Leatherface
In early October 2006, New Line Cinema released The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. A prequel to the 2003 remake of the 1974 original film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it features Leatherface’s first chainsaw murder, set four years prior in 1969. While there have been many different types of teenage slasher movies that feature infamous fictional serial killers, from Halloween, featuring Michael Myers, to Nightmare on Elm Street with Freddy, to Friday the Thirteenth’s Jason Voorhees, TCM perhaps outdoes them all.
Tobe Hooper directed the original movie and its widely-panned 1986 sequel as low-budget horror. An article on Wikipedia notes that he devised the film when he spotted some chainsaws while trying to get out of a crowded store. It became an international sensation and is considered one of the most memorable horror movies of all time.
Loosely based on the creepy tale of Wisconsin killer Ed Gein, who didn’t use a chain-saw but did gut at least one of his victims like slaughtered deer, this film begins in 1969 as four teenagers cross Texas to have some fun before one gets drafted to go to Vietnam. Three of them wind up captured by a cop and taken to the Hewitt farm, where Thomas is becoming Leatherface. Directed by John Liebseman, the new film recognizes scenes from the original that were cut in the remake.
There were other sequels as well: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994). In 2003, Marcus Nispel directed the remake, updating the teenagers’ situation and personalities, and cutting some of the more gruesome cannibalism scenes. However, the formula for slasher movies holds true throughout: promiscuous, good-for little kids get whacked while kids with moral fiber and stamina generally manage to survive and even to save or assist others.
Since Gein figures into several films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, featuring Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins (also with three sequels), let’s review his grisly deeds.
When the police went to the farmhouse in Plainfield, Wisconsin, where Gein lived alone after the passing of his parents and brother, they meant to question him about a robbery, but he wasn’t there. Entering a deteriorating out-building, they spotted what seemed to be a dressed deer carcass hanging from the rafters. On closer inspection, they realized that this corpse was human. Hung feet first was the headless body of a woman, slit from her genitals to her neck, with her legs splayed apart. They wondered if this might be a missing storekeeper, Bernice Worden.
Next, the police entered Gein’s house and their questions were answered. Inside they found all manner of body parts, including skin, a box of preserved female genitalia, a heart in a frying pan, a box of noses, the sawed-off crania from several skulls, death masks, a skin vest with breasts, and a female scalp with black hair.
Gein admitted that he’d stolen most of them from the local cemetery, but he’d also killed Bernice Worden, as well as another missing woman, Mary Hogan. He was suspected in the disappearance of four others, but those women he did kill or dig up had been about the size of his mother and he’d been using skin from the bodies to make himself a female “suit.” Alone and socially inept, Gein had devoured books on human anatomy and Nazi experiments, sending away for shrunken heads. Although he denied consuming the flesh, some who studied the case believe he did.
in Psycho
As well, he kept a shrine of his dead mother in a room, which became the basis for the demented character, Norman Bates, in Psycho. Whenever he feels lust, he cringes under the load of guilt from his Puritanical mother. So he kills the object of it, restoring his “balance” and pleasing his dead mother, kept mummified in her room. He also transforms into her, as a case of multiple personality disorder.
Gein was found to be insane (unable to grasp the nature of his acts) and incarcerated in an institution, where he eventually died in 1984, but his psychosis lives on in these films. The Hewitts are cannibals, devouring body parts like candy. Leatherface, a grave-robber, wears a mask made of skin and a bloody butcher’s apron. Norman Bates has transgender issues with a violent twist. His crimes were recreated in House of 1,000 Corpses (2003) as an amusement park ride.
Another low-budget Gein-esque move was Deranged, about a demented middle-aged man, dominated by his mother, who digs up bodies in the local cemetery, and there’s a recent First Look Pictures bio-pic, simply titled Ed Gein.
Leatherface isn’t the only serial killing monster having his origins unpacked; another character involved in a Gein-inspired film is set to return as all.
Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant but psychotic psychopath of The Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter and its remake, Red Dragon, not to mention Hannibal, will return to show us his background in Hannibal Rising. All of these films are based on novels by Thomas Harris.
It’s commonly supposed that the Buffalo Bill character in The Silence of the Lambs is a composite of the acts of three infamous serial killers: Ted Bundy’s MO in luring victims, Gary Heidnik’s basement dungeon for sex slaves, and Ed Gein’s habit of skinning victims of the right size to create a type of pieced-together vest. Supposedly, it will transform him into a female).
Harris had attended meetings at the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, learning as much as he could about how the elite crew of profilers worked. At that time, renowned profilers such as John Douglas and Robert Ressler were members of the BSU (now BAU), and both consulted on the filming of The Silence of the Lambs, released in 1991. It went on to win seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor and Actress, and to become an international sensation. Despite the villain’s gruesome actions, audiences cheered him on.
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter
In the story, agent-in-training Clarice Starling is sent to imprisoned serial killer and cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, to learn about the mind of “Buffalo Bill,” a killer who is holding a woman hostage in a high profile case. Lecter plays mind games with her, in part to keep his superior edge and in part because he likes her and wants to keep her coming back. While this scenario would never occur in real life, the novel and film had a sense of authenticity because of the FBI’s participation and approval. Jack Crawford, the unit’s head, was based on either Ressler or Douglas, or both. The implication is that killers know best how other killers operate, and Lecter does in fact supply key information. In Red Dragon, the idea that the agent is but a slight psychological step away from the killer’s mindframe is emphasized.
