by Neil Gaiman
Monsters can be made by domestic trauma, and sometimes they come out of nowhere, but what do our monsters tell us about the society that produces them? It is not shocking or subversive to posit that evil sometimes comes out of nowhere, but to delve deeper and point out the societal triggers of psychopathy is still a deeply controversial issue in our psychotically politicized age. Too easily are books and cinema that ask these very questions demonized as somehow driving consumers to violent acts. The subtle yet universal trauma of class warfare and elitism, Bret Easton Ellis obliquely warns in American Psycho (1991), can produce a whole demographic of monsters.
A purebred slab of elite Yankee beef, Patrick Bateman fanatically embraces the shallow power games and orgies of consumption of the Reagan Wall Street boom, but his suppressed self-hate is a raging storm that periodically forces him to kill bums, prostitutes, and even rival brokers whose business cards look better than his. As his excesses grow from a symptom of his success to an indictment of the system, Bateman wants to get caught, but finds he can’t even turn himself in. The privileged class he belongs to will not allow his sloppy indiscretions to disrupt their own reign of terror. Of course, when the unreliable narrator finds his corpses cleaned up and his confession dismissed as a coked-up joke, we are allowed to write off the whole spree as a delusion or metaphor. But whether real (in a work of fiction) or imaginary, the murderous career of Patrick Bateman beautifully captures the utter banality, the utterly unromantic hole at the heart of the psychopath.
When the serial killer boom reached its high-water mark in the mid-1990s, the only taboo left was to let them fall in love. Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse (1996) pairs up two serial killers (one based on meek UK killer Dennis Nilsen, and the other on Jeffrey Dahmer) in a volatile love triangle with Tran, a hapless morsel of perfect victim-meat. As dedicated to purple neo-Gothic romance as iconoclastic shock, Brite’s dueling killers are, like her vampires, a species apart, capable of greater depth of feeling as well as physical miracles like feigning death to get out of prison. While utterly repulsed by the otherness of its narrators, we are cornered into sharing their ecstatic sense of being a breed apart, not cursed, but gifted, with the will to kill.
With all the taboos seemingly shattered, the psychopath stares at us across a vast gulf. Walking in his shoes only underscores the necessity for getting these bastards off our planet. But as the world grows ever more crowded and competitive, we each harbor a longing to identify with that killer, rather than to blend into the herd. To see ourselves as the wolf. But how to make a truly sympathetic serial killer?
With his incredibly popular Dexter books, Jeff Lindsay seemed to hit the answer. His serial killer is a true bad seed, cursed with the taste for blood from his murky infancy. But raised to channel his appetites into hunting other killers, he becomes a uniquely satisfying hero that allows us to revel in being both the Vigilante Champion and the Big Bad Wolf.
Film
If genre literature was slow to try to explore rather than invent the geography of madness, the movies, to their credit, never really tried.
Owing much to the French theatrical tradition of Grand Guignol, in which madmen conspired with unlikely coincidences and unruly fate to deal out bloody punishment to all, the modern horror film has cooked down the dangerous madman into two discrete, equally unrealistic archetypes: the Fool and the Fiend. From Grand Guignol plays to postmodern slasher flicks, the lunatic is often an agent of fate or bloodthirsty Old Testament morality, or a demented Greek chorus, feeding vital plot points laced with nonsense.
The Fool is more mad than evil, and often represents an apologist for the villain or the author’s veiled attempts to help the protagonist––Dwight Frye or Tom Waits as Renfield in Dracula, or Dennis Hopper as the “harlequin” photojournalist in Apocalypse Now (1979). An all-too-common cliché of recent supernatural films is the visit to the insane asylum to glean clues from the surviving victim, the burnt-out police detective or the crazy old lady whose cryptic raving in the first reel proves prophetic in the third.
The Fiend inherited all the operatic sadism and destructive obsession of the Gothic villain. His motive is usually revenge or to fulfill an insane project, while the best ones fuse both aims into one. While morbid and fraught with sick obsession, the most overwrought of these stories have become blockbusters on Broadway. The Phantom of the Operahas been a perennial remake favorite, gradually reducing the villain’s hideous disfigurement to a tiny blemish to make him a romantic anti-hero. Sweeney Todd (1936) turned an urban legend about a degenerate barber who killed his customers to make meatpies into a romantic revenge tragedy. By giving the monstrous Todd a dead wife and a stolen daughter, he becomes not only a sympathetic protagonist, his career of murder becomes a shocking new form of class warfare.
