Criminologist Reviews Serial Killers From Movies & TV | Vanity Fair

i ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti i've never encountered a serial killer who would behave quite so much in that pantomimic way i have encountered serial killers who've tried to scare me but i wouldn't be scared by anthony hopkins i'd have laughed frankly if he'd told me about fava beans and a nice chaonte hi my name is david wilson i research write about and work with people who've committed violent crimes specifically murder and serial murder today we're going to be breaking down clips from tv shows and movies about serial killers this scene is from zodiac don't get up i want her to tie you up okay what's interesting about this clip is that you begin to see one of the basic original fbi binary classifications that serial killers are organized or they're disorganized by organized we simply mean that the serial killer brings with him those things which he's going to need to incapacitate his victims so in this scene the zodiac killer brings with him rope he's wearing gloves he's masked usually we would also say that if you're an organized serial killer that will imply for example that you're employed that you've got a higher intelligence that you're sexually competent that you're able to drive a car the other aspects of organization that we see in this particular clip is just how much control the serial killer has over his victims serial murder as a phenomenon in my experience always starts from a sexual fantasy and i think we've got some of that sexual fantasy in this particular clip around bondage being powerful being in control not only is he masked and wearing gloves he's also wearing black clothing he's also got a symbol on his black clothes all of these things are about instilling fear in his victims it's also about how he can make his fantasy real he's fantasized about what he's going to do for a very long period of time i always say that nobody wakes up overnight and decides that they're going to be a serial killer a serial killer is a long time in the making this is simply a way that he now wants to make the fantasy become real once they've engaged in the fantasy once or twice it's no longer fantastic and therefore the sorts of things they'll do within the crime scene will become more bizarre more exaggerated more extreme it's interesting that he also brings a gun but he chooses not to use the gun initially he ties his victims up he's going to threaten them with the knife this is the difference between those serial killers who are act focused and those serial killers who are process focused the act focused serial killer simply wants to kill his victims end of bang they're dead the process focused serial killer is interested in extending the length of time that he has with his victims he wants to tie them up he wants to see the fear that they're experiencing he wants certain words to be spoken he wants them to plead for their lives before he kills them that actually makes him feel sexually powerful sexually in control to be the person that he wants to be get on your stomach so i can tell your feet we hear the flatness in the zodiac killer's voice i'm taking your car and going to mexico that is often characteristic of an underlying personality trait called psychopathy and inability to show empathy to show sympathy to walk in another person's shoes it gets really cold out here at night we could freeze of course we see the male victim in the scene trying to engage in conversation in my experience of working with uh serial murderers they are simply not interested in that kind of rapport they don't want to see you as being another human being usually they're psychopaths and therefore they can't walk in your shoes they don't care about your suffering in fact your suffering is actually what they're seeking to do next up is a fictional serial killer called dexter your mind now should do exactly as i say dexter fits a type of serial killer called the mission orientated serial killer he's a serial killer who's on a mission to rid the world of other serial killers and that's very typical of a number of actual serial killers criminologically me i definitely understand see i can't help myself either children i could never do that not like you never ever kids he establishes very quickly that there's some kind of moral hierarchy in the phenomenon of serial murder of course there's no such thing as a moral serial killer everybody who takes another person's life is by the very nature of the fact immoral in dexter we've got the ultimate organized serial murderer he has a garage that he's able to control his victim ultimately he's going to inject his victim so that he becomes paralyzed dexter has a very elaborate mo and a very unique signature mo stands for modus operandi it is the means by which the serial killer or the murderer kills the mo would change because of how the victim might react whilst the signature is a particular way that a killer will leave the crime scene that will be unique to that particular individual dexter is somebody who's going to torture and the context for that torture is almost medicalised he's usually doing poisons he's in a particular medical room his kill room that kind of medicalized signature is not that common in my experience with one particular caveat because of course a significant number of health care professionals have been serial killers this next clip is one that is a particular favorite of mine the silence of the lambs you're one of jack crawford's aren't you i am yes may i see your