Sympathy for the Devils: Are Movie-Psychos Changing for the Better?, HeyUGuys
Violence and psychopathy are meant to be married. The labels “serial killer”, “murderer”, and “psycho” immediately conjure up the images of grotesque lunatics with (often literally) an axe to grind. Horror and exploitation movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre covered this beautifully – showing every bone, every hair, every flap of skin; concluding with a man in a mask dancing around with a rusty chainsaw. Torture Porn and Splatter Films entered the 21st century with a franchise interest for drowning the screen in blood and guts – as in the Saw franchise, which in its (as of last year) eight installations developed many ludicrous ways of a psycho ripping people, and their bodies, apart.
But in recent psycho-dramas, such a gory attitude to constructing serial killers isn’t such a common tact. Like the infamous ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, filmmakers appear to be panning away from extreme violence and focusing on the killers as people instead of monsters. There have been movie-psychos to sympathise with in the past: think of Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange, or Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, or the voyeuristic Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom (for which director Michael Powell’s career was cut brutally short). But the tendency, and the fun, is in alienating these people instead of getting to know them. And in the past 12 months, we haven’t seen psychos and serial killers in quite this vein.
