This Week at MIS: Serial Killers
Hurdy Gurdy Man vs. Inspector Callahan
Forget about Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers. It has always been the real serial killers who freak me out the most. Son of Sam, The Hillside Strangler, The Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer - these guys are more chilling than any Hollywood creep in a mask.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in Washington, a state that has seemingly had more than its share of serial crimes, particularly when I was young. In the 1970s Ted Bundy took his first victims in the Puget Sound area, including one from the college I would one day attend. In the early ’80s there was The Green River Killer who would officially confess to killing 48 women by the time he was finally captured in 2001, though he claimed the actual number was 71. Between the two men, my childhood was filled with sporadic reminders that the boogeyman really existed.
Of course, as a movie fan, I’ve always loved movies where the real killer isn’t a stoic, invincible killer dispatching horny teenagers. Instead, he’s often a version of the boy next door - Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Helter Skelter and even Spike Lee’s imperfect but underrated Summer of Sam. These are the movies that keep me awake at night.
This week at the Moving Image Source, Thomas Doherty takes a look at our fascination with serial killers in general and one man specifically: The Zodiac. As Doherty points out, this killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970s provided the inspiration for Scorpio in Don Siegel’s iconic Dirty Harry starring Clint Eastwood (recently re-released on DVD and Blu-Ray) and he was also the motivating force in David Fincher’s terrific Zodiac 36 years later. Doherty’s essay rambles at times and feels a little pedantic, but his contrasting of the two related films highlights what I love about them both.
Befitting his 1970s milieu, Dirty Harry was an ambiguous hero. He played fast and loose with the law, but there was never any doubt he stood on the side of the audience. You could count on him. Despite anyone’s protests, he would get his man in the end, one way or another. Harry was a certain man in an uncertain time protecting us from ourselves.
On the other hand, Fincher’s film looks back at that same uncertain time and uses it as an illustration of an altogether more unsettling conclusion: even if we can establish the difference between good and evil, we can’t always do anything about it. Evil can’t be shot through the chest with a .44 magnum. Most distressing of all, in Fincher’s world the monster is among us and he can’t always be identified by a telltale hockey mask.
Filed under: Essays
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- Movie Audiences: Infants in Adult Clothing
- Stan Winston, Makeup and Effects Artist: 1946 - 2008
- Don’t Mind the Staple
- …Or maybe Clint Eastwood is just Dirty Harry again
Funny, I was just listening to Hurdy Gurdy Man in my car coming home. It’s obviously taken on a whole new meaning post-Zodiac. It was always nebulously unsettling; now it’s scary.
Serial killers are fascinating, and I’m looking forward to DePalma’s take on the Boston Strangler.
Also recommended, in a similar vein as Fincher’s Zodiac, is the Joon Bong-ho Memories of Murder.
That’s right, we haven’t talked about the DePalma film ’round these parts though I recall you mentioned it at CCC.
I’ll take a look at Memories of Murder.
Also I love Hurdy Gurdy Man, second only to the more ominous Season of the Witch.
I have also had a long term fascination with serial killers on film. I don’t like the films I just feel compelled to watch them.
Much like yourself, my life has had re-occuring examples of the world truly has evil people in it.. Yet, my brushes have been even closer. The city in which I live has had two of Canada’s most notorious serial killers. Clifford Robert Olson was a pedophile killer that made most kids lives when I was growing up a misery. Parents suddenly wouldn’t allow their kids to go anywhere unattended. The three block walk to school, suddenly became a drive.
In Recent years Robert William Pickten has been alleged to have killed 40+ women. The pig farm where he disposed of his victims is very close to where I live, and the Elementary school I attended was adjacent to the farm. The investigation got so large that even people that were frequently seen near the site, had DNA taken. (myself included…did I mention I live really close!).
Serials killers leave a weird knot in my stomach like no other kind of film.
I enjoy your site, always an interesting read.
SEASON OF THE WITCH is the bomb.
*raises hand* Donovan fan here…
As I recall, it was used to great effect in the ending of TO DIE FOR.
If you’ve seen it, it needs no explanation whatsoever…
Colleen. Thanks, and wow, your brush with serial killers certainly trumps mine. That’s creepy. But that’s pricisely what’s so scary about them. They’re real and they could be anywhere. Shiver.
Miranda, I haven’t seen To Die For in a decade. Thanks for reminding me of it.
I’m also looking forward to De Palma’s Boston Strangler movie. Although I’m a big fan of the 1968 Richard Fleischer film, so I’ll be burdening the film with a quite high measuring stick.
Wow, I’ve never seen the Fleischer. Thanks for the tip.
They had it a couple months ago at the New Beverly and I was bummed that I missed it. Allegedly it’s one of Tony Curtis’s best performances.
Yeah, Evan and I discussed the Fleischer film from 1968 over at CCC in relation to the DePalma project. Very good movie, with strong performances from Tony Curtis as DeSalvo, Henry Fonda and George Kennedy. A solid procedural with many blind alleys. Fincher must have seen it before he made Zodiac.
You people have seen everything.
I’ve seen The Boston Strangler as well - a very long time ago on late night TV. I couldn’t even tell you what I thought of it as I was only a teenager then and, though I always loved film passionately, didn’t have the same critical skills that I do now.
I found it not so much unbearably frightening as disturbing. Of course, the fact that this is based on case histories and a man that actually lived and perpetrated these horrific crimes is chill inducing in the extreme.
The stuff that I read after the fact about Tony Curtis’ decision to play the part was very interesting. The cultural climate that emcompassed 1968 (when TBS was released) is sure as hell not what we have now.
You know how ANTHONY HOPKINS was almost effectively lionized for playing Hannibal Lecter in SOTL? (Don’t get me wrong. He is one of my favourite actors performing in one of my all time favourite movies, playing one of my all time favourite characters. He is brilliant in that film…and he deserves every single solitary bit of credit for that.) That wouldn’t have happened if SOTL had been made 25 years earlier.
Back then, playing a murderer/rapist/serial killer could often effectively end your career. Tony took on a very big risk playing DeSalvo. I think a lot of people tried to talk him out of it. But by then his career had gone into such a decline that I think he felt that it was worth it in the end. He really had nothing to lose at that particular point.
But I did hear that he was extremely disappointed that he never got an Oscar nod for that.
I’ve always wondered about our general fascination with serial killers in the media and entertainment, and to a larger extent the general fascination with crime on TV and in print. As a society, we are intrigued with the tawdry and the terrifying. We wonder about why and how these things happen and in general I think, we share a barely-subconscious sense of relief that these horrible things happened to someone else.
Craig, you could easily apply that last paragraph of your post regarding evil as a cautionary statement towards the war on terror. I don’t think Fincher is overtly commenting on that specific aspect of our modern world with Zodiac, but I have a feeling it’s in there somewhere, under the surface of his thinking. I found it interesting that the procedural aspect of Zodiac goes to great pains to point how difficult it is to identify and isolate evil and how destructive that search is.
Joel, I was thinking exactly the same thing. Even if you don’t want to get all political about it, I think Fincher is very much using the 70s as a mirror for the way things are today. There’s a general sense of helplessness and fear.