Serial Killers

[poliphilo]

Silence of the Lambs was OK. Se7en was passable. But since then the weirdo serial killer has been done to death.

As a genre, the serial killer murder mystery is as artificial as Agatha Christie. Real life serial killers don't take their inspiration from the Book of Leviticus (or whatever.) They don't pit their enormous intellects against the police.

Real life serial killers are demented low-lifes. Psychopaths as brilliant as Hannibal Lecter is supposed to be don't go on killing sprees; they set up their own businesses or go into politics.

Comments

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

Most serial killers aren't very bright, because if they were very bright, they'd be getting away with it. Of course that leads to the question of how many Hannibal Lecters are out there that haven't been caught and we don't know about.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I just don't believe in Hannibal Lecter.

I just read the Wilkipedia entry on Denis Nilsen- a British serial killer who has the reputation for being intelligent. It turns out the only reason he kept killing for so long was that the police were even stupider than he was and kept missing the clues. On one occasion they assumed the incident they'd been called out to was a gay lover's tiff and handed the victim (half-butchered) back to Nilson, who proceeded to finish the job.

[mokie]

Same thing happened with Dahmer, as I recall--even though the victim the cops handed back was clearly drugged, injured and underage.

Silence and Se7en worked so well because they brought the audience something they'd not seen before--a killer that was smarter than they were. We were bored to death with sinful hicks stalking righteous suburbanites in the '70s and teaching us all that Suburbia is the place to be; the unstoppable and inhuman killing machines of the '80s who taught teens that sin could kill you had long since stopped being scary and started spouting one-liners. But now the killers were smarter than we were, were two steps ahead of us and taking things very seriously. It was a nice change of pace.

But then they did it to death and dumbed it down, villains became protagonists, and the directors and audience both forgot which side they were supposed to be on. The killer only becomes the hero when the audience stops fearing him, and when that happens it's time to go back to the genre's drawing board and figure out which cycle is coming around again...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There seem to be a lot of parallels between Nilsen and Dahmer.

Yeah, the serial killer thing has run out of steam. The latest sub-genre seems to be the one where you imprison a group of people in some confined space-
in the style of reality TV- and put 'em through hell while Big Brother watches and smirks. I've seen three or four of those recently. The best of them was the Canadian indie, Cube.

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

Sounds rather like the Jeffrey Dahmer case, where the cops also handed back a bloody victim to him because it was a "gay thing".

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Serial killers don't get away with it because they'e smart, but because the cops are so dim.