A very short history of Serial Killers in films

Many people may be shocked to learn that the history of real life and fictional serial killers in the movies dates back to the early 1940’s – though in those days the villains weren't called ‘serial killers’.  That specific term wasn’t created until the early 1970’s by the FBI.  Back in the 1940’s, film villains that today would easily be called ‘Serial Murderers’ were labeled as psychopaths, psychotics, sex criminals, maniacs or mass killers.

 

It’s believed that the first ‘serial killer’ movie ever made was in 1943, by none other than the original master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock. It was called Shadow of a Doubt and it depicted the story of the Merry Widow Murderer.

In that same year, a movie called Arsenic and Old Lace was released.  It was a light-hearted comedy about two senior citizens who murdered vagrants and buried their bodies in the cellar.  The curious fact was that in the movie they weren’t labelled as psychopaths or insane, but simply as two concerned New Yorkers doing their civic duty by pushing forward the inevitable and perhaps saving the city the cost of the funeral.

Another curious fact that few people realize is that in 1947 Charlie Chaplin released a movie called Monsieur Verdoux, which was a black ‘comedy of murders’ about a Parisian Bluebeard who murdered his wives for their money.  The movie was widely rejected by audiences, and laughed at (not in a comedic way) by the critics, which caused the movie to rapidly fade into obscurity.  Today that same movie is acclaimed as a masterpiece.

Considered at the time, and for many years later, the scariest movie ever made, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho hit the screens in 1960, and it is considered the first genuine modern-day serial killer movie. Few people know that just prior to the film’s release, competitions were held in major cities throughout the world to find couples who were confident enough to view the movie, alone, in a pitch black theatre, at midnight.  If they didn’t come running out of the movie theater screaming and scared senseless, they’d win a prize.  No one volunteered.

Inspired by Psycho, several other ‘serial killer’ movies were released in the 1960’s, including three sequels to Psycho, as well as the disturbing Peeping Tom, and The Boston Strangler, the first movie/documentary of the activities of a real serial killer.

It was only in 1971, with a film titled 10 Rillington Place, that portrayed the true story of the horrors committed in London in the early 50’s by the fiendish serial killer and necrophiliac John Christie, that audiences fainted in the aisles and left the theatres in tears and absolutely terrified.

Despite this, many critics consider that the golden age of serial killer movies started in 1980 with the film Cruising, starting Al Pacino.  After that, several notorious serial murderers were portrayed by various great actors on the silver screen. However, it was only in 1991, with the screen adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel, The Silence of the Lambs, that the term ‘serial killer’ became known all over the world.

The impact of The Silence of The Lambs film was a worldwide phenomenon, and Hannibal Lecter and the term ‘serial killer’ became household words overnight.  With that, the serial killer craze had well and truly arrived, instigating a revolution in fictional crime films and books to satisfy the ever-growing legions of salivating serial killer fans.

I must admit, I was, and still am, one of those fans.

Chris Carter is the author of the Robert Hunter series, The Crucifix Killer, The Executioner, The Night Stalker, The Death Sculptor

Writing with my Sister By Camilla Grebe

How do you write a bestselling psychological crime series? Ask your sister! Camilla Grebe tells us how she and Åsa Träff started out writing Some Kind of Peace.

Maybe it was the time I spent as manager for a small audio-book publishing house in Stockholm; the many hours of reading manuscripts, meeting with authors and attending trade fairs. Maybe it was the fact that the house my sister and I grew up in was filled with books, and not just any books: thrillers and crime novels by famous Swedish writers such as Sjöwall-Wahlöö and Maria Lang. We read them all before we turned twelve. Summers were spent analysing crime plots and discussing whether characters were credible or not.

            But regardless of what actually initiated it, in the summer of 2004, I sent my younger sister Åsa an e-mail saying “I’ve written the first chapter of a crime novel – now you write the second one. Much to my surprise, she complied. Years later, she explained to me: “It wasn’t because I felt I had to obey you, you know, but I discovered I rather enjoyed reading what you had written. Strange, huh?”

            Within weeks it had become our pet project. We kept e-mailing each other chapter after chapter, and every time I received one of Åsa’s e-mails, I opened it with the same anticipation as I would a Christmas gift.

            Now, eight years and three books later, I sometimes miss that very first time. Writing was pure joy, an innocent game between the two of us. No deadlines, no pressure to deliver. Our heroine, the capable, yet so fragile psychiatrist Dr Siri Bergman, grew organically from our co-operation. When we first met her, she was a stranger, even to us. Today, she is like the third sister we never had. We often refer to her when discussing everyday issues, “Siri would have hated that guy. She never could stand that kind of self-conscious man”.

            Famous Swedish poet, Karin Boye, wrote: “Yes, there is meaning in our journey – but it’s the pathway, which is worth our while”. I begin to think that it’s exactly the same thing with writing. The books, fantastic as they may be, sometimes feel secondary to what writing them has done to us. For me and my sister Åsa, writing has brought us very close to each other. And, of course, now we can enjoy the company of our “third sister”, Siri, that we created out of thin air that warm summer eight years ago.

