William Burns
‘Thinking back to all the details is not at all unpleasant. I rather enjoy it.”—Peter Kürten quoted in Dr. Karl Berg’s The Sadist
While postmodern thinkers may scoff at “grand narratives” and “human nature,” the one topic that seems to link human beings across time and space is a fascination with crime and criminals. The real life what, how, why, and who of criminality have fed pretty much every form of human expression: myths, epic poems, folktales, ballads, songs, poetry, novels, short stories, plays, radio shows, films, TV shows, comic books, journalism. documentaries, videos, web sites, video games, podcasts, ad nauseum. Rather than as a way to facilitate communication, perhaps media was invented to highlight and share accounts of the dark side of human behavior to the thrilled fascination of its audiences whether around a fire or an iPhone. In the 21st century, cable TV, social media, video platforms, and streaming services are overflowing with true crime movies, documentaries, podcasts, and programs based on the most heinous of offenses. Felonies such as fraud, theft, abuse, identity theft, racketeering, bank robbery, drug trafficking, conspiracy, smuggling, and sex crimes have all been fodder for our entertainment, giving us the ability to live vicariously through wicked criminals and then feel satisfied and superior when they are apprehended for their social violations.
The one type of delinquency that is the heavyweight champion of crimes in terms of being at the center of our interest in the transgressive side of human experience is, of course, murder, and in particular, murders perpetrated by the serial killer. While one may be able to understand passionate ferocity spurred on by jealously, greed, or anger, the fantasy-driven inner catalysts for serial killers are harder to discern. This internal obsessional focusing on violently sexualized images that exist only in perpetrators’ damaged psyches that become so overwhelming that they must be actualized in reality has more in common with the power of concentrated will and hyper-visualization exhibited by leaders, geniuses, moguls, and Type-A go-getters more so than calculating monsters. The lurid atrocities and mysterious motives of these depraved malefactors have become perverse commodities bought and sold in all forms of media. Viewers can’t seem to get enough of the cases of Bundy, Dahmer, and Gacy, from their childhoods to their arrests and demises; every aspect of their lives have been autopsied for paying audiences. Although the creation of the term and concept of the serial killer itself is a product of the 1970’s (portrayed in Netflix’s series Mindhunter), the cinematic depiction of the “lust murderer” preceded the FBI Behavioral Unit and Clarice Starling by decades, and can be traced to a single film: Fritz Lang’s 1931 masterpiece M.
Fritz Lang’s M
M focuses on the crimes of Hans Beckert, a child murderer whose unassuming presence helps to lure children into his grasp. Appearing friendly and gentle, Beckert tempts his victims with candy, gifts or just a caring hand to hold, before he escorts them away to their deaths. Beckert’s reign of terror in Berlin is so monstrous that not only are the police searching for him, but the city’s underworld crime lords decide enough is enough, and they must help stop him too. The film is noted to be one of the first police procedural dramas as the film centers on the manhunt for Bekert. Lang tries to be as realistic as possible in his depiction of a forensic approach to law enforcement, utilizing fingerprints, handwriting analysis, and science. M was Lang’s ‘s first sound film. but he doesn’t use sound just for dialogue or background music. Lang creates a musical leitmotif in the form of Edvard Grieg’s classical piece “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” which is continuously whistled by Beckert and adds extra menace and creepiness to his character. Fellow German Richard Wagner actually created the notion that specific uses of music can reflect the inner aspects of characters and that these pieces of music can recur throughout a film, becoming a part of the character’s identity. In M, all Lang has to do is have the tune of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” be heard, and we know that the killer’s presence is there, ready to strike at an unsuspecting, innocent victim.
Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert in M
The key to the film’s success is Peter Lorre’s stunning performance as Hans Beckert. M was Lorre’s first major starring role, and it made his career. The angst and pathos he brings to his portrayal of a child murderer almost convinces the viewer that he shouldn’t be held responsible for his crimes. Lorre’s speech before the underworld “court” that tries him for the murders actually turns the tables on his accusers by arguing that he is uncontrollably compelled to kill while other criminals choose to break the law with free will. Is Lorre’s impassioned monologue genuine, an authentic expression of the uncontrollable torment that rages in his mind, only momentarily silenced by his crimes? Beckert makes a good case for his innocence on the grounds of insanity, but we also have to remember that psychopaths are inveterate liars, deceivers that use all types of subterfuge to get the upper hand on their victims. Hans Beckert is a pragmatic predator and will use any strategy for self-preservation. In an interesting reversal, Beckert does not kill for the usual serial killer motives of achieving power and domination but, rather, because he has no control over his own will (or so he claims) and is a puppet of his own mental demons—he himself just as much a helpless victim as the dead children. Lang doesn’t totally put the blame on Beckert either, as the director suggests that we all should be more vigilant in watching and protecting children; the issue of serial murder not only being a legal or psychological matter, but a community responsibility as well: “No sentence will bring the dead children back. One has to keep closer watch over the children. All of you.”
