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.
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.
Jodie Foster finally figures out who's been killing and skinning young girls all over the Midwest in The Silence of the Lambs, but only succeeds in tracking the killer down by sidling up to a serial cannibal (Anthony Hopkins) who later escapes from prison by exploiting careless police work. Warden Tommy Lee Jones so completely screws things up in Natural Born Killers that his penitentiary gets taken over by deranged prisoners who subsequently tear him to pieces. In The Vanishing, Kiefer Sutherland is forced to mount his own investigation into his girlfriend's disappearance when the police lose interest in the crime. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, the cops can't even do the math to realize, "Hey, we got a serial killer on the loose here!"
You only need to look at Morgan Freeman's performances as refined, cerebral, slow-to-anger detectives in Seven and Kiss the Girls to figure out that you can't count on our major police institutions to save your kid from a psychopath. Heck, Morgan Fairchild would have needed less time to bust these cases wide open.
Finally, it is important for parents concerned about serial killers to teach their children not to provide serial killers with justification for their killing. In this regard, I Know What You Did Last Summer could turn out to be the most valuable item in your Home Serial-Killer Film Library. In this movie, high school heartthrobs Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar and their arrested-development boyfriends accidentally run over a stranger who suddenly looms up in front of their sports car on a dimly lit road. Thinking that he is dead, and not wanting to wreck their college careers, they dump his body in the ocean. Alas, he is not dead, not even close to it, and even though we subsequently learn that he is a cold-blooded murderer who deserved to be dumped into the ocean by amoral teenagers, this does not diminish the enormity of the adolescents' crime. Even though the people who made the movie seem to think that it does.
The seemingly drowned man returns from the dead and understandably starts stalking his murderers, whereupon the kids find themselves in quite a bind. They can't go to the police and tell them what they have done, because that would involve confessing to attempted murder or leaving the scene of a crime or something else that could get them five years in prison or, at the very least, grounding for a week. Also, they know cops are idiots. They have no choice but to gut it out, while they themselves are systematically gutted.
Of all the films in the serial-killer genre, I Know What You Did Last Summer is the one that young parents should pay closest attention to. If you're going to raise your kids to be solid, upstanding citizens who don't heedlessly turn themselves into serial-murder victims, you must instill in them a clearly delineated sense of right and wrong. That means sitting them down at some point and explaining in no uncertain terms that if they ever find themselves on a dark, lonely highway at night and they accidentally run over a complete stranger, they should immediately report it to the proper authorities. Dumping what appears to be a corpse in a nearby ocean is not the way we do things in this society. It's tasteless, it's foolish and it's wrong, but most important of all, it might kill you.
Finally, parents should periodically take out their Home Serial-Killer Library copy of Copycat and fast-forward to the scene where serial-killer expert Sigourney Weaver tells a transfixed audience that 9 out of 10 serial killers are white males, ages 20 to 35. This would seem to suggest that the kids might be better off moving to Fiji or Hokkaido or Sierra Leone. One final helpful hint: if you're a blind cellist who's being stalked by a serial killer the way Uma Thurman is in Jennifer Eight, don't count on a policeman to help you because if he's like Thurman's policeman boyfriend, he'll already be under arrest on suspicion of killing his partner. Since few blind cellists read Movieline, we encourage subscribers who have blind cellist friends to pass along this information.
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Joe Queenan wrote about foreign films for the November '98 issue of Movieline.