credentials certainly hannibal lecter does something which is very true to life in my experience when i'm interviewing murderers they're only prepared to talk to me once they've got my cv they love knowing that they're being interviewed by the top bloke you use of your skin cream and sometimes you wear lead at all but not today i've never had a serial killer mention my aftershave but that seducing behavior is something that i have to manage on a regular basis so for example i had to speak on the telephone to an infamous serial killer who's in jail he was sometimes known as the bikini killer or the serpent he said you look much younger than your 64 years it was the very first thing that he said it just shouted out as psychopathy the next scene is from seven by david fincher this was found on the wall behind the refrigerator the obesity emergency longest way and hard that out of hell leads up to light it's from milton paradise lost some serial killers do leave evidence clues if you want to call them clues and often in my implied work i'm asked is that because they want to be caught well that's not why the clues are left that's not why the evidence is left at all it's usually simply by the end of their killing cycle they're operating in an entirely parallel moral universe that is different to the moral universe that you and i inhabit that they simply don't understand that what they're doing is so bizarre it's so extraordinary that of course these kinds of things left at the crime scene are going to be able to be harvested to identify who the killer is however there are some serial killers who do want to be caught ultimately a very small number because of course they want to stand out they want to be seen as extraordinary and therefore they can't be seen as extraordinary if they don't get caught have you ever seen anything like this what we have in seven is the sense in which the serial killer is super intelligent is a super predator and again this is playing on one of the stereotypes that the media have about serial killers that they will be super intelligent and trying to out fox almost as if they were playing a game of chess with the law enforcement the other thing about seven that i think is interesting spoiler alert if you haven't seen seven but the head of one of the chief characters in the movie is cut off serial murderers will often take body parts as trophies and we tend to call that in my world overkill the killer is using much greater violence than is necessary to achieve what it is that he wants to achieve which is to affect the kill of his victim i saw you with the box what was in the box when i first started out in my professional world i had only ever encountered one man who had beheaded his victim of late i've seen overkill during the pandemic become much more common i now encounter overkill and mutilation all the time this next scene is from alfred hitchcock's extraordinary movie psycho is anyone at home no the whole is somebody sitting up in the window no no no there isn't oh sure take a look oh that that must be my mother she's she's an an evil and a bullet uh it's a it's practically like living alone oh i see and norman bates anthony perkins is wonderful as a particular type or a trope of what we've come to understand as being the serial killer somebody who is transsexual transvestite he wants to dress up as his mother what hitchcock gets wrong is the sense in which it's these transgressive sexual identities that is the motivating force behind serial murder and of course he's also wanting to present norman bates as effectively psychotic i wouldn't necessarily describe norman bates as a psychopath he probably does have some psychopathic traits as a character i would see him as having some sort of psychosis in other words he's hearing voices having visions he's operating in an unreal world if norman bates had existed in reality norman bates would have behaved so bizarrely so aberrantly that he would have been caught very quickly because he would have stood out of course there's another media trope being used here which is that the detective is actually interviewing the serial killer but doesn't realize but might suspect that he's interviewing the serial killer that really doesn't happen in real life although a phenomenon that does occur on a regular basis is that often murderers will return to where they've committed murder sometimes they just simply uh like the risk-taking that they are engaging with which is one of the reasons why often photographs are taken of the crime scene because there might be the perpetrator within that photograph let's just say for the years just for the sake of argument that she wanted you to uh gallantly protect her you'd know that you were being used that uh you wouldn't be made a fool up would you but i'm not a fool well and i'm not capable of being fooled not even by a woman in my real work with people who've committed serial murder i often say that they're beta males trying to become alpha males they are often losers and we get that sense of the loser i think in norman bates this is somebody who doesn't seem to be able to be competent in any way that one would expect of an adult man and therefore for me bates spits that pattern that i see a lot of my applied work that the serial killer far from being a super predator is often just simply a loser our next clip is from the film ma played by octavia spencer i can feel those big doe eyes watching me maggie you are something else that much diazepam can knock out a great dane for five hours ma really is just simply a genre