Television: "Your inner monologue is the conscience of America."

Entertainment Weekly has a profile of Peter Weller, focusing mainly on his turn in latest season of Dexter. In it, readers discover that Robocop is, among other things, a UCLA PhD candidate in Renaissance Studies. I kid you not. This odd story leads to this interesting bit:

"I'm finishing my Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance history. I just passed my oral exam. One of the guys on my committee is from Cambridge, a professor, Peter Stacey — he’s a genius. He’s also a Dexter freak. I brought him to the Dexter set, and he had this great take on the character. He said, 'You know who Dexter is? If you watched Dexter from outside the US, you'd see immediately. He's the history of America: a child born in blood, condemned to tyrannize — like a child — but possessed with the voice of its Founding Father, pointing him in the right direction. He's the ultimate vigilante. A creation like Dexter sees itself as the world's police force except it has a conscience, which is the voting public.' Stacey told Michael C. Hall, 'Your inner monologue is the conscience of America.'"

Hmmm.

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True Crime: America's first serial killer?

Since his starring role in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, H. H. Holmes, 1861 to 1896, has widely been acknowledged as America's first serial killer. Holmes' bizarre method of dispatching his victims - through the use of a nightmarish gas chamber and abattoir that seemed, at once, to be an organic outgrowth and a demented satire of the slaughter houses of his adopted Chicago home - carries with it the stamp of modernity: His death chamber was, in essence, a human processing plant, a mechanical expression of homicidal urges that seems to presage the genocidal madness of that threatened to entirely engulf the century to come.

But a new claim by author Jack El-Hai - author of the definitive biography of the inventor of the frontal lobotomy - suggests that Holmes might not have been America's first serial killer. According to El-Hai, that title belongs to the obscure Harry Hayward (note to parents, don't give your kid all-H initials).

Hayward first came to the attention of El-Hai when the author was writing an account of the Catherine "Kitty" Ging case. Ging was a dressmaker in Minneapolis. She began dating Hayward in the early 1890s. Hayward took out an insurance policy on Ging and, in December of 1894, with the help of an accomplice, killed Kitty Ging. The accomplice put a .38 slug in her head.

His capture and convict was a pretty straight forward affair. His accomplice was caught right away and, under police questioning, he gave Hayward up. Hayward was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was the last person to get the death penalty in Minnesota. After him, the state abolished capital punishment.

End of story. But something about Hayward stuck with El-Hai. He couldn't get over the murderer's casual sociopathy. From El-Hai:

He never expressed remorse; he laughed over Ging’s fate and disparaged her as a stingy woman unwilling to keep his wallet fat. He joked and kidded his way to the gallows. Only the noose silenced him. . . Hayward’s brutality seems so out of place in 19th-century Minneapolis, so modern. I couldn’t shake off the memory of the killer’s calm, confident face. He seemed extraordinarily manipulative, cold-hearted, and dangerous.

Still, El-Hai could never find any evidence that Hayward was anything other than a desperate kept man who couldn't squeeze his lady for any more dough. Until a random Google Books search showed that Google's indiscriminate scanning of public domain books had digitized an extremely rare book from 1896: Harry Hayward's last recorded confession.

For the rest of the story, check out El-Hai's article at the Minnesota Monthly: The Murderer that Haunts Me.

And don't forget . . .

Submit a list of traits you think make a slasher flick as part of THE GREAT SLASHER RESEARCH PROJECT OF '10: the project so important, it appears in all-caps sometimes. Not all the time though, 'cause that's insanely annoying. Happy slashin'.

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Books: Reheated leftovers?

Dexter is Delicious, the fifth installment in Jeff Lindsay's series about a serial killer who hunts killers, pits the titular protag against a Goth cult of cannibals who have kidnapped, and are threatening to make long pig out of, two school-aged girls from one of Miami's elite private academies. This new installment is a solid entry in the series, but the strain of developing Dexter - a character who is defined primarily by the twin poles of his lack of emotion and his Big Secret - is starting to put visible strain on the narrative.