William Peterson, who now plays Gil Grissom on C. S. I., took the role of Special Agent Will Graham in Manhunter, a 1986 Michael Mann film derived from Harris’s novel, Red Dragon. Lecter first shows up in this tale, which involves Francis Dolarhyde, a bizarre killer who is also a self-conscious and somewhat sympathetic victim. Simpson writes in Psychopaths that it’s a film about destabilizing forces in relationships, and the continual flow of the roles of killer and victim into each other. It’s also about alienation, failure, misunderstanding, and the violence that rides on the inability to fully connect. There’s no refuge anywhere, and psychological necessity becomes a driving force. “The Gothic territory into which the detective must venture,” Simpson points out, “contains its own subversions that are inseparable from its affirmations.”
In Hannibal Rising, Lecter’s early life is chronicled in Eastern Europe, from the ages of 6 to 20, including the death of every member of his family during World War II. Given Harris’s penchant for psychoanalytic theory, he will probably draw deep-seated causal inferences about exposure to death and development into a killer.
While it’s unlikely that someone with the flamboyant psychosis that Lecter reveals, especially in Hannibal when he opens the skull of a living man, would ever become as controlled and refined as that character is, there have nevertheless been killers in history who come close: they have pulled off massive deceptions of normalcy while also carrying on with detailed torture murders. Notable among them are H. H. Holmes and “B. T. K,” Dennis Rader.
Let’s look at Holmes, since a movie is in the works about him.
Mudgett
A murder in Philadelphia in 1895 implicated a man named H. H. Holmes, whose real name was Herman Mudgett. He passed himself off as a doctor and in his wake there were numerous deaths. Arrested for the Philadelphia murder, Holmes sat in jail while detectives in Chicago went through his three-story “hotel” there.
Not far from the site of the “White City,” the name by which the 1892 Chicago World’s Fair was known, Holmes had used his “castle” to let rooms to young women arriving in town to attend the fair. The building included soundproof sleeping chambers with peepholes, gas pipes, sliding walls, and vents that Holmes controlled from another room. Investigators found secret passages, false floors, rooms with torture equipment, and a specially equipped surgery. There were also greased chutes that emptied into a two-level cellar, and a very large furnace. Holmes would apparently place his chosen victims into the special chambers into which he then pumped lethal gas and watched them react. Sometimes he’d ignite the gas to incinerate them, or place them on the “elasticity determinator,” to see how the human body would stretch. When finished, he presumably slid the corpses down the chutes into his cellar, where vats of acid and other chemicals awaited them. He would deflesh them and sell the bleached skeletons to medical schools.
To exonerate himself, Holmes decided to pen a book about his innocence, Holmes’ Own Story, but no one believed him. He then wrote a confession, paid for by the Hearst newspaper syndicate, admitting to 27 murders. He insisted that he could not help what he’d done. “I was born with the Evil One as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world,” he lamented. Yet he expressed no remorse.
At trial, Holmes used his intelligence and charm to defend himself during the first day, but proved unable to establish saw the jury. Convicted and sentenced to death, Holmes went to the hangman’s noose on May 7, 1896. Even there he changed his story, and he claimed to have killed only two. No one knows how many people he actually murdered, but the number may top one hundred.
by Erik Larson
Several books were written about Holmes, but Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, a 2003 bestseller, sold film rights to Paramount, in part because he describes the development of the World’s Fair as well — the “white city” – giving the story a larger cultural context. Kathryn Bigelow is attached to the project, for Cruise/Wagner films, according to media reports.
For those who can’t wait for it, other movies about clever serial killers are already available.
In 2004, the world was introduced to “Jigsaw,” a serial killer who enjoys torturing via forcing people into situations where they must kill one another to survive — as he watches. His alleged motive is to make them better appreciate their lives, and indeed, they do have some lessons to learn.
James Wan directed and co-wrote Saw, setting the action in a windowless industrial washroom. Two men revive from a stupor, find themselves chained, and learn from audiotapes why they’re there. One is required to kill the other by a specified deadline. While they try to stage this death, their tormenter discovers it easily enough. As the movie unfolds, they learn how their lives have crossed in negative ways. The game grows more complex as more people enter and various clues to Jigsaw’s identity and motive are revealed.
Not based on any killer in particular, no claim is made that these films are psychologically realistic, which is a good thing, because while psychopaths are clever and generally love their games, they don’t tend to tie all their resources up in trying to teach others to live better lives. Such a moral code is generally of little interest to them. (Psychopaths do have moral codes, to be sure, but they’re emotionally empty lists of rules.) In addition, Jigsaw has advanced cancer (thus, his motive), and would probably have little concern for such issues, not to mention strength to get all the items needed to rig up the games.
In 2005, Saw II came out, also in October, and Saw III followed the same pattern in 2006. Darren Lynn Bousman directed it. Leigh Whannell, who co-wrote the original, also co-wrote this one with Bousman. More deadly games are in store for people trapped in a house in which sarin gas has been released. Those who fail to follow the rules learn the consequences.
The third film joins Wan, Whannell and Bousman together and features Jigsaw’s protégé as the mastermind of more vicious games. The ending indicates that viewers can expect future entertainment along these lines.
The Internet Movie Database lists more than 800 movies and television series associated in some way with serial killers. By this writing, there are probably more, including the loveable “Dexter” on Showtime, a vigilante killer of serial killers. Several films are based on actual killers, such as John Christie, Keith Jesperson, Karla Homolka, Ted Bundy, Albert DeSalvo, and Andrei Chikatilo. Others simply play off the public’s fascination with this type of repetitive murder. In fact, the intelligent, clever serial killer is so hackneyed now that movie critics complain when they see it.