hollywood movie about a serial murder but what's really interesting about it is that we tend to think of serial murders as white professional men as super predators and rarely do we get a character portrayed who is of a different gender and of a different ethnicity and yet the reality of serial murder in the united states is that some 20 of serial murderers will be women i got us a beer pong table and a keg of bud light is on ice the other thing though about ma as a character is that she's desperate to be liked she wants to fit in but of course in fitting in she's also secretly desperate to stand out and that's actually got a kernel of truth it seems to me they want to be seen as being like you and me but secretly they want to also be different they want to stand out from you and me because they want to be seen as somehow special mars victim group of course are also students we tend not to see students as being particularly vulnerable in reality to serial murder if a serial killer was to start to attack a group who had social capital and who certainly had parents who are likely to have social capital that serial killer will by and large be caught much more quickly than serial killers that would target sex workers the homeless the elderly this next clip is from american psycho howard is bateman patrick bateman you're my lawyer so i think you should know i've killed a lot of people some of my girls in an apartment uptown uh some homeless people maybe five or ten um an nyu girl i meant in central park i left her in a parking lot behind some donut shop i killed bethany my old girlfriend with a nail gun i've never encountered a white caller investment banker as a serial killer they will often be delivery drivers taxi drivers they will often have a background in law enforcement i've encountered several white investment bankers who undoubtedly were psychopaths and if i was to encounter a patrick bateman in real life i would just simply find him very fetishistic he is wearing particular clothes he has a particular look he's very surface he's very shiny he's no deep emotion i would think of him as a psychopath and frankly i try and avoid them i don't want to leave anything out here i guess i've killed maybe 20 people maybe 40 i have encountered serial killers in real life who just simply couldn't remember certainly wouldn't remember the names of their victims certainly wouldn't remember what they did with their victims and that's partly because often by the stage that they have been arrested they have been killing for such a long period of time and so regularly that they literally don't remember with one or two serial killers that were prepared to talk about the murders that they committed i felt that they were talking to me about them because they were wanting to relive the moment that they took another person's life and i merely became therefore a vehicle for them to relive their fantasy and you see a sense of joy in this particular characterization of patrick bateman you know he moves from being remorseful to one in which he's boastful i killed paul allen with an axe in the face his body is dissolving in a bathtub in hell's kitchen bateman ends this clip by having this sort of insight i mean i guess i'm a pretty sick guy he's a pretty sick guy which of course he is but by and large i've never had serial killers talk about themselves in that derogatory way i've had serial killers we've thought of themselves as supermen as extraordinary human beings and you think my gosh do they have no insight at all about what they've done and the answer to that question is of course they have no insight into what they've done or they wouldn't have done it in the first place this next clip is from no country for old men howdy what's this about step out of that car please sir what is that i need you to step out of the car sir what is that for will you hold still please we're dealing really with a characterization of the serial killer that isn't really at all based on reality this is the serial killer as the super predator the bogeyman what is accurate about the movie is the sense in which lots of serial killers who are able to repeatedly kill without being caught have to be geographically transient have to be mobile are often engaged in occupations which allows them to be in different places at different times legitimately you see instrumental reasons being expressed by javier bardem's character and also psychological reasons being shown he simply wants to steal the car that's the instrumental whereas the psychological will be when he's playing cat and mouse with the gas station owner he's simply expressing his power he's simply expressing his control what's the most you ever lost on a coin toss sir the most you ever lost and according to us but here's the downside that i think the coen brothers get completely wrong if somebody like javier bardum's character existed in real life he wouldn't need to kill because he's so powerful and in control anyway he'd be running multinational corporations he'd be running for president he doesn't need to get his kicks through killing people in gas stations it just doesn't hold water for me this next clip is from the show riverdale can any of you guess what the murderers all have in common nothing isn't that kind of the point actually they all have one thing in common a specific set of genes they discovered that you have the maoa and the cdh13 let's get rid of immediately the idea there's a serial killer gene it's an attractive idea and of course it's cropped up repeatedly in our history and so