Lang was an extraordinary filmmaker and his CV is littered with classics – the Mabuse films (1922, 1932, 1960), Metropolis (1927), Fury (1936), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Big Heat (1953) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) are merely the best known – but he himself regarded M, his first sound film, as his best, and it’s not hard to see why. Furthermore, it’s not only a piercingly astute psychological study of a man who suffers awful remorse for the crimes his uncontrollable urges force him to commit but also – and just as illuminatingly – an examination of how society might respond to the revelation that it is harbouring, somewhere, a child-killer.
#NERO SERIAL KILLER FULL#
Neither of these films, therefore, is about – in any full sense of the word – a serial killer.
#NERO SERIAL KILLER SERIES#
And while Wiene’s expressionist classic does feature a series of killings, since they’re perpetrated by a somnambulist who’s being directed by a mesmerist it’s primarily concerned with questions of control and consciousness, sanity and responsibility. Though based on a play inspired by the Jack the Ripper killings, Hitchcock’s film is actually centred on is-he-or-isn’t-he? suspense about a man who finally turns out not to be the murderer.
#NERO SERIAL KILLER MOVIE#
Now you might argue that M was not the first great serial-killer movie – after all, it had been preceded not only by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926) but by Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).
That last title, made in 1956 by Fritz Lang and as withering in its depiction of a greedy, sensationalist press (plus ça change!) as it’s acutely aware of the psychological torment of the killer in question, brings to mind the same director’s M, made in 1931 and starring the great Peter Lorre as the child-killer Hans Beckert. Even those who seldom visited the cinema knew about Psycho (1960) and any self-respecting cinephile would probably have been able to list a handful of classics from Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Peeping Tom (1960) and Le Boucher (1970) to 10 Rillington Place (1970), The Boston Strangler (1968) and While the City Sleeps (1956). Yet they’d been with us a very long time.
Whatever, back then, serial killers suddenly felt very fashionable. Such movies still get made, of course, though mercifully the flow did abate somewhat – or perhaps it simply got diverted into books and television. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), Manhunter (1986), White of the Eye (1986), The Silence of the Lambs (1990), Man Bites Dog (1992), Natural Born Killers (1994) and Se7en (1995) are just a few of the most ambitious and best known films to emerge during that period.Īt the time it sometimes felt as if what had previously been a steady trickle of titles was threatening to become a flood, with filmmakers apparently trying to outdo one another in inventing ever more grotesque perversity, gruesome plot twists and gory carnage. Some years ago – we’re talking about the mid-80s to the mid-90s – serial killer movies were, for want of a better phrase, all the rage.
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