Some films are made to probe the inner mind of a repetitive killer, and American Psycho (2000) may be the ultimate attempt at this goal. Adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s novel by the same name, the movie diverges in this regard: it’s most likely meant to portray a fantasy (although this remains ambiguous). In both versions, however, the lead character, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), is clearly a narcissist obsessed with one-upping everyone else toward the goal of his won perfection. While accomplished in his daily life, he also spends hours immersed in violent, gory fantasies of killing and mutilating people — especially when he sense he’s losing ground to others. In one scene, a reference is made to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as Bateman reveals his mastery of the details of serial killer lore.
No one knows this part of him, and it seems impossible that he could be so caught up with this violence while also retaining his decorum as a businessman. Yet criminologists know that many serial killers are this compartmentalized. Dennis Rader, also known as BTK, was the perfect illustration of this: he was Bateman’s manifestation in the real world (although not quite as refined or successful.)
In 2005, Rader was arrested and charged with the eight BTK murders that dated as far back as the 1970s (including a family), as well as two others not officially linked with BTK at the time they were committed. He pled guilty and recounted with obvious relish the details of his crimes in open court. His arrest and the revelation of his background and stability added a new dimension to the typical ideas about serial killers. While not unique for being a family man holding down a job while also killing people, that he had communicated so often early in his murder career and then let decades pass before communicating again was unprecedented. He wanted people to know what he’d done, because in his mind, he had worked to perfect his “art.” Analysts went over and over the details in an attempt to understand his motives and psychological make-up.
But no serial killer has commanded as much attention and inspired as many books and articles as Jack the Ripper.
Early in the morning of Friday, August 31 in 1888, Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols went out into the streets of London’s Whitechapel area to earn her keep. A man grabbed her and slit her throat with two powerful strokes, leaving her with severe cuts to her abdomen. She was the first of five prostitutes to become the official list of victims attributed to an unknown killer dubbed Jack the Ripper.
The next victim after Nichols was Annie Chapman, discovered on September 8. Her stomach was ripped open, her intestines pulled out, and her throat cut. Her bladder, half of the vagina, and the uterus had been removed and taken.
A note that arrived to the Central News Agency on September 27 raised hope of a lead. Begun “Dear Boss” and signed, “Yours Truly, Jack the Riper,” the author claimed that he “loved” his work and would continue. By the end of that month, on September 30, there were two victims on the same night: Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. Two weeks after the “double event” came a letter and box “from Hell” to the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, with a half of a kidney preserved in wine. The note’s author indicated that he’d fried and eaten the other half. He taunted the police to catch him if they could.
The last official victim was Mary Kelly, 24, who on November 8 invited a man into her room and closed the curtains in preparation. She was found the next morning nearly obliterated, with many parts cut off and a great deal of blood and gore decorating the room.
Movies about Saucy Jack are more common than mosquitoes in a swamp. Newton says, “There are not less than 76 novls, 25 motion pictures, eight stage plays, three short-story anthologies, two poetry collections, one rock opera, and one computer game.” Hitchcock’s 1927 The Lodger to the time Jack turned up via the importation of the London Bridge in Lake Havasu, Arizona, in Terror at London Bridge (1985). Sherlock-Holmes-meets-the-Ripper tales include A Study in Terror (1965) and Murder by Decree (1978). In one rendition, it turns out that Holmes himself is the Ripper In Hands of the Ripper (1971), it turns out that Jack had a daughter, and she grows up to continue her father’s legacy.
One of the most recent Jack the Ripper films was From Hell (2001), a title taken from one of the letters often attributed to Jack, starring Johnny Depp as the opium-addicted Inspector Frederick Abberline. Although there’s little evidence supporting the romantic theory that the Ripper’s atrocious acts were the product of a Masonic conspiracy surrounding a royal cover-up, this theory nevertheless garners widespread — and enduring — attention.
Based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore, the plot of From Hell features the conspiracy idea. The Duke of Clarence has fathered a child with an East End shopkeeper, a scandal that must be quashed. Agents for the Royal Family kill the new mother’s friends to silence them, and thus it turns out that, besides prostitution, that’s the common link among all of “Jack’s” victims. They weren’t sex murders at all, but simply a way to keep a family secret.
Since we’re going back in history, let’s look at two of the earliest serial killer movies ever made. The first one was also somewhat influenced by London’s Ripper.
Fritz Lang’s M, which some interpreters have decided is about Peter Kürten (though Lang denied it) was released in 1931 as a black-and-white film noir. It features Peter Lorre in his first starring role and is included on the list of 100 Greatest Foreign Films. Now digitally restored, with the final scene replaced, M premiered in Berlin to standing ovations.
Lorre plays a man tormented and driven by his compulsions, hating himself for what he cannot control — luring and killing children – and his actions draw not only law enforcement to chase him but the criminal underworld as well: Even other offenders think his clandestine crimes are bad for the neighborhood, because it draws too many cops. This atmospheric film competently captures the creepy secrecy of a child molester, who also moans that no one can imagine what it’s like to be him. While Peter Kürten did kill children, he was much less focused on them than was the character in M.
Kürten was arrested in 1930, having attacked numerous people with various weapons and killing nine. He used anything from hammers to knives, and he often drank the blood, especially from the temples as his victims bled to death. Thus, he gained the moniker, “The Vampire of Düsseldorf.” When two of his victims were not discovered, he sent a letter to the local newspaper, with a map. Yet as it turned out, he was a friendly, well-dressed, and seemingly responsible married man. After his arrest, people were shocked to learn about his violent deeds, including the slaughter of children. Supposedly when he wrote his letter, he capitalized the “M” in murder with a red pencil, while the rest of the letter was written in a different color of ink. His was the first case to be thoroughly studied by a psychiatrist.