Similarly, Lionel Atwill, as the titular mad scientist Doctor X (1933), seeks a means of producing tasty artificial flesh from human tissue. Atwill so excelled at melodramatic madness that he returned the same year to play Ivan Igor, the scarred human monster of Mystery of the Wax Museum. Using the bodies of his victims in his stunningly realistic exhibits, Igor finds another colorful way of reducing his fellow humans to products. Vincent Price played the same role with more polished menace than madness in House of Wax (1953), but when loosely remade in 2005, the killers were mute rednecks who grind out the murders and surreal installations with the dull resolve of hirelings making doughnuts.
With a healthy American mistrust for anyone smarter than the mob, horror movies also found a useful archetype of the Fiend in the arrogant but all-too-rational Victor Frankenstein. The mad scientist who unleashes Things Man Was Not Meant to Know pursues chaos and horror for its own sake. Beginning with the dashing disconnection of Colin Clive in Frankenstein (1931), the monster-maker devolved into a raving curiosity in The Human Centipede (2010). While exciting, these pictures offer little insight into the mysterious kinship of genius and madness, or the paradox of truly rational, educated men committing atrocities.
No enlightening sparks of madness enliven the blunt daily inventory of Heinrich Himmler’s journals; no moustache-twiddling raving punctuates the experimental records of Josef Mengele, and no colorful telltale symptoms betray the homicidal delusions of Charles Whitman, Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Columbine killers in time to help spot the next one. The tragically ordinary truth is that the will or compulsion to murder is often accompanied by a quite unremarkable absence of normal emotions, rather than crazy behavior or evil split personalities. So art is too often unwilling, even where it is able, to cleave to the truth about madness.
Fritz Lang’s M (1931) was a striking departure, not only for its stark, proto-noir scenery, but because it forces us to stalk with the killer as he chooses his prey and to run with him as he is, in turn, hunted. A fascinating dynamic of evil versus evil emerges when Berlin is locked down by a dragnet, forcing the underworld to collude to hunt the killer themselves.
The “realist” serial killer biopic has grown into a genre of its own, evolving from Psycho and the commercially disastrous but intriguing Peeping Tom (both 1960) to the incendiary Taxi Driver (1976). When a Stranger Calls (1979) limps away from its electrifying first act to follow John Hurt as a miserable killer seeking absolution, or at least deliverance. But our hunger to vicariously enjoy the life of a human predator is turned back upon us in sick yet effective flicks like Maniac (1980) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986).
By the 1990s, the familiar serial killer is all too aware of his audience: in the mockumentary Man Bites Dog (1992), the cunning killer corrupts his camera crew into cleaning up his sanguine messes. In Se7en (1994), we are force-fed a cold banquet of schadenfreude as the killer flenses away a litany of human jetsam. In his philosophy, if not his technique, he only articulates the fierce will to judge others that makes these movies so satisfying in the first place.
Insight into the inner workings of the killer are untrustworthy, and we are easily manipulated by dazzling flurries of spectac
le that manipulate us into pitying or even admiring them, as in Natural Born Killers and Heavenly Creatures (both 1994) or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s masterpiece, Santa Sangre (1990). We are fools, these films seem to say, to expect the madman to explain himself to us. What we get, instead, is often the serial killer’s explanation of us.
But Jodorowsky and Oliver Stone had the luxury of lofty thematic statements that comes with genius and/or big-studio backing, while most psycho pictures were merely trying to make a buck. Psychos are, after all, even cheaper and easier than zombies or vampires. In Herschell Gordon Lewis’s bloody potboilers like Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs(1964), anyone could be a maniacal killer, simply because somebody had to be.