Ironically, Dex's third outing, widely panned for its profoundly regrettable side-trip into supernaturalism, may have turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to the series. At this point, Lindsay would have to turn out a pretty dismal book to not land a title above the bar of "worst Dexter ever." Though that's probably unnecessarily harsh: Dexter is Delicious contains all the elements that have made Lindsay's series an unlikely hit and there's nothing to suggest that Lindsay phoned it in or that it won't be happily welcomed by series fans. To clarify the television continuity from the novel series - the two are, at this point, almost entirely unrelated - the new novel finds Dexter the paterfamilias of a curiously functional/dysfunctional family. He's married Rita and become the stepfather of Aster and Cody: both of whom are larval stage serial killers, brutalized by the behavior of their biological father and looking to Dexter to pass along the vigilante code he lives by. (It is a curious conceit of the series that being a serial killer is sort of like being a mutant in the Marvel sense of the term: it gives you heightened senses, allows you to detect other serial killers, and other odd powers.) Dex's sister, a coworker at the Miami PD who is in the know about his extracurricular activities, increasingly relies on Dexter's extralegal capacities. And, in and odd twist, Dexter's biological brother, the baddy from the first book in the series, is back to make amends and help train Aster and Cody in the ways of serial murder. Only Rita, Dexter's wife, and the rest of his coworkers don't know (and a couple of the latter suspect something's up). All of this is complicated by the fact that Dex, after the birth of his first child, has sworn off the whole serial killer thing.

Fans of the Dexter series will find plenty to like here. Dexter's bemusedly sarcastic narrative is awkwardly charming. Lindsay transforms his baddies from pathetic to creepy with pleasing proficiency. The absurdist sensibility that situates the Dexter series firmly in crime-comedy subgenre of Florida crime writing is on fully display. The plotting of the actually mystery is straight-forawrd in that post-Spillane the-answer-happens-to-the-protag way.

If it delivers on the goods, why does the new Dex leave me feeling indifferent? The problems stem from the increasing inefficiency of the series. I don't want to accuse Lindsay of taking cues from the Showtimes series, but Lindsay has seemingly chosen to develop his character on the same track: making the struggle between Dexter's homicidal impulses and his role as family man the nexus of the series drama. The television series, which has never fully bought into the idea of Dex's psychopathy and has always emphasized the development of character, has made this the center of their show. By contrast, Dexter's unredeemed psychopathy was a strength of book series. It primary benefit was that it helped situate Dex, the narrator, in narrative position of the classic detective. Because Dexter didn't care about his past or his future, he behaved in the oddly impersonal and eccentric manner of any classic detective. Like Poirot or Nero Wolfe, he existed mainly to get involved in mysteries and solve them. There was, despite the bizarre context, a classicism to the early Dexter books that was a real treat for the reader. This narrative efficiency has become increasingly lost as the narrative has soap-operaed out. Second, the gleeful nihilism of the series has been replaced with a drive to build an inner emotional life for the main character. One of the chief pleasures of the early series was Dexter's chipper, yet inhuman voice. This was a character who, when strapped to a vivisection table, would express a giddy curiosity about what what about to happen to him. His inhumanity was the primary source of the early books' satire: the distance Dexter felt from his fellow humans made them charmingly absurd. With the evolution of Dexter, suburban daddy, this voice has gone from absurdist to petty. Dex no longer marvels at the seemingly suicidal antics of Miami drivers. Instead, he worries about speeders threatening his child. He's gone from amoral dissector (literally and figuratively) to a walking "Baby on Board" sticker. Such a development is not welcome.

You got sympathize with Lindsay: he has not made it easy on himself. When the televised Dexter threatened to overshadow him, he made a bold move in a direction that series wouldn't ponder. And he got spanked for it. Unfortunately, to go in the direction of the TV series is to suck the petrol right out of what made the series great, its weirdly amoral ability to romp through the worst behavior humans could offer up. This latest book is a perfectly serviceable holding maneuver, but it leaves me feeling inert. The future of the series depends on recapturing some of that old magic.