Indeed, during the era between the world wars in Germany, images of sexual murder became part of the elite art scene, with many artists painting gory scenes, so it’s no wonder that Lang felt inspired at that time to write his script. In addition, during the 1920s, there were three serial killers who were also cannibals or who severely mutilated their victims. Fritz Haarman liked to chew through their necks as he was raping them, and Karl Denke and Georg Grossman both collected body parts.
While the film itself bears little resemblance to the real story of Peter Kürten, it does portray the compartmentalized killer who can go through the motions of ordinary life and hide his terrible secret. In fact, his theme song, which he whistles at significant times during the film, is Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Lang’s working title, in fact, had been, “The Murderers are Among Us.” The following year, another movie featured an even more malicious killer, and this plot inspired many more movies and television series.
In 1932, a film was released, the plot of which may have influenced some serial killers. The Most Dangerous Game, starring Joel McCrea, Leslie Banks and Fay Wray, was based on a short story by Richard Connell. A cabin cruiser wrecks off the coast of a remote island, and its three passengers reach the island safely. They encounter the man who owns the island, the enigmatic Count Zaroff, who invites them to stay. He seems to be a gracious host, but he has a hidden agenda: He likes to hunt and he needs more prey — humans.
The RKO Studio then remade the film as A Game of Death and released it in 1945. Directed by Robert Wise, it received poor reviews. Many television series used the plot as a foundation for an episode, and other filmmakers have been inspired by the original premise. Thus, the human-as-prey notion has become engrained in our culture.
It’s not surprising, then, that “hunting humans” would occur to serial killers within the framework of a challenging game. In June 1983, Alaskan police were faced with a strange story told to them by a young prostitute in Anchorage. She claimed that a redheaded john had tortured and raped her, and had planned to fly her to a remote cabin, but she had escaped. She identified the home of local baker, Robert Hansen, as the place where she’d been raped, but he insisted she was lying. Yet the remains of several women had turned up in the wilderness, shot or stabbed, and most had been prostitutes.
The local police invited the FBI’s profiling unit to assist in developing a warrant and a set of questions for Hansen. The warrant turned up a weapon that ballistics matched to bullets removed from the murdered women; it also turned up their missing jewelry and IDs. Hansen finally admitted using his victims as “game.” For a sexual thrill, he would drop them off, naked, in the wilderness and hunt them down. He showed detectives on a large aerial map where he had buried victims, identifying gravesites, and the detectives took him along as they went to search each location. He was able to lead them to the burial places of twelve women not even known to be dead. On February 18, 1984, he pled guilty to only four of the murders and was sentenced to 461 years, plus life. By May that year, investigators had found seven of the bodies at the gravesites that Hansen had shown them.
Another movie had a definite influence on several serial killers, many of whom found within it their ultimate fantasy of sexual enslavement.
The Collector, a bestselling novel by John Fowles published in 1963, inspired a film (1965), directed by William Wyler and starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Egger. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, while Samantha Egger won a Golden Globe for Best Actress.
Frederick, a lonely entomologist (a London bank clerk in the film), abducts the beautiful Miranda, whom he has worshipped from afar, to hold her captive. He has the delusion that he can make her love him just as he can make her wear certain clothing or bathe at certain times. He views her like one of his butterfly specimens, something he can keep, admire, and do with as he likes. He is certain that eventually she will submit to him and accept that she belongs to him. Her former life is gone.
However, he hasn’t counted on her own stubborn will. Miranda is frightened of him and wants to be free. She misses her life and her family. Even when she eventually feels a need for his company, she still cannot love him the way he wants, because he needs her total capitulation. In fact, as she gets the idea of what he intends, she tried to thwart him and then deceive him, all toward the end of getting away.
Eventually Miranda grows ill and dies, indicating to Frederick that he’s made an error, but he quickly dismisses this unfortunate “accident” and looks for another captive — a woman from a lower social station who may be more submissive. Miranda’s death is no more meaningful to him than the death of one of his butterflies. Similarly, actual collectors of humans feel the same way. Their victims are interchangeable with one another.
Many killers who’ve held victims captive for a period of time have expressed admiration for The Collector, sometimes citing this novel (and film) as support for their actions. The idea of having total control over another person appealed to them and so they put their own plans into motion: they wanted a sexual slave who would accede without resistance or complaint to their most deviant whims.
For example, Robert Berdella embraced the image of keeping someone around to do his bidding, and he often kept his victims for days, torturing them and photographing their suffering. He’d seen The Collector when he was a teenager and he claimed it had planted the dark fantasy in his mind. The main character is driven by the need to capture a woman and keep her imprisoned, forcing a relationship on her. The way he discarded her after she died apparently felt right to Berdella, because he did the same thing with several men that he’d trapped in his home. One of them escaped, bringing back the police, so Berdella was arrested. He admitted that the film had provided him with a framework for feelings he was already having. He confessed to the murder of six men.
Yet another cited by at least two killers provided them with a form of excuse for their crimes.
In Gainesville, Florida, during the summer of 1990, there were five gruesome rape-murders in quick succession. The first crime scene involved two freshmen at the University of Florida who’d been repeatedly stabbed, mutilated and posed for shocking effect. That same night, investigators found a missing eighteen-year-old in her bedroom: her head was propped on a bookshelf and her nude mutilated body set on the edge of the bed. Two days later, a mile away, a male and female student were found murdered in their apartment. As with the others, a pry tool was used to gain entry.
An FBI profiler indicated that the perpetrator had probably watched each apartment from the nearby woods. Near one scene, the police found a campsite and a black bag with a screwdriver, money taken during a bank robbery, duct tape, a cassette recorder, and clothes. But when the screwdriver initially failed to match the pry marks from the scenes, these items were forgotten…until Danny Rolling was arrested for robbing a store. They listened to the cassette in the recorder, which began, “This is Danny Rolling.” He sang a song about being insane and signed off with “something I gotta do.” Confronted, Rolling confessed but blamed an alter ego, Gemini—inspired by a movie, Exorcist III.