Beginning with suspense thrillers like Experiment in Terror (1962) and Wait until Dark (1967), we begin to see high-toned films that marry us to the victim as they are stalked by a cruel, seemingly inhuman sadist, but they also let us share the thrill of terrorizing a helpless woman, of eluding the police and having our way. Hitchcock elaborated on the shower scene in Psycho with a sickeningly intimate strangling scene in Frenzy (1972). Once audiences had betrayed their enjoyment for the thrill of the chase, the mystery part of the package was discarded, and the slasher film was born.
Many huge, excellent books on the slasher film phenomenon have been written already (the hugest and most excellent among them being Butcher Knives & Body-counts); but amid debates over violence as pornography and slashers as enforcers of gender inequality, precious little consideration is given to whether any movie psychos are even properly insane. Most are not alive or completely human, and they are only meaningful as portraits of our most irrational, suppressed fears.
Your meat-and-potatoes slasher kills for revenge against taunting classmates, unattainable women, irritating assholes, or anyone who reminds them that they’re different. Usually, the differences involve childhood abuse or sensational disfigurement, leading to sexual impotence compensated for with cutlery and power tools. Nailing a couple in flagrante delicto is the grand slam of slashing. But few, if any, slashers qualify as bona fide maniacs by even the broadest M’Naghten standard.
Michael Myers is an explosive Bad Seed, though we have seen nothing to explain what went wrong. Seemingly a happy, normal child, he snaps and kills his way through his house like a runaway lawn mower. Dormant for decades until a chance to escape turns him loose on his hometown, he zeroes in on couples coupling like his sister, suggesting a simple Freudian attachment, a lethal fear of sex. Dr. Loomis’s raving in successive sequels seem to suggest that Myers is much more: an indestructible avatar of death itself. In John Carpenter’s deft hands, Halloween’s Michael Myers was a truly frightening and ambiguous figure for the skeptical, cynical ‘70s.
An audience’s hunger for answers should seldom be catered to; a filmmaker tempted to give too many easy answers seems to have missed the lesson of Jack the Ripper. Once the public’s attention is captivated, the less they know, the more they want to find out. The increasingly threadbare sequels layered motives and schemes on the once-elegant minimalist story until nothing edifying or entertaining was left. Rob Zombie’s remake inserts a nightmarish tapestry of abuse and humiliation to explain Myers’s rampage, until any sane person in the same straits would put on a Shatner mask and go stabbing.
Even easier to diagnose, A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy is a child molester and “the bastard son of a thousand maniacs,” as his grandiose legend has it. More a victim of studio greed than vengeful parents, Freddy began as a caricature of a child molester, the comic book apotheosis of Albert Fish, a jester-executioner fueled, if not created, by his self-loathing teen victims’ masochistic imaginations. As an all-powerful ghost, he can enter dreams and warp reality, but because he merely kills, rather than perpetuating his cycle, the remake predictably twisted the original plot into even worse knots, with the even creepier new Freddy proving to have been innocent of his original charges.
Friday the 13th’s Jason is a zombie revenant, a clumsier, sweatier Grim Reaper, but his mother is a nice piece of work. Right or wrong, the mother loves her deformed child to the exclusion of all else. When he drowned, she had no choice but to kill the horny counselors responsible, and anyone who subsequently filled their jobs. This kind of tissue-thin rationale gets stretched even further in teen exploitation potboilers like Terror Train (1980) , Massacre at Central High(1976), and the like. Though it was only trying to keep the franchise alive, Friday the 13th V: A New Beginning (1985) came closest to an interesting wrinkle when it replaced the lumbering hockey zombie with a copycat killer swept into the monstrous identity because his own life was a vacuum of frustration. While lifted from the superior My Bloody Valentine (1981), this twist backed into a fascinating integral part of the slasher genre. As self-conscious slasher franchises like the Scream and Saw series emphasize to the exclusion of all else, the mask is all-important, and anyone can be called to put it on.
Perhaps the most disturbing of all the slashers is Leatherface, because he’s neither insane nor truly evil. Another pop culture version of poor Ed Gein by way of Sawney Bean, Leatherface (in 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), represented the nadir of the American conservative heartland, a backwoods King Kong whose rage and venal fetishes are caused by ignorance and inbreeding. When he sees a clown on his Speak & Spell in TCM3 (1990), he earnestly types FOOD over and over.
