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Too Evil to Be True-- and That’s a Good Thing

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CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Question: Which of the following is not the plot of a movie in production or development?

(a) A female investigator hunts a serial killer whose victims are her past boyfriends.

(b) An FBI agent hunts a serial killer who may be his colleague.

(c) An FBI agent hunts a serial killer who may be his identical twin.

(d) A student interviews a serial killer to help him get into Harvard’s psychology program.

(e) An FBI Internet crimes investigator hunts a serial killer who posts his murder scenes on the Web.

Answer: Trick question; they’re all real.

How about the one in which a hypnotist reads a detective’s mind and finds clues about a serial killer seeking immortality? Or the one in which an investigator cracks the case of a serial poisoner in a California medical center?

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Yup. Yup.

Would you believe a serial killer sticking mirror shards into his female victims’ eye sockets so they can “watch” him gradually transform into a supernatural being? That movie, “Red Dragon,” broke October box office records last weekend with a take of $36.5 million.

At a time when you can’t turn on the news without seeing reports about abducted kids and terrorist cells, those in the entertainment community figure we still want to spend our leisure time with murderous creeps. They may be right.

Some movie fans might reasonably have viewed “Red Dragon,” the presumed last Hannibal Lecter thriller, as a sign that the serial-killer tank is just about empty. This is, after all, a “prequel” that’s really a remake of a 16-year-old movie (“Manhunter”) based on Thomas Harris’ first novel in the series (which continued with “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Hannibal”). But, no, just as in the movies themselves, these serial killers won’t die.

“They never cease,” marveled filmmaker John McNaughton, who helped get this current ball rolling with his chilling 1986 cult film “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” “I just read one script where a serial killer comes back from the past or the future or some place, and is back in the habit of carving sevens on the eyeballs of his victims.”

Serial killers certainly exist in our society, but they’re not the raging epidemic that media coverage and entertainment portrayals might have you believe. FBI Special Agent Chase Foster called them “statistically insignificant,” noting that last year about 18,000 homicides were committed in the U.S., while the FBI investigated 43 possible serial killers.

At this point, serial killer movies must be considered their own genre, one that follows a particular set of rules: Some terribly nasty person is killing not-quite-random victims according to a mysterious pattern, and the investigator must get inside the murderer’s head and nab the suspect before the next victim is offered up for slaughter.

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Serial killer movies aren’t new: More than 20 variations on the Jack the Ripper story have been filmed, from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1926 silent “The Lodger” to the Hughes brothers’ “From Hell” last year. What’s changed, aside from such films’ frequency, is their stature.

“It used to be these types of movies were the B movies,” said Mike Zam, who runs New York University’s screenwriting program. “In 1944, Barbara Stanwyck was reluctant to play a killer in ‘Double Indemnity.’ These are the A movies now.”

“The Silence of the Lambs,” from 1991, bestowed respectability on the genre with its Oscars for best picture, actor (Hopkins), actress (Jodie Foster) and director (Jonathan Demme). David Fincher’s darkly stylish “Seven” (1995) was another milestone, a dread-drenched thriller that lured $100 million from North Americans who watched Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt try to nab Kevin Spacey before he could complete a killing cycle based on the deadly sins.

This year, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in “Blood Work” (serial killer murders potential heart donors to aid ailing FBI agent and thus renew rivalry), Bill Paxton directed himself and Matthew McConaughey in “Frailty” (serial killer as byproduct of abusive father) and “feardotcom” went the more traditional exploitation-film route (victims log onto serial-killing Web site).

Denzel Washington has starred in two serial killer movies (“The Bone Collector” with Angelina Jolie, “Virtuosity” with Russell Crowe), as have Freeman and his “Kiss the Girls” co-star Ashley Judd, who currently is filming “Blackout” (the ex-boyfriend killer) with venerable director Philip Kaufman (“The Right Stuff”).

Meanwhile, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner are producing “Suspect Zero,” starring Aaron Eckhart, Carrie-Anne Moss and Ben Kingsley in the story of an FBI agent suspicious of his colleague. And Goran Visnjic of “ER” will be the hypnotist of “Hypnotic.”

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“They’re showy parts often, so they attract big stars, and big stars attract audiences,” Zam said.

Serial killers have been inhabiting the small screen as well. A news release from “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” notes that “this year, episodes will address such important issues as elder abuse, child smuggling, a female serial killer disguised as a prostitute....”