we have to nail that one on the head now before i start filling in all the details any guesses on which one of these men is the murderer it's the third man the idea that there could be somebody who is going to be able to simply look at photographs or walk down the street and identify who the serial killer is is just complete nonsense i hope that isn't too disappointing to you but it is complete and utter nonsense serial killers are banal and ordinary serial killers are never spectacular they're always too human if the serial killer really wants to be effective they've got to fit in because if they stand out they're not going to be able to get access to the people that they want to kill this next clip is from copycat 9 out of 10 serial killers are white males aged 20 to 35 just like these i love this movie because it both plays on some of the cliches that i've been talking about but it also provides just enough authentic information to be credible the fbi estimates that there could be as many as 35 serial killers cruising for victims even as i speak the truth is well the fbi has said that they're between 25 to 50 active serial killers what sigourney weaver's character doesn't say is that they will only kill about 1 of all the murder victims in the united states she makes it sound as if there are lots of serial killers killing lots of victims the act of killing makes him feel intensely alive what he feels next is not guilt but disappointment it was not as wonderful as he'd hoped maybe next time it would be perfect the other thing that she captures that seems to me to be absolutely authentic is what the serial killer is getting from having killed and how he probably feels disappointment after killing because he wants to kill again because it's the moment of killing that he seeks that scene is so like scenes from my own life whereby i've had to address public audiences and i've had to have security at those lectures because i've had to deal with some pretty bizarre things this next clip is from the tv series mind hunter when we see the real serial killer ed kemper being interviewed you see bill knew a week before she died i was gonna kill her she went out to a party she got sauced she came home alone i asked her how her evening went she just looked at me she said for seven years she said i haven't had sex with a man because of you my murderous son [Music] so i got a claw hammer and i beat her to death i cut her head off and i humiliated her i said there now you've had sex it is true that wrestler and douglas did interview 36 convicted serial killers which was the beginning of the fbi's understanding about serial murderers and one of the serial murderers that they did interview was ed kemper and of course what we see portrayed there is a very chilling picture of the kinds of things that he did and he did indeed kill his mother in the way that he was describing and he did indeed behead her and he did indeed have sex with her decapitated body so there's a lot going on here that's completely and utterly accurate even as a child i had kind of a rich fantasy life you had fantasies of what real women oh yeah and my mother yelled and screamed at me tell me i was sick the one thing that seems to connect all of the serial murders is that there is an underlying sexual fantasy that is a seed that then grows and grows and grows until that particular individual serial killer wants to make that fantasy real and why they choose to do that will be specific and unique to that individual in this modern society what do we do with the ed kempers of the world death by torture of course kemper requested the death penalty lots of serial killers i've worked with can be quite moral in other aspects of their life they will have standards about behavior that they will insist that i should have about my life one serial killer would constantly correct my grammar or my punctuation and letters that i'd sent to them did your mother humiliate you [Music] and what's interesting about this series is that it's also about that other trope that we see in a lot of hollywood movies that people like me would try and enter the mind of a serial killer i am not interested in what motivates a serial killer i am much more interested in who it is the serial killer is able to kill if we concentrated our attention on the groups that serial killers constantly target we would do a lot more to reduce the incidence of serial murder in our cultures as opposed to any number of offender profilers who claim that they can enter the mind of a serial killer if you really want to do something to reduce the incidence of serial murder in our culture let's challenge homophobia let's have a grown-up debate about how we please those young men and young women who sell sexual services and above all let's try and work out why the elderly are so vulnerable in our culture because they don't have a voice and have no power thank you so much for watching and thank you vanity fair for inviting me

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Keywords: american psycho, criminologist, criminologist review, criminologist reviews, criminologist reviews serial killers, criminology, dexter, expert review, experts review, hannibal lecter, mindhunter, review, reviews, reviews serial killers, serial killer, serial killer fact check, serial killer movies, serial killer review, serial killers, serial killers review, silence of the lambs, true crime, vanity fair, vanity fair review, vanity fair reviews, zodiac killer

Id: 29n2bv7F6uc

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021