ABSTRACT
Serial killing exerts a peculiar cultural fascination. Despite its marginality as a cause of harm – for the number of individuals who will die at the hands of a serial killer is minutely proportional to the numbers who will die from heart disease or from lack of access to or knowledge about health screening programmes – representations of the serial killer allow certain fears and anxieties to be embodied. While widespread social problems such as poverty and neglect are hard to depict in assimilable ways, the violence of the serial killer ‘acts as a substitute and a shield for a situation so incomprehensible and threatening it must be disavowed’ (Taubin 1996: 16). The serial killer thus has an indexical value that is not commensurate with the statistical incidence of serial killing as a cause of death. And unlike films (such as Romper Stomper, Do The Right Thing, Clockers and La Haine) which imply that the threatening impact of criminal behaviour upon society is or can be ghettoized within a specific location, the serial killer film locates criminality in any suburb, any neighbourhood, dispersing the threat of victimization across all the boundaries of crime control. In addition to this spatially generalized threat, serial killers are represented as selecting their victims according to an arbitrary and unpredictable index – victims may be selected for reasons as arbitrary as checking into the ‘wrong’ motel or happening to be a size 14 in clothes. If, as is axiomatic in criminology and criminal justice, crime generates fear, then representations of the serial killer are significant for showing the fear that results in an encounter with extremity, and films dealing with serial killing show how the anxiety generated by that encounter is put on display, interrogated, and, sometimes, resolved.