Sharon Lawrence played that murderer in the series’ season premiere, becoming at least the fourth in a string of “SVU” serial killers that included Richard Thomas (John Boy of “The Waltons”) as a multiple murderer crazed by syphilis.

Such characters are compelling, “SVU” executive producer Neil Baer said, “because they represent our deepest, darkest desires and thoughts, and they act them out. They act out things that maybe have crossed people’s minds, and we’re fascinated about what makes them go over the edge, what makes them do it.”

Hopkins used similar reasoning in a recent interview (excerpted last week on the Internet Movie Database www.imdb.com) as he tried to assuage moviegoers’ guilt over enjoying Hannibal Lecter.

“He represents the unspeakable part of ourselves, the fantasy, desires and dark areas of our lives that are slightly unacceptable to us but actually healthy, if only we acknowledge them,” Hopkins said. “Perhaps we’d like to be as daredevil as him. But admiring him doesn’t mean we’re deeply disturbed, sick people. It means that we’re human.”

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One reason for admiring serial killers is that they’re portrayed as super-intelligent and super-methodical, and they strike against authority in a way ordinary mortals can’t. Yet isn’t the idea of an enjoyable serial killer a bit ... off?

“I don’t think that this subject is something that you can or should take real lightly and treat as entertainment per se,” Demme said in an interview. “I would include ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ If you’re going to enter the world of serial killers for entertainment purposes, I think there’s a responsibility to tell the full story, and as far as I can tell, not many of the movies have.”

That full story, Demme noted, usually involves a history of child abuse, which “Lambs” touches on with killer Jame Gumb (Ted Levine) and “Red Dragon” more overtly addresses with Frances Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes), whose background is ignored in “Manhunter.” “Red Dragon” writer Ted Tally and director Brett Ratner also make a point of reminding us just how evil Lecter is.

Yet even though the new movie is more serious-minded and less grotesque than last year’s “Hannibal,” years and years of exposure to real and fictional serial killers have dampened our ability to react with full horror. “In Cold Blood,” the 1967 film adaptation of Truman Capote’s book about two young killers who murder a family, prompted viewers to reflect on the nature of violence more than any of the current movies do.

“There was a stronger sense of moral outrage about these films and about the prevalence of violence in society” with “In Cold Blood,” Penn State University film studies specialist Kevin Hagopian said. “I think that the serial killer films of today take the fact of violence in society as kind of a given.”

“There are serial killers, I guess, in all countries,” Demme said. “We make movies and go get entertained by that instead of as a society really going, ‘[Gasp] what are we going to do about that?’ ”

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Few inside or outside the entertainment industry figure that the production of serial-killer entertainment is tied in any way to the news or national mood. At the same time, not everyone discounts the notion that such movies might have a certain resonance now.

“What do we mean when we say ‘evil’?” asked Robert J. Thompson, Syracuse University media and popular culture professor. “What does the president mean when he says ‘axis of evil’? These questions are very much on our mind right now. These movies, I think, are the way that we dramatically try to feel around what those definitions of evil are and how they relate to the human spirit.”

Yet few serial-killer films portray real figures. First Look Pictures did release the features “Dahmer,” “Ed Gein” and “Ted Bundy” this year, but they have had very limited theatrical lives.

They’re also less graphic than First Look’s fictional serial-killer movie “Hypnotic,” due in March 2003. “That film is indeed gory,” First Look Senior Vice President Bill Bromiley said. “That is a very on-the-edge-of-your-seat thriller.”

McNaughton’s theory is that the country doesn’t want to confront realistic serial killers any more than it wishes to address other looming threats.

“In the aftermath of Sept. 11, I think the shock of it is such that no one is facing it in any way that’s serious,” McNaughton said. “What I see in the scripts I’m seeing is denial, some of the most meaningless and stock stories that one wonders why anyone would bother to tell them. People are hiding from the truth now, whatever it might be. It’s too horrible to face.”

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So the most heinous of real-life criminals ultimately serve the cause, in Bromiley’s words, of “pure escapism.”

“When things are not going well in society or family life, people need entertainment,” he said. “They need to be taken to another world. For some people that means a romantic comedy, and for some people that means going to see a serial killer thriller film.”

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Mark Caro writes about movies for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.

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