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True Crime: "I still have 83 more women to kill."

The francophone Afrik News has a story on the proliferation of serial killers across Africa and the unique problems they pose to nations that often lack the investigative and communication infrastructures to identify, track, and capture such criminals. Drawing extensively from the work of Stéphane Bourgoin, an expert on African serial killers, the article paints a nightmarish portrait of these predators. Along with the police organization and data sharing issues that would hound detectives and researchers in any country, the article points out the way in which local cultural traditions can, for lack of a better word, normalize serial killing in some African communities. From the article:

And while these rampant murders are are sometimes not linked to tradition, most of them are. In southern Africa, sangomas [midwives, healers and soothsayers] call on hired killers who, for the pleasure of killing end up as serial killers, provide them with some of their tools of work. The sangomas sometimes prepare concoctions containing human body parts. A beverage brewed from a child’s sexual organ, for example, is believed to cure impotence.

"Muti killings", murders committed by puncturing the organs of a living person, is the cause of hundreds of deaths per year. "Africa registers more crimes related to cannibalism and vampirism than anywhere else in the world". Eating someone means capturing the soul and spirit of that person. And the victims’ blood are believed to contain life. It is no secret that fetish priests and some traditional worshipers believe that by drinking human blood they either become immortal or are reborn. "This kind of belief explains the acts committed by the two Kenyan serial killers: Philip Onyancha, who drank the blood of his victims and George Otieno Okoth, who collected human hair.

Besides the "muti killings", it can be noted that across Sub-Sahara Africa, many of those often labeled as witches or wizards, mostly by fetish priests, are poisoned, drowned, hacked to death with machetes or buried alive at will in an attempt to deliver their souls from the snare of the ‘devil’. Here again, a killer could evoke witchcraft in order to be given the leeway to kill to satisfy his whim. Only last year, a Zimbabwean judge, Justice Ndou, ruled that 32 year old Vusumuzi Ndlovu’s unshakable belief in witchcraft was an extenuating factor to spare him from the southern African country’s legally imposed punishment, after he killed his neighbor whom he accused of witchcraft.

The title of this post comes from Philip Onyancha, shown under arrest above.

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Stuff: Portrait of a serial killer. And some landscapes.

In 1957, Life magazine sent a team of photographers to capture the unfolding Ed Gein case. Online, Life's created a slideshow of the images those photographers created.

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Stuff: And the gift shop is killer.

If you're in DC, and you happen to be a criminal psychologist, an F.B.I. agent, or the haunted survivor of an infamous serial mass murder who is obsessed with avenging the death of your teen friends, then you might just think about swinging by the Evil Minds Research Museum: a by-appointment research museum that hosts a collection or documents, art, and artifacts gathered by the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit in their endless hunt for America's deadliest serial killers.

BSU head Greg Vecchi makes the pitch:

One of the most exciting research projects that we have, is we’ve have started what we have labeled the 'Evil Minds Research Museum.' And what this is, this is actually a research museum where we are collecting serial killer and other offender artifacts.

And so these artifacts are like paintings, John Wayne Gacey paintings. Paintings that he was the Killer Clown back in Chicago several decades back, who would kill men and boys, and he would dismember their bodies and put them under his floor board. Well, after he was caught, well, he turned out to be a so-called killer of the community [NB: this is a transcription error, Vecchi actually says 'pillar of the community'], and he would dress up as a clown and do gigs doing clown stuff for the kids. And so he would draw pictures or paint pictures of clowns, and he had clown paintings in the room where he dismembered the bodies. And he had clown paintings that he did after he got arrested and when he was basically on death row.
And so we got those paintings and we are studying those paintings. We want to look at the brush strokes. We want to look at what drives him, what changes, because the pictures are completely different. Before he was arrested, for instance, the clowns were Flippo the Clown, very happy clowