Young Blood

In other films, it is clear that too much parental involvement in a child's life, rather than too little, can be the dominant factor in the decision to turn to a life of senseless crime. Consider the issues in Seven. Here Kevin Spacey plays a disturbed individual who is systematically butchering complete strangers who have committed one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Somehow, Spacey's inner child has gotten it into his head that personal failings such as gluttony, greed and sloth are serious offenses.

How did this come about? How is it possible that never once in the child's life did either of his obviously devout parents take him aside and explain that the Seven Deadly Sins are archaic medieval tropes of a highly stylized nature that really bear no relation to contemporary life? And even if these parents failed to communicate the notion that the Seven Deadly Sins are a quaint theoretical concept, where did he get the idea they were capital crimes? How could a child become so estranged from reality that he would fail to understand that you simply cannot kill another human being for sloth? For money, sure. For sex, obviously. For real estate, no problem. But not for sloth. What parents can learn from this film is that a solid grounding in moral principles must include some sense of historical context.

If Scream made the important point that peer pressure can trigger serial killing, parents must nevertheless teach their children to have proper respect for peers who aren't pressuring them. Just because you have a friend who, like Joaquin Phoenix in Clay Pigeons, is a complete idiot, that doesn't mean you have the right to become a serial killer and pin everything on him as a prank. Indeed, the most unsettling thing about this film is the sense that Vince Vaughn has become a serial killer not because he gets any special thrill out of murdering women, but because people like Joaquin Phoenix need to be taken down a peg or two. This sort of catty serial killing is the worst kind of all. Vaughn's parents could have directed their child's latent sadism into some socially acceptable avenue of deviant behavior--a career as a mercenary or as a linebacker in the National Football League, for example--and an awful lot of carnage might have been avoided.

Although on the surface Serial Mom might seem like just another opportunity for John Waters to make fun of heterosexuals, this film, in which Kathleen Turner plays a suburban mother who habitually murders people, actually has a deeper, more disturbing message. It suggests that parents no longer take their status as role models seriously. Most of the movies we have analyzed deal with families where the parents are inadequate at best and more often outright dysfunctional, but at least they're not serial killers. What hope is there for Kathleen Turner's children, reared in an atmosphere where mass murder is not only tolerated but encouraged?

Again and again in the serial-killer film genre, inadequate or unconventional child-rearing practices are the key elements in a young person's decision to choose a life of crime. In Psycho, it is Norman Bates's sense of displacement by his mother's new lover that causes him to go off his rocker. (Though parents might also consider why the Boy Scouts of America offer no merit badge for taxidermy.) In The Vanishing, Jeff Bridges's parents are so inattentive he throws himself off a balcony and later develops an overwhelming desire to bury young women alive. In Kalifornia, a child locked overnight in a slaughterhouse by his mother grows up to be a sledgehammer-wielding serial killer. The list goes on and on. Almost without exception, the responsibility for a child's decision to become a serial killer can be laid directly at the feet of his parents.

Now we turn our attention to how parents who have not raised serial killers can keep their progeny from falling into the hands of the children of those who have. Here, the aforementioned _Kaliforni_a furnishes us with helpful material. This is a movie about an unemployed journalist, played by David Duchovny, who sets out on a trip across America to visit the sites of various serial murders with the intention of writing a hip, postmodern coffee-table book about his experiences.

Early in the film, Duchovny voices the opinion that serial killers are not responsible for their actions: "Talking about the mind of a serial killer, as it relates to culpability, someone who has no ability to distinguish between right and wrong is like a child, and in the eyes of the law he should be treated like a child. He should not be in prison, let alone executed." Duchovny adds that because these people suffer from severe chemical brain imbalances, "the answer is research and treatment under hospital-supervised conditions, not the electric chair." If you've brought your child up to have this kind of laissez-faire attitude toward serial killers and he hasn't become a serial killer, it's very likely he'll become a serial killer's victim. Serial killers are always on the lookout for defenseless new victims, but people who spout this kind of nonsense when dentally challenged swamp trash sporting Confederate flags on their baseball caps are in the general vicinity are simply throwing down the serial-killer welcome mat. Frankly, we here at Movieline are kind of surprised that we have to be telling anybody this stuff.

Attentive readers may be wondering at this point why there has been no mention of police work as a profession that parents might urge their more dubious children to consider going into as a way of curbing antisocial tendencies that might otherwise turn them into serial killers. The reason is simple: in both Jennifer Eight and Kiss the Girls the serial killers are cops. Hence, parents who are afraid their children might become victims of serial killers should be somewhat wary of the police, too. Of course, the likelihood that the police officer your child turns to for help would himself be a serial killer is quite small. A greater possibility is that he or she is sleeping with a serial killer--as Michael Douglas does in Basic Instinct, as Jamie Lee Curtis does in Blue Steel, as Al Pacino thinks he's doing in Sea of Love. Jesus, where are the Internal Affairs guys when you really need them?

More unnerving than those concerns, however, is the idea that the police will be no use at all in protecting your child against serial killers. One message that comes through loud and clear in serial-killer films is this: the cops just aren't doing their job. By the time Holly Hunter finally catches up with the serial killer who's been stalking Sigourney Weaver in Copycat, he's already erased all of Son of Sam's records and is fast closing in on John Wayne Gacy's. Brad Pitt is a complete dud as a cop in Seven, bungling the case so badly an actress as esteemed as Gwyneth Paltrow gets beheaded.

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