In this 1990 film directed by William Peter Blatty, a demon that had variously possessed the child Reagan and a priest had migrated into a wandering lunatic, who was locked up. But fifteen years later, murders begin in the place where he’s kept with the same MO and the police are confronted with the sadistic Gemini Killer. His favorite method is to paralyze his victims with succinlycholine, which leaves them alert and aware of their torture. Gemini is the “thing” inside the killer, using the man’s body to perform his gory deeds.
Rolling was unable to use the multiple personality excuse. Instead, he was convicted and sentenced to die, and later wrote a book about his crimes. He was not alone in being inspired by this movie. Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibalistic killer of seventeen men in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said it was his favorite film as well.
Sensational murders such as these often draw tourists of the macabre, and have done so for centuries, a phenomenon that itself inspired a film.
While Copycat and Se7en are often cited as being among the best films about serial murder, the latter in particular is more literary than realistic, bringing the killer’s rituals in a circular fashion back to his own sins. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman play two detectives looking for a killer who selects victims he believes have committed one of the seven deadly sins. Like Jigsaw, this serial killer has a moral agenda that involves elaborate planning and access to victims. He likes to read, apparently, and the police consider him intelligent and also insane. In Copycat, an agoraphobic psychologist (Sigourney Weaver) who is an expert on serial killers psychologist and is asked to come out of seclusion to solve a series of murders. While both movies have their merits as thrillers, the crimes are too cleanly calculated to reflect what serial killers are like.
More typical is the killer depicted in Kalifornia (1993), although this movie, too, has its literary agenda. When a psychology graduate student, Brian Kessler, and photographer, Carrie Laughlin, decide to document infamous murder scenes across the country, they look for companions to share their expenses. Enter Early Grayce, played by Brad Pitt, with his girlfriend, Adele Corners (Juliette Lewis).
Early has just killed his landlord and torched their trailer, and needs to put his foul deeds behind him. (In Psycho Paths, Simpson says he’s a “marginally more socialized version of Leatherface.”) He clearly has bad manners and no sense of cleanliness and protocol, but there’s something else about him that bothers Carrie (Michelle Forbes). Early eyes her, especially as she takes clandestine photographs of him having sex with Adele, and finally decides he wants her. Adele is now dispensable.
Treating Brian (David Duchovny) to a real taste of violence, Grayce shows his true colors, killing a man, shooting Adele, and threatening to kill the others. Along the way, he has challenged Brian, the so-called serial killer aficionado, with just how he’s going to write a book about murder when he’s never killed anyone and therefore knows nothing about it. Brian has no response, but Early Grayce still fascinates him.
Brian does learn that he’s more than a little naïve about killers and after Early brutalizes him, shoots Adele, and kidnaps Carrie, Brian comes to realize that murder is immediate and terrible.
Images of death subliminally support the film. The “Kali” in Kalifornia refers to the Hindu goddess of sacrifice and blood. She’s a figure of unremitting annihilation, a demanding mother figure whose color is black. The four characters also ride to the West Coast in a four-door convertible similar to the one in which President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
Brian and Carrie survive, but the ordeal has deeply affected them. Brian indicates that despite all his research, he still does not understand what inspires men like Early Grayce to kill, but he says that he has learned the “difference between them and us”: they have no remorse, no confrontation of conscience.
Early is clearly evil, but he has his qualities. At one point, Adele tells Carrie that she’s been brutalized by others but with Early she feels safe. In fact, she thinks he has the eyes of an angel. That’s not unlike people who encountered another infamous killer who inspired several films.
In 1974, young women were disappearing in the Pacific Northwest. In one case, witnesses offered descriptions of a man named “Ted” who had driven a tan Volkswagen Beetle. But Ted was on his way across country, stopping in Utah and Colorado to grab several more victims. One got away, and Theodore Robert Bundy was arrested and imprisoned. Before his trial, he escaped, ending up in Tallahassee, Florida.
On January 15, 1978, he entered a sorority, attacking four girls and killing two of them. Yet a witness had seen him, and it was a matter of time before Bundy was apprehended — but not before kidnapping and killing a twelve-year-old.
Once in custody, Bundy swaggered and bragged about his notoriety, eventually confessing to more then thirty murders. He went through two trials, identified by both the sorority house witness and the bite mark he had left on one of the victims. He attempted to defend himself but inadvertently admitted to his involvement. Found guilty, he was sentenced three times to death. Bundy claimed that his compulsion to kill and mutilate had been inspired by the need to possess his victims totally, especially after death.
What’s notable about him is that he lured women with his good looks and charm, and often with an added touch of feigned neediness or the pretence of being a police officer. He said of himself that during these encounters some malignant portion of his personality took over. As he said to his mother just before his 1989 execution, “Part of me was hidden all the time.”
Four movies have been produced about Bundy thus far, three of them specifically for television. In 1986, a two-part miniseries, The Deliberate Stranger starred Mark Harmon in the role of Bundy. While it was influenced by Anne Rule’s definitive book, A Stranger beside Me, another movie by that name was aired on the USA Network in 2003. This time Billy Campbell played the notorious killer. More interesting in some ways was the A&E film of Robert Keppel’s book, The Riverman, in which Cary Elwes, as Bundy, talks with law enforcement about the as-yet-unidentified Green River Killer. And finally, Bundy was featured in one of a series of bio-pics directed by Matthew Bright. In this one, Michael Burke was the star.
Bundy’s not alone in being an attractive killer who spawned a film, but what sets the next one apart is her gender: she was a female.