Some Kind of Peace, Camilla and Asa’s beautifully written debut novel featuring Siri Bergman – a psychotherapist who is terrified of the dark – is out now.         

AND THE WINNER IS . . .

Author Craig Robertson introduces the winner of the Crime in the City short story competition.

I was honoured to be asked to judge the Waterstones short story competition, run as part of their Crime in the City series in Glasgow, along with Laura McCormick of Waterstones and Margaret Clayton of The Sunday Post. The first prize was to be a £100 gift voucher for everyone’s favourite bookshop and, more importantly, publication on these Dark Pages.

The standard was reassuringly high and Scottish crime fiction, already more than punching its weight on the world stage, is in safe hands if these entries are anything to go by. The winner was announced at an event in Waterstones in Sauchiehall Street last Friday (15th June)evening.

The shortlist was:

Dan Stewart - Hen Night

Frances Pitt - Out of the Shadow

Elizabeth Adamson - Summer Desires

Peter McCormack - The Ameteur (Runner-up)

Les Wood - Joy (Runner-up)

Elliot Cooper - A Conscious Realisation of Error (Winner)

Elliot Cooper’s winning entry is darkly delicious, effortlessly conveying a real sense of obsession that doesn’t just border on the unhealthy; it invades it with guns blazing and flags flying.

It’s a nasty and deeply disturbing tale but it never loses sight of the beauty that the narrator sees within his distorted vision. Elliot manages to convincingly portray a slowly-increasing mania that you know will lead to somewhere you’d rather not see yet find yourself unable to tear your eyes away from.

Elliot also does a fine job with the narrator’s voice, striking just the right note between method and madness, all the while wrapping the unfolding horrors up within lyrical language that gives this story a dangerously unsettling edge.

Intrigued? Why not read it and judge for yourself . . .

Download Elliot's Story HERE

My Scandinavian Thriller by Jeremy Duns

I’m not jumping on the bandwagon, honestly – I had the idea to write a thriller set in Scandinavia ages ago. Now, finally, I’ve done it. Despite the title, my latest novel, The Moscow Option, is largely set in Åland, an archipelago of around 6,500 small islands between Sweden and Finland. 

I first visited the place a decade ago, with my then-girlfriend, now-wife, who is from there. We arrived in winter, and I was immediately enchanted. The tarmac used for the roads is mixed with a local reddish-pink granite, making for a dramatic landscape of pink ribbons snaking through fields of snow. I slept like a baby in a cabin on a tiny island, drank beer in a wood-fired sauna and ate copious amounts of freshly smoked fish. It was idyllic. One evening, my father-in-law-to-be told me that the water between the archipelago and the mainland sometimes froze over and you could drive across, with makeshift roads marked out along the ice. 

I hadn’t yet written my first novel, but my immediate thought on hearing this was ‘car chase’. What could be more exciting than a car chase across frozen ice? Then I thought: why would it be taking place? Who would be involved? I stored it at the back of my mind. Unfortunately, I didn’t do anything with it, and about a year later the James Bond film Die Another Day featured just such a scene, set in Iceland, so I discarded the thought. 

A few years after that, I moved with my wife and kids to Stockholm, and discovered that every other person in the country was reading a trilogy of crime novels by someone called Stieg Larsson. By now I had written my first novel, a spy thriller about a double agent in Nigeria during the Biafran War, and was planning a follow-up to it set in Italy. Making notes on the ferry to Åland one morning I looked out of the window at the passing islets, most of them uninhabited, and thought ‘Paul Dark has to come here’. The car chase idea was out, but there was something both beautiful and lonely about the scene, and I realized that the place offered a perfect opportunity to recreate the kind of book I loved reading when I was growing up. Alistair Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Jack Higgins, Ken Follett and others wrote thrillers set on remote islands, sometimes in Scandinavia. I also knew from reading the local papers that the wrecks of submarines from the Second World War were sometimes discovered around the archipelago. And what could be more thrillerish than a sunken U-boat? I trawled through newspaper archives to find out more, and one case in particular caught my attention: in 1945, the corpse of a young U-boat captain had been washed ashore. With the help of my father-in-law, I visited the island where his body had been found and interviewed several people, including the son of the local police constable at the time. He remembered the events vividly: then in his teens, his father had even given him the U-boat captain’s pen as a keepsake. Further research uncovered the police report on the incident. Strangely, there was no record of his death in the church where he had been buried. 

I started digging deeper into the history of the place, and even persuaded the coastguard to take me to an island containing one of their abandoned stations, where I was delighted to find a sauna that had been built in 1961, and which provided the inspiration for a key scene in the book. With assistance from my parents-in-law and other locals, I eventually managed to construct a plot that fitted into established history, but which, I hoped, also recreated the excitement I had felt in the fleeting thoughts that had led me on the journey. No hackers, no grumpy detectives, no druggie underworld and no car chase across ice, either … but nearly a decade after that first glint of an idea I finally finished writing my own Scandinavian thriller. I’m happy to be able to join the club.

Jeremy Duns brilliant Cold War thriller The Moscow Option is out now.