Psycho Paths

Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction

Philip L. Simpson

October 2000

ISBN 0-8093-2328-1 | cloth | $52.00s

ISBN 0-8093-2329-X | paper | $19.95t

256 pages | 6 x 9

Film Studies, Literature, Cultural Studies

"Simpson provides us with an original discussion of a variety of serial killers texts, and a close examination of their functions within the genre.”

—Richard Tithecott, author of Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer  

“Tracking the best known U.S. serial killer novels and films of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, Simpson places the genre in the long Gothic tradition but focuses on the qualities associated with serial killers. He finds that serial killer narratives reflect some of the movements of those decades in the culture: feminism, the romance genre, and the new right. In this world, the malevolent lurks in the everyday. . . . The best introduction for the scholar beginning study of this narrow genre. . .”

—Choice

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. 

Philip L. Simpson is an assistant professor of communications and humanities at the Palm Bay campus of Brevard Community College, Palm Bay Florida.

Paper

Cloth