Lang does not show any acts of violence or the deaths of children on screen. He uses shadows, reflections, and simple images like an empty place setting at a table, a bouncing ball, and an abandoned, deflated balloon stuck in powerlines to suggest the heart-rending murders, of children who will not be coming home ever again. This more psychological approach to portraying crime on film was taken up masterfully by Alfred Hitchcock, with his catalogue of the evil that humans do. It’s the idea that the mind can conjure up much more horrifying and realistic details than any special effects or make-up can—and so suggestion is more powerful for the viewer than the actuality of seeing. And yet, has the continued strategy of keeping a serial killer’s grisly crimes off screen or bowdlerized encouraged the idolization and romanticism of these psychopaths? Would Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram influencers who fawn over how dreamy Ted Bundy is still feel that way if a film or television series accurately represented the frenzied bludgeoning, rape, and strangulation of his victims? How about showing Bundy’s necrophiliac proclivities? Can a brutal sex crime be recreated realistically and directly without exploiting the victim or wallowing in abject prurience?
Michael Goi’s 2011 found footage film Megan is Missing, loosely based on the crimes of Ward Weaver III, was attacked by “family values” watchdog/ratings arbiter Common Sense Media (a nonprofit organization that informs the public on the “suitability” of entertainment and online media for children) and banned by the New Zealand’s Office of Film and Literature Classification because of its brutally realistic depiction of the rape, torture, and murder of two teenage female victims by a serial killer who trolls online chatrooms and social media for his unsuspecting prey. Interestingly, Marc Klass, whose daughter Polly Klass was abducted, raped, and murdered in 1993 and seems to be an unfortunate expert on the subject of crimes against children, praised the film for exactly the reasons it was condemned. Goi made the film as a “wake up call” to parents who aren’t keeping tabs on their children’s virtual lives (shades of Lang’s ending statement in M), and perhaps this is where the backlash really lies: it is parents’ self-absorbed inattention and self-obsessed lack of interest in their own children’s lifestyles that help predators catch their prey. The inability for some parents to admit their own agency in the traumas that affect their children and the egomaniacal basking in the attention and pity they get from the victimization and destruction of their own offspring can be hard truths from which government offices and media consultants feel the need to shield their constituents: truths that seem less important than keeping up the bourgeois façade of omnipresent boogeymen and blameless parents.
Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove
Perhaps this is where Lang and Hitchcock part ways from other directors who have taken on serial killer narratives such as Barry Shear’s suburban ennui horror The Todd Killings (1971), Ulli Lommel’s rapacious The Tenderness of Wolves (1973), John McNaughton’s dead-souled Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) or Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019), probably the most authentic serial killer movie ever made. Ironically, what makes these films so faithful is not only the raw viciousness that is shown unflinchingly, but also the documenting of the mundane, insignificant details of the lives these sociopaths live, truly the evil of banality.
It’s been conjectured that the main character of M was based on real life serial killer Peter Kürten, whose crimes took place in Weimar Germany during the 1920s. Lang denied that he drew from any one case, saying he used a variety of contemporaneous criminals including the pedophilic butcher Fritz Haarmann (the “Vampire of Hanover”) as the basis for Beckert. Lorre’s character is not an exact portrait of either killer: neither Kürten nor Haarman preyed solely upon children; Haarman also attacked teenagers and young men, while Kürten was an equal opportunity predator. It was the accuracy of the psychological aspects of these criminals that Lang was more interested in than the actual crimes and criminals themselves. The fact that Hans Beckert is not just a facsimile of a real serial killer allows Lorre the latitude to bring a pathos to his character that one cannot find in either Kürten or Haarman but can certainly find in their many victims.
Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs
This conglomerate cinematic serial killer can also be seen in Jonathan Demme’s pop culture monster The Silence of the Lambs (1991) as unhinged character Buffalo Bill was constructed by author Thomas Harris from the jagged pieces of real-life murderers Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, and Gary Heidnik. Demme doesn’t attempt to portray his killer with any sympathy, but, rather, uses the combined traits of these serial misogynists to imply that serial killers are not anomalies or outliers in a male dominated society that has historically and traditionally treated women as inferior things, objects of disposable pleasure and ridicule, unworthy of respect, dignity, and equality. Buffalo Bill is a self-loathing misogynist who thinks he wants to be a woman, which only intensifies his hatred of women and himself—his self-debasement validated by the social debasement of women. The Silence of the Lambs suggests that serial killers are the natural products of a dehumanizing patriarchal world, the alpha machismo unfettered, reflecting the predatory male gaze back at its audience.
A few years after the release of M, psychiatrist Dr. Karl Berg published a book about Peter Kürten titled The Sadist (1938). A landmark in profiling and behavioral science, the book was drawn from extensive interviews that Dr. Berg had with Kürten while he awaited his trial and execution. Kürten had no problem discussing his loathsome life and atrocities, reveling in the sexual aspects of his crimes. Kürten’s answers are matter of fact without a hint of shame or remorse; his obsession with blood, violation, and violence is accepted by the perpetrator as an integral part of his psyche: his bloodlust and perverse drives as natural as breathing. The reason why he committed his abominable crimes was simple: murder, savagery, and rape gave him thrilling bliss. Kürten’s vicious fantasies were even fueled by the nascent medium of the movies: “Yes, sometimes I ejaculated …I also liked to go to the cinema where exciting pictures were displayed showing somebody being gripped by the neck or thrown over a cliff.”[1] Looking for the cause or motives of serial offenders often gets bogged down in debates over mitigating physiological, biological, societal, cultural, psychological, and personal factors. Although there has been much debate over whether nature or nurture creates the serial killer, perhaps looking through the problematic lens of the Marquis de Sade can actually shed light on the why of these nihilistic destroyers of life: they only exist to satisfy their selfish appetites, preserve their narcissistic selves, and seek self-gratification at all costs. Nothing else matters. Murder and sexual violation make these offenders feel good; they continue to commit these crimes until they are stopped or the experience no longer satisfies. Arguably the first documented serial killer, Gilles de Rais confessed after killing at least 100 children that “I conceived them [his crimes] from my thoughts, from my daily pleasures, and solely for my own amusement and delectation.”
Lust murderers are said to have extensively immersive fantasy lives, and it is the all-consuming need to manifest these fantasies in “reality” that is the prime mover behind their crimes. Intensely engrossed in their imaginations, composing narratives, visuals, characters, settings, symbols, climaxes, and dénouements, the killer selfishly orchestrates and directs terrifying tableaux, using unsuspecting actors and actresses. Some serial criminals want acknowledgment and a reaction from an “audience,” and save media about their crimes as if they are promotional materials or reviews in “praise” of their actions. The physical actualization of these fantasies and “predilections” are what compel serial killers to perform their deeds, and yet is this also a similar urge that drives artists to realize their works? Is the fascination with serial killers only a provocative subject for writers, directors, and musicians or is there some kind of common ground between them? This is not a twenty-first century question, as Thomas De Quincey pondered this connection in his 1827 essay “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts,” and the performance art collective Coum Transmissions also explored this unsettling correlation in their manifesto “Annihilating Reality” in 1978. Is the single-minded fixation of the artist on her/his/their work similar to the psychopathic monomania of the lust murderer? Do both seek the same fulfillment, validation, and rapture at achieving the objective of bringing their inner visions to external reality? Lang’s M suggests that far from representing cut and dry binaries between sane or insane, born or made, guilt or innocence, or even criminal or fantasist, the serial killer exists in multiple but interconnected realities that overlap (uncomfortably) with mainstream “normality.”
Peter Kürten’s head
Moments before going to the guillotine, Peter Kürten actually asked the executioner if he’d be able to hear the blood gush out of his body in the seconds after being beheaded, as he would find this “the pleasure of all pleasures.” Perhaps Kürten realized, at that moment, that he was his own work of “art,” created for, consummated, and enjoyed by an audience of one.
P.S.—Peter Kürten’s severed head is currently on display at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, a grisly objet d’art that only has any value to a spectator because of the crimes committed by its former owner.
[1] Could Kürten have used one of Lang’s own cinematic creations as stimulation for any of his bestial reveries?
William Burns is an English professor at Suffolk County Community College in New York. His books include The Thrill of Repulsion: Excursions into Horror Culture and Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia from Headpress Books.
