Young Blood

Noting that serial-killer thrillers are favored by young actors and beloved by young moviegoers, Joe Queenan watched several examples of the genre and came to his very own socioanthropological conclusions.

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When a newborn child comes into the world, its overjoyed parents invariably start building castles in the air, dreaming that young Kyle will grow up to be the starting quarterback for the Fighting Irish, or that little Megan has what it takes to become the first female president of the United States. But with the passage of time, these dreams tend to become more realistic as parents start asking themselves whether Kyle has the intellectual firepower to finish high school and whether Megan can make it through 10th grade without getting pregnant. Again.

For some parents, the trepidation is even greater. As American society has become more and more violent, Mom and Dad have had to come to grips with the possibility that their child could grow up to be a serial killer. Statistically speaking, of course, the odds of this happening are only slightly greater than the odds of one's child becoming the first female president of the United States. Clearly it's not something parents need to get all worked up about when they bring their infant home from the hospital. But later, if their toddler appears to be not too tightly wrapped, conscientious parents should be on the lookout for telltale signs that this lovely little boy or girl is already on the way to collaborating with the Grim Reaper. Sure, most disturbed children find socially acceptable channels for their deviancy like the National Rifle Association. But the children who slip through the cracks--those are the ones likely to become the latest incarnation of Hannibal Lecter.

Although Movieline magazine is basically a forum for movie stars to apologize for their last two films and explain away various results of their own disturbed childhoods, it has another, far more sacred mission. This magazine has long recognized that motion pictures are a subliminal expression of the public's most cherished aspirations and deepest fears. In view of the veritable explosion of films about serial killers over the last several years (_Nightwatch, Halloween: H20, Urban Legend, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer_ and Psycho last year alone), many of which involve youthful killers, it is no longer possible to dismiss this trend as a meaningless coincidence.

Therefore, as a public service to our readers, we have devoted our energies to deconstructing serial-killer films and gleaning from them helpful hints about defective child-rearing practices that may turn an otherwise wonderful child into a mass murderer. In doing so, we have identified a library of essential serial-killer films that parents can review at their leisure to ensure that they are doing their jobs as nurturers. Needless to say, a video library such as this would make an excellent shower gift for any mother-to-be who seems to be the kind of person who might raise a serial killer.

Let us begin with the original Scream, a hugely successful movie and thus an important gauge of the national psyche. On first glance, there is a strong temptation to lump this motion picture in with earlier slasher films such as those in the Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series. This is a grievous mistake. In the latter films, the carnage is merely a reflection of American society's profound dislike of teenagers, an animus largely shared by teenagers themselves. The serial killers are ludicrous Hollywood constructs bearing little relation to real life. They are one-dimensional plot devices, humanoid versions of Chucky. Scream, however, introduces us to an entirely different kind of serial killer. Skeet Ulrich does not set out to murder every teenager in town because he is a cardboard celluloid psychopath like Michael, Jason or Freddy.

To the contrary, Ulrich seems like a perfectly likable young man who has become a serial killer because of domestic turmoil for which he personally cannot be held accountable. There are, of course, two serial killers in Scream, and depraved as Ulrich might be, he pales by comparison with the epic dysfunctionality of the other murderer, Matthew Lillard. Unlike Ulrich, who turns to murder because of a family crisis, Lillard frankly confesses that he became a serial killer because of "peer pressure." This, in effect, is the dark subtext of Scream: while some adolescents may understandably become serial killers in response to perceived parental failures, other teens do it simply because they want to be part of the "in" crowd.

What then can concerned parents take away from Scream? On the most obvious level, they should avoid having all but the most necessary extramarital affairs, and they should arrange their trysts in out-of-town venues. More important, parents should teach their children that there are worse things than being viewed as dorks. Children should learn that once they start going along with their peers just so nobody calls them a nerd, it's only a small step from smoking in the boy's room to chugging brewskies behind the football stadium to circle jerks to mass murder.

It is astonishing how often defective parenting turns out to be the explanation for the murderers' depredations in serial-killer films. In the controversial Natural Born Killers, Juliette Lewis becomes a serial killer after she is repeatedly sexually abused by her father, Rodney Dangerfield. The kindred spirit she joins forces with, Woody Harrelson, has become a serial killer in direct response to a childhood trauma in which he saw his father take his own life. What makes Oliver Stone's otherwise incomprehensible film understandable, though, is that then something even worse happened to Harrelson. Specifically, the gutter press has suggested that the young boy may have in fact killed his own father. Small wonder the tyke ultimately chose the path of Satan!

So, the lessons parents can take away from Natural Born Killers are twofold: first, if you're going to commit suicide, don't do it while your kid is watching; and second, if you're intent on committing suicide in front of your kid, leave a note behind so he won't be suspected of having killed you himself.

In Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a young boy's psyche is hopelessly scarred by the conjunction of two completely unrelated events. One day his father brings home two new bikes that he has stolen from work. Alas, the bikes are too big for his two small sons. Rather than go out and steal two smaller bikes, Pop sells them and never replaces them. Some time thereafter, Henry discovers that his mother is a whore. And not a very classy one. Noting that Mom would sometimes bring men up to the house and make him watch their fornicating while forcing him to wear a dress, he seethes: "It ain't what she done, it's how she done it." Well, precisely. A parent can be forgiven for Indian giving and non-domestic prostitution. But start screwing strange men in the presence of your petticoat-clad, bikeless child and you are just asking for trouble.

In Basic Instinct, we discover that the crucial, mind-twisting crisis that turns a happy, healthy child into a lethal predator can sometimes occur far along in the child's development, well beyond the period in which a young mind is thought to be vulnerable to criminal imprints. Serial killer Sharon Stone had, we are to understand, a perfectly normal life until her parents capriciously decided to send her to University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley is, and always has been, a mecca for America's most disturbed young people, precisely the sort of emotionally dysfunctional atmosphere in which a psychologically fragile young woman not yet sure of her career path could easily slip into mass murder without anyone back home being any the wiser. Especially if she's rooming with Jeanne Tripplehorn.

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