"Each entry contains a listing of the film's main credits, a synopsis of the film, a summary of the film's respective merits and a discussion of how they fit into the themes and structures outlined in the introduction."--BOOK JACKET.
The depraved crimes of both real and imagined serial killers and mass murderers have long transfixed us in newspapers and books, but perhaps nowhere more so than on the big screen. Films such as Silence of the Lambs, Psycho and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer have not only reached huge audiences but also allowed us into the minds of society’s most disturbed individuals. Bestselling author, Christopher Berry-Dee, talks to the serial killers whose wicked stories have most thrilled and fascinated us at the movies and, through far-ranging and disturbing interviews, he tells the stories of the mass murderers who provided the inspiration for some of cinema’s most shocking films. Serial Killers at the Movies takes the reader on an uncomfortable and truly dark journey into a lurid world of murder and deviancy.
Philip L. Simpson provides an original and broad overview of the evolving serial killer genre in the two media most responsible for its popularity: literature and cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. The fictional serial killer, with a motiveless, highly individualized modus operandi, is the latest manifestation of the multiple murderers and homicidal maniacs that haunt American literature and, particularly, visual media such as cinema and television. Simpson theorizes that the serial killer genre results from a combination of earlier genre depictions of multiple murderers, inherited Gothic storytelling conventions, and threatening folkloric figures reworked over the years into a contemporary mythology of violence. Updated and repackaged for mass consumption, the Gothic villains, the monsters, the vampires, and the werewolves of the past have evolved into the fictional serial killer, who clearly reflects American cultural anxieties at the start of the twenty-first century. Citing numerous sources, Simpson argues that serial killers’ recent popularity as genre monsters owes much to their pliability to any number of authorial ideological agendas from both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. Serial killers in fiction are a kind of debased and traumatized visionary, whose murders privately and publicly re-empower them with a pseudo-divine aura in the contemporary political moment. The current fascination with serial killer narratives can thus be explained as the latest manifestation of the ongoing human fascination with tales of gruesome murders and mythic villains finding a receptive audience in a nation galvanized by the increasingly apocalyptic tension between the extremist philosophies of both the New Right and the anti-New Right. Faced with a blizzard of works of varying quality dealing with the serial killer, Simpson has ruled out the catalog approach in this study in favor of in-depth an analysis of the best American work in the genre. He has chosen novels and films that have at least some degree of public name-recognition or notoriety, including Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, Manhunter directed by Michael Mann, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer directed by John McNaughton, Seven directed by David Fincher, Natural Born Killers directed by Oliver Stone, Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.
Mass-murderers, serial killers, spree killers, homicidal rapists, cannibals and other human predators; 20th century history is poxed with the atrocious, apparently motiveless acts of violence and mayhem perpetrated by these psychopathic outsiders. As the century progressed, cinema and TV played an increasingly important role in the enormous influence of the mass-murder phenomenon on contemporary popular culture. Bad Blood also reveals how life imitates art, examing those allegedly inspired to murder by exposure to violent movies.
Serial killing is an extremely rare phenomenon in reality that is none-theless remarkably widespread in the cultural imagination. Moreover, despite its rarity, it is also taken to be an expression of characteristic aspects of humanity, masculinity, or our times. Richard Dyer investigates this paradox, focusing on the notion at its heart: seriality. He considers the aesthetics of the repetition of nastiness and how this relates to the perceptions and anxieties that images of serial killing highlight in the societies that produce them. Shifting the focus away from the US, which is often seen as the home of the serial killer, Lethal Repetition instead examines serial killing in European culture and cinema – ranging from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and from Britain to Romania. Spanning all brows of cinema – including avant-garde, art, mainstream and trash – Dyer provides case studies on Jack the Ripper, the equation of Nazism with serial killing, and the Italian giallo film to explore what this marginal and uncommon crime is being made to mean on European screens.
On the night of October 10, 2008, Johnny Altinger, 38 and single, was heading to his first date with a woman he had met online. Soon after, Johnny's friends received strange emails and computer messages from him, boasting of his new girlfriend and her plans to treat him to an extended tropical holiday. 'I've got a one way ticket to heaven,' he wrote, 'and I'm never coming back.' He was never seen again. Two weeks earlier, aspiring filmmaker Mark Twitchell, a young father with a devotion to the television series Dexter, began a three-day shoot for his latest short film. His horror story featured a serial killer who impersonates women on an online dating site to lure unsuspecting men to his suburban kill room. But was his script actually the blueprint for a real-life murder? And what of Twitchell's other writings, including the elaborate and shocking document titled S.K. Confessions? Was it a diary detailing his dark transformation into a would-be serial killer? Combining sharp journalistic insight, meticulous research, and a powerfully gripping narrative,The Devil's Cinemais the definitive account of the notorious 'Dexter Killer,' a case and trial that captured the world's attention. Steve Lillebuen takes us deep into the extraordinary police investigation and the lives of everyone involved, while unveiling never-before-revealed details, all drawn from extensive and exclusive interviews - including months of contact with the killer himself. Moving from the police station to the courtroom, from the surface calm of suburbia to the surreal glamour of Hollywood, The Devil's Cinemais a compelling, multi-faceted story of dangerous obsessions pushed to extremes.
David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), written by producer James Vanderbilt and adapted from the true crime works of Robert Graysmith, remains one of the most respected films of the early twenty-first century. As the second film featuring a serial killer (and the first based on fact) by Fincher, Zodiac remains a standout in a varied but stylistically unified career. While connected to this genre, the film also hybridizes the policier genre and the investigative reporter film. And yet, scholarship has largely ignored the film. This collection is the first book-length work of criticism dedicated to the film. Section One focuses on early influences, while the second section analyzes the film’s unique treatment of narrative. The book closes with a section focusing on game theory, data and hegemony, the Zodiac’s treatment in music, and the use of sound in cinema. By offering new avenues and continuing a few established ones, this book will interest scholars of cinema and true crime along with fans and enthusiasts in these areas.
'An irresistible page-turner that reads like the most compelling, sleep defying fiction' TIME OUT One was an architect. The other a serial killer. This is the incredible story of these two men and their realization of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and its amazing 'White City'; one of the wonders of the world. The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City, the massive, visionary landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals and gardens. The killer was H. H. Holmes, a handsome doctor with striking blue eyes. He used the attraction of the great fair - and his own devilish charms - to lure scores of young women to their deaths. While Burnham overcame politics, infighting, personality clashes and Chicago's infamous weather to transform the swamps of Jackson Park into the greatest show on Earth, Holmes built his own edifice just west of the fairground. He called it the World's Fair Hotel. In reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber, a crematorium. These two disparate but driven men are brought to life in this mesmerizing, murderous tale of the legendary Fair that transformed America and set it on course for the twentieth century . . .
In 1929, while serving a 25-year sentence for burglary, Carl Panzram bludgeoned a fellow inmate with an iron bar and was sentenced to death. On death row at Leavenworth Prison Panzram wrote his life story, or autobiography, through a series of letters to Henry Lesser, a guard he befriended. Here he sets down a detailed description of his criminal exploits, including 21 murders, his upbringing in correctional facilities for juvenile delinquents (where he was severely beat and tortured for petty infractions) and time as an adult incarcerated in places as varied as Leavenworth to county jails.