Karla Homolka was released from a Canadian prison in July 2005, and the media held a “Karla watch” in anticipation. She’d met Paul Bernardo in 1987 when she was 17 and began a torrid romance. Paul, however, was secretly raping women in Scarborough. Karla let him do whatever he desired and by some published reports, his demands became increasingly brutal.
Six months prior to their wedding in 1991, Karla offered Paul her 15-year-old sister, Tammy, as a Christmas gift. She’d drugged the girl with a tranquilizer from the vet’s office where she worked so Paul could rape her while she was presumably passed out from alcohol consumption. Instead, Tammy died, and it was ruled accidental. After the two bought a house, Paul brought home two girls, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Both were held captive, terrorized, raped, and finally killed. Paul took videotapes of most of these acts. It later turned out that Karla had lured Kristen French to the car to kidnap, because, as she later put it, Paul liked young girls and she wanted to keep him happy. She had also assisted in dismembering and getting rid of Mahaffy’s body.
Since Paul also beat Karla at times, she finally left him in 1993. When the police began asking questions, she offered details about what Paul had done in exchange for two ten-year terms for manslaughter. Two more years were added after videotapes were uncovered and authorities realized her role in her sister’s death.
In prison, Karla appeared to thrive. She got involved with a woman (who later claimed to have been manipulated into giving her gifts), and participated in parties and fashion shows. Professional opinion is divided on whether or Karla is a victim or a dangerous psychopath. She’s divorced now from Bernardo, imprisoned for life, and in 2006, a movie, originally titled Deadly, was released based on her. In March 2005, a lawyer representing the families of the slain schoolgirls demanded an advance screening of Karla to determine whether he would try to block its release, but he ultimately decided, along with the families, not to fight it.
Directed by Joel Bender, it stars Misha Collins as Paul and Laura Prepon as Karla. Some people believe it’s important for the public to see female offenders like this, so as to dispel myths that they are not as devious or violent a men, but others called for a boycott. Nevertheless, a successful film has its own momentum, and one of the most notorious females has had several books and documentaries devoted to her, as well as an opera. In 2005, she got a movie, although by the time it was released, she’d already been executed.
Charlize Theron won numerous film awards, including an Oscar, for her portrayal of Aileen Wuornos, the female serial killer in Florida who shot seven men to death. While the film portrays Wuornos as a victim acting out against a lifetime of abuse (Wuornos’s defense), as well as a woman who needed money to take care of her girlfriend, in actuality, her girlfriend had a job and could easily fend for herself. Just before her execution, Wuornos said that if released, she’d do it again. She felt no remorse.
The case began late in 1989 when the police came across the body of Richard Mallory. He’d been shot four times in the chest with a .22 caliber gun. In May 1990, a truck was found on the side of a Florida highway, registered to David Spears. His naked corpse was discovered sixty miles away, also shot with a .22. Five days later, another male corpse was found, and then a witness spotted two women removing the license plates from a silver Sunbird, stolen from a missing missionary. Composite sketches were distributed, and more male corpses were found, including the missionary’s. Finally, several people identified a pair of lesbians, Tyria Moore and “Lee,” A. K. A., Aileen Wuornos, who was soon arrested in a biker bar. Police pressured Moore to tell what she knew, and used a key found in Wuornos’s possession to enter a storage space, where they located items missing from victims.
Moore agreed to get Wuornos to talk on a taped phone conversation. On January 16, 1991, Wuornos went to the police and confessed that she had killed seven men. She said that she had wrestled with an abusive Mallory before she shot him in self-defense.
Nevertheless, Wuornos was convicted of murder and given the death penalty six times. She was executed in 2002.
It’s likely that the success of this film while inspire other filmmakers to dedicate scripts to specific real-life killers. Let’s look at a collection of them from the past.
A number of serial killers have inspired movies either about their murder sprees or about the events surrounding them. The Summer of Sam (1999) depicted the terror in New York during the series of murders for which David Berkowitz was convicted, and the Happy Face Killer (1999) featured a couple who took credit for one of the murders committed by trucker Keith Jesperson in the pacific Northwest. For some bizarre reason, a woman (played by Ann-Margret) fingered her much-younger boyfriend and said she was involved as well. The film stars Marg Helgenberger (“Catherine” on C. S. I.) as a police officer investigating the woman’s claims, as she keeps changing her story. While this film is presented as fictional, it’s fairly close to what actually occurred. The couple went to prison while Jesperson, incensed that someone else was taking credit for his crimes, started sending notes signed with happy faces.
Possibly one of the most sensational depictions was Tony Curtis’s portrayal of Albert DeSalvo as the Boston Strangler. Adapted from the book by Gerold Frank, The Boston Strangler, released in 1968, and directed by Richard Fleischer, the film bore little resemblance to the actual events or to DeSalvo himself. Nevertheless, it gripped the country and set the image of a serial murderer who entered homes and raped thirteen women. (In recent years, although DeSalvo confessed, evidence has come out that he may not have been the Strangler after all.)
William Heirens, the infamous “Lipstick Killer” who terrorized Chicago during the 1940s, killing three before he was caught, is portrayed in While the City Sleeps (1956). Fritz Lang, of M, also directed this one, although it focuses largely on the struggles of a city newspaper.
A recent attempt by First Look Pictures to put out a series of movie-like biopics about individual (or team) serial killers, which one can find in any video store, fails in part because several are inaccurate or fictionalize certain incidents. The series includes Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Richard Ramirez, among others. This attempt is disappointing largely because there’s no need to report the facts erroneously. The true stories are dramatic and gruesome in their own right. One gets the impression that the directors are trying to leave their own artistic mark, but most people who know the cases will steer clear, even if some, like Ed Gein, prove to be capable renditions. While the actors tend to resemble the people they play, helping to affirm the documentary “feel,” the series generally fails to live up to its promise.