At his best, Leatherface is a chilling figure because he isn’t insane at all. He has merely been raised to see you as food. His rage, then, is the nigh-universal anger of anyone too ugly, dumb, and poor to be worthy of love and admiration. As such, Leatherface is less a hillbilly killer than the avenging angel of the bungled and the botched, a chain saw as lethal middle finger thrust out at the Beautiful People.
Perhaps the most absurd, and the most educational, of slashers, is Jigsaw of Saw fame. The fear of getting hunted by a slasher is a rootless, narcissistic one––the reverse of winning the lottery––so elaborate in its conventions as to have nothing to do with real crime, as shown in the heavy-handed spoof Behind the Mask: The Rise of Lesley Vernon (2006). That some giant mutant rodeo clown would want to stalk and kill you, for whatever far-fetched reason, is a compelling enough idea that one forgets how ridiculous and unlikely it is. That a killer should get to know your secret shame, and devise a preposterous Rube Goldberg torture device to teach you and the universe a half-baked moral lesson, somehow captured the imaginations of postliterate audiences in an era when less cynical horror flicks couldn’t get into theaters on Halloween.
Taken on its own silly terms, if Michael and Jason are avenging angels and Freddy is a devil, then Jigsaw is an idiot’s vision of God. Some mean asshole who knows all your sins, who constructed and trapped you in an elaborate machine to punish you for being no better than you were made to be.
If we really want to understand why we’re drawn to these cartoon depictions of madness, we have to go even further from reality, and back to Batman.
In the Joker, we have seen Cesar Romero as a nitrous-huffing hyena laughing at his own lame jokes; Jack Nicholson as Jack Nicholson, with a laconic scenery-chewing performance that made Keaton’s inhibited Batman irrelevant. His sole, continuous joke seemed to be that he realized that he was in an exceedingly silly summer movie. But Heath Ledger brought a shockingly new intensity to the Joker that effortlessly planted doubts about our own understanding of madness.
In his conflicting monologues explaining the tragic events that made him a monster, this new Joker seems to own not only the decades of disposable comic book and film incarnations of himself, but also the audience’s need to know the Reason Why. Like Henry’s serial fantasies about having killed his mother, they show something important about us, not the madman. It also shows us what we fear the most: a psychopath unencumbered by morality, impossible to understand, who yet understands us all too well.
While psychos and serial killers have always been the ultimate Other, the movies have always held a special spo
t in their heart for temporary madness, and American audiences have always loved a romantic fling with a body count. In a world where we are all controlled, overcharged, humiliated, and pushed around, the thought of taking to the road to grab all that you truly deserve is a fantasy tied to America’s burnished love of outlaws.
Born out of the road pictures that celebrated the counterculture’s bid for liberation from straight society, Bonnie & Clyde (1967) and Badlands (1973) took notorious murderous rampages and turned them into daring, romantic adventures, reinventing murder as a rite of American passage. Bonnie & Clyde reinvented a plain young wife of a recidivist jailbird and a “rattlesnake” driven to mass murder by repeated rapes in a Texas prison into dreamy matinee idols with the casting of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Arthur Penn’s frenzied film shows the desperate, doomed couple as they saw themselves in their two-year spree, as the only sane people trying to make their glamorous way in a world gone mad.
Terrence Mallick’s Badlands does less to glamorize the fictionalized Stark-weather-Fugate rampage of 1958, and their murders are treated with anything but the cathartic orgasmic energy of Penn or Sam Peckinpah. But we are drawn in and charmed by the meditative vistas of the empty plains and the wistful narration of Sissy Spacek, and by Martin Sheen’s puckish take on beady-eyed creep Stark-weather, and for a moment, we are tricked into identifying with stone-cold killers.
With his usual adroit insight and heavy, heavy stylistic hand, Oliver Stone turned these seductive visions of violence into a massive neon-lit varmint trap. Designed as a bug zapper for controversy, Natural Born Killers didn’t disappoint. Employing every trick in the book to apologize for the explosive rampage of Mickey and Mallory Knox, we must either identify with the ultimate dysfunctional power couple in their feud with the world that made them, or we must walk out before the third act.
