- #KILLER A JOURNAL OF MURDER MOVIE SERIAL#
- #KILLER A JOURNAL OF MURDER MOVIE SERIES#
- #KILLER A JOURNAL OF MURDER MOVIE TV#
As a culture, it seems we compulsively return to the scenes of these crimes.
#KILLER A JOURNAL OF MURDER MOVIE TV#
The perennial popularity of films, mini-dramas, and documentary-style TV shows depicting the above-named figures – and others, such as Ted Bundy, Fred West, and Peter Sutcliffe – reflects the symbiotic relationship between the popular media, which helps produce the sensationalism surrounding these types of crimes, and our collective fascinated consumption of them. The fictionalisation of these murderers return to the known details of the “real life” crimes, as the viewer also returns to these events, which are simultaneously rooted in reality and fiction/fantasy.
#KILLER A JOURNAL OF MURDER MOVIE SERIAL#
Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) interview some of America’s most notorious serial killers: Edmund Kemper/“the co-ed killer” (Cameron Britton), David Berkowitz/“Son of Sam” (Oliver Cooper), and Charles Manson (Damon Herriman), among others. In the Mindhunter series, which will be my focus here, FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCannelly), and psychologist Dr. The return of the spectator and the murderer, then, is linked to a fantasy of a more fulfilling “consumer” experience.
Just as a cliff-hanger works to attract the viewer’s return, the act of murder ‘leaves the murderer hanging, because it isn’t as perfect as his fantasy’ ( Ressler and Schachtman 1992: 33). However, in Ressler and Tom Shachtman’s Whoever Fights Monsters ( 1992), the link between serial consumption and the term serial killer is made explicit: Ressler reveals that the term “serial killer” is partly inspired by his own viewership of The Phantom.
#KILLER A JOURNAL OF MURDER MOVIE SERIES#
The series adapts the non-fiction crime book of the same title by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, which in turn is based on research conducted by a group of FBI agents and psychologists (led by John Douglas, Robert Ressler, and Ann Wolbert Burgess) in the 1970s. In the Netflix series Mindhunter ( 2017-), the relationship between serial killing, commodity culture, and consumerism is more subtle, but nonetheless manifests itself at times – such as when convicted murderer Monte Rissell (Sam Strike) requests a can of Big Red soda in exchange for his interview ( Mindhunter 2017: 1.4). He can only conceptualise things in their finished form, that is, the money form of a commodity’ ( Lee 2000: 111). The serial killer’s relationship to consumption has been explored by Christina Lee, who observes that the fictional exploits of American Psycho’s (1991) investment banker and compulsive murderer, Patrick Bateman, present ‘a limit case of commodity fetishism that no longer recognizes the process of production, merely the act of consumption. Mark Seltzer implies the extent of our interest in this particular configuration of masculinity when he writes that depictions of the serial killer and serial murder ‘have by now largely replaced the Western as the most popular genre-fiction of the body and of bodily violence in our culture’ ( Seltzer 1998:1). Monstrous yet seductive, popular representations of the serial killer fascinate and disgust consumers of this genre of cultural product.
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