Besides lone killers, teams have become fodder for depictions of serial/spree murder.
A more gruesome depiction is Natural Born Killers, which is an ironic commentary on the public’s consummate and oblivious fascination with serial killers. Oliver Stone produced this film, which came out in 1994 to mixed reviews and a great deal of controversy over the rampant and gratuitous violence. Although the killing couple, Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory Knox (Juliette Lewis) are based more on spree killers Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend than on serial killers, in fact they commit several murders as serial killers, too.
Stone’s commentary that accompanies the DVD is illuminating, in terms of the symbols and colors he used to make his point: that the American public was far more devoted to violence than they wanted to admit, and the media glamorized it for commercial exploitation. (The popularity of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Kill Bill II attests to this appetite for graphic violence — and in fact, he wrote the original screenplay for NBK.) Robert Downey Jr. plays a television journalist, Wayne Gale, who knows that “if it bleeds it leads,” so he relentlessly pursues the story to boost his career and slake the public’s thirst for details about Mickey and Mallory. Ultimately, the pair kills off 52 people, many in gory scenes of mass murder.
Wedding, Boyd and Niemiec, in Movies and Madness, state that in most action and horror movies, “the purpose of violence is to stimulate, dazzle, and entertain.” It’s just a way to get audiences into the theaters, with the promise of excitement. This film takes that notion to an extreme. Mickey gives an interview in which he says that violence is part of being human (echoing serial killer Ian Brady, one of the British couple known as the Moors Murderers). In the end, after a lengthy and brutal scene in which prisoners are incited to turn on the guards, Mickey and Mallory execute Gale on camera. Given the pessimistic view, the only surprise is that they didn’t run together for president — and win.
Not as gruesome, perhaps, but just as disturbing is a cult favorite about an infamous pair of serial killers — killing both apart and together.
In 1986, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was released, directed by John McNaughton and based loosely on the life and crimes of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole (although Ottis dies in the film in a way not true to his story).
Henry (Michael Rooker) is a drifter with no regard for anyone. He acquires a partner, Ottis (Tom Towles), and allows Ottis’s sister, Becky, to hang with them. As in realty, Becky eventually annoys Henry sufficiently to become a victim. (Henry Lee Lucas said, tearfully, that she was the only person he ever loved.)
Director Chuck Parello made a sequel to Henry, and Rooker has been replaced by Neil Giuntoli, a television actor. It was released in September 2006. Henry has a new partner, Kai, whom he meets while applying for a job. Kai invites Henry to room with him and soon confides his dirty work with arson for insurance payouts. Henry takes to this, helping to set fires, and in the film, he commits a few random murders along the way. There’s a slight love interest, followed by a suicide, and Henry eventually dispenses with Kai and moves on. He’s essentially a lone wolf. It’s not the stature of artistic rendering that the first one is (or so some critics insist) and will probably disappoint the cult following that Henry inspired.
Henrydoes at least depict the distanced psychopath who can kill even a person he claims he has loved (for all that a psychopath can love). The original is the one to watch, as it follows Henry on his journey of murder.
Henry Lee Lucas, arrested in 1983, estimated at that time that he’d killed 100 people, but eventually raised that number to over 350 in twenty-seven different states (some sources claim he took credit for over 600). His partner, Ottis Toole, gleefully added his own, and affirmed that he had participated with Lucas in murder, necrophilia and cannibalism.
Lawmen came from all over the country to Texas to close their open cases, providing Lucas with outings and meals, but suddenly he recanted. Then he insisted he’d been forced to recant, confusing everyone. “I set out to break and corrupt any law enforcement officer I could get,” Lucas said. “I think I did a pretty good job.” When he died in 2001, the truth went with him.
While it was clear that he had committed at least four murders, including his mother, even one of those—a female victim dubbed “Orange Socks”—came under doubt in recent years. Some criminologists believe he was responsible for between forty to fifty murders, and he was convicted of eleven, but no one knows his number of victims for sure. He received the death penalty for “Orange Socks,” but this sentence was commuted to life, and he eventually died in prison of natural causes.
Of the original Henry, some critics state that the graphic, even casual way the murders are committed trivializes murder, which, of course, is true to the type of killer Lucas was. The film adequately portrays the drifter type, for whom nothing is sacred and nothing much matters. (The various Ripley films about a psychopathic killer accomplish something similar, especially the one starring John Malkovich.)
In contrast, a killer in Russia had a job, a wife, children, and no apparent reason to be as savage as he became.
Among the most instructive films about serial murder is Citizen X (1995), based on the books about Chief Inspect Viktor Burakov (Stephen Rea) and his adversary, Andrei Chikatilo (Jeffrey DeMunn), who killed for nearly a decade. In this case, behavioral analysis from the crime scenes had played a crucial role.
Chikatilo managed to kill and mutilate 56 women and children during the 1980s in the Ukraine. On girls and women, this killer would gouge the breasts and destroy the vagina, uterus and bladder or abdomen. On boys, he would mutilate the penis, scrotum and anus, and once he actually chewed out a tongue. A few victims were stabbed through the eyes. His signature was clear — he led them into a patch of woods and attacked, leaving the corpses where they died — but the Russian team’s technology was archaic, making it difficult to run a proper investigation. In fact, Burakov was forbidden to publicize the murders to get public assistance, because the bureaucrats running the U. S. S. R. at the time did not wish to admit that their system might produce a serial killer. It was considered a “bourgeois phenomenon.”
