a patina of respectability to the hunt for serial killers.

An adaptation of Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel, The Silence of the Lambs, features not one, but two serial killers. There is Buffalo Bill (catchy name alert), who skins his female victims in order to make himself a new skin and Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins), a psychiatrist and incarcerated cannibalistic serial killer.

Hannibal the Cannibal offers to help the rookie Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) track down Buffalo Bill who has kidnapped a senator’s daughter (the Final Girl). Incidentally, The Silence of the Lambs was released on February 14, 1991, i.e. Valentine’s Day — must have been a fun date movie.

Subversion galore

Even as The Silence of the Lambs unleashed a flood of serious serial killer movies, invariably featuring a tortured, traumatised and driven detective, and increasingly complicated clues, there was Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), featuring killers subverting the rules of the genre. There was I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) with young people being killed off by yet another masked serial killer.

The Scream franchise is going strong with the fifth instalment coming out early this year and a sixth in the works. I Know What You Did Last Summer has been turned into a rather uninvolving streaming series.

Hindi cinema has had its share of serial killers from Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Khamosh (1985) with a killer loose on a film set and Anurag Kashyap’s beyond disturbing Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016) to R. Balki’s vaguely pretentious Chup: Revenge of the Artist about a serial killer targeting film critics running in a theatre near you.

There are good, bad and ugly (all horrid torture films come in this category) serial killer films and now even streaming shows project the serial killer genre. Presenting as they do a heady cocktail of danger and a path forged by rebels and outliers, they perhaps offer a chance for us to metaphorically walk on the wild side before returning quickly to the quiet comforts of home.