Trying with scant resources to narrow leads, and influenced by the FBI’s BSU, Burakov asked psychiatrists to draw up a profile. Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky (Max von Sydow) agreed to do it and he stated in a report that the killer was a sexual deviant, 25-50 years old, around 5’10” tall, who suffered from sexual inadequacy. He brutalized the corpses to enhance his arousal, but also because he was frustrated.
The U. S. S. R.’s disintegration eased political control, and Burakov finally identified Chikatilo at a train station after the murder of another child. Searching his bag, detectives found Vaseline, a rope, and a knife. However, they needed a confession, but Chikatilo offered nothing. When his release appeared imminent, Burakov invited Dr. Bukhanovksy to read his profile to the suspect.
The psychiatrist recognized in Chikatilo the type of man he had described in his profile: ordinary, solitary, non-threatening. Painstakingly (and well-depicted in the film as a highly dramatic moment), he read his report to Chikatilo, who then broke down and confessed to fifty-six murders, although there was corroboration for only fifty-three: thirty-one females and twenty-two males. He received sexual gratification, he admitted, from murder, mutilation, and cannibalism, but more than that, he achieved a sense of peace.
Chikatilo was found legally sane and sentenced to die. The movie remains close to the actual events, although it takes liberties in the beginning to fit a long period of time into a shorter sequence. As a film about profiling, Citizen X is among the best. But as profiling has lost some of its larger-than-life allure, some scriptwriters have tried to make it more exciting.
Angelina Jolie starrs as FBI profiler Illeana Scott in Taking Lives (2004). Thanks in large part to The Silence of the Lambs and books by former FBI profilers, such as John Douglas’s Mindhunter and Robert Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters, movies about profilers chasing down serial killers have proliferated, to the point of being hackneyed or highly inaccurate.
The fact that a profiler must go to Canada to teach law enforcement there about profiling is a strike against the film; it’s condescending. Canadians have a superior system these days and might like collaboration but are far past the Keystone Kops featured in this film. Add in her inappropriate clothing and her need to go lie in a grave to get a sense of the killer and you have a preposterous scenario, stretching things even beyond the Harris plot of an agent-in-training taking on the most dangerous serial killer all by herself.
At any rate, the plot features a renowned FBI profiler, Illeana Scott, summoned to assist law enforcement in Montreal. They must identify a serial killer who assumes the lives and identities of the people he kills. Scott finds herself at odds with the people she’s supposed to be helping, and then rather stupidly violates ethics to get involved with a witness (Ethan Hawke) — a man who, for all she knows, could be the killer. One can only wonder how she acquired the reputation of being so good at her job. She’s not. She should know better than to accept anyone at face value who’s part of an investigation. But then, this agent goes grave-diving rather than studying crime reports.
Her violation of protocol is nearly as bad as the FBI agent who goes out to meet a potential killer in Frailty (2001), when a religious nut gets the idea that he has to kill people he thinks are filled with demons.
In Blood Work (2002), Clint Eastwood plays a retired profiler, Terry McCaleb, who must return to work to identify a killer, thanks in part of his own heart transplant. The clues point to an unsolved series of cases from his career, but casting Jeff Daniels in a “bit” part — the neighbor, Jasper Noone – is too great a giveaway as to what his real role would be. How is it that a profiler of McCaleb’s stature has no third eye for his own backyard?
Yet even as profilers come in for Hollywood’s mismanagement, serial killers, too, can sometimes become the butt of a joke.
Not all movies about serial killers are serious. During the 1940s, Arsenic and Old Lace was made from a popular Broadway play about two elderly spinsters who murdered twelve homeless men and buried them in their basement. People laughed, but the truth is, in the 1980s, landlady Dorothy Puente was doing just that — or, actually, putting her victims in her garden as she collected their Social Security checks.
Kathleen Turner played a killer in the black comedy, Serial Mom (1994). Beverly Sutphin, married to a successful dentist (Sam Waterston), strives to be the perfect mother and wife in her perfect home in Baltimore, Maryland. When her son’s teacher thwarts her, she runs him over, thus finding the solution for her frustration — just kill whoever’s in her way. The fun lies in trying to guess what kind of household object she’ll utilize next as a weapon. At one point in the film, Beverly even watches The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
In 1994, The Silence of the Hams parodied a lot of slasher movies as Detective Jo Dee Foster (Billy Zane) hunts for a killer who has over 120 victims. The plotline follows both Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, keying in on humorous twists to those serious themes and images. A few serial killer movies are parodied in the Scary Movie series.
While we can’t begin to discuss all the movies that have ever been made about serial killers, we’ve covered many of the primary ones. Quite a few more are in the works, some of them based on actual killers and others entirely fictional. Such movies have perpetuated myths about killers, such as that they always look for the same victim type, they can’t stop, and they’re preternaturally clever, and will probably continue to do so. Since audiences seem to like this, the formulas will likely continue. However, with the artistic and commercial success of Monster, we may also see more along the lines of bio-pics. In addition, scriptwriters will probably take on more plots involving technology, a la CSI. Whatever direction such films take, despite critical complaints, serial killer movies appear to be here to stay — especially in October.
Bibliography
Fox, James and Jack Levin. Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and mass Murder.
Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 2005.
Internet Movie Database, Inc., us.idmb.com
Newton, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. New York: Facts on File, 2001.
Ramsland, Katherine. The Human Predator: A Historical Chronicle of Serial Murder
and Forensic Investigation. NY: Berkley, 2005.
“Serial Killer Culture,” Crime Library.
Schechter, Harold. The Serial Killer Files. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Simpson, Paul. Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
Wedding, Danny, Mary Ann Boyd, and Ryan Niemiec. Movies and mental Illness. nd edition. Hogrefe, 2005.
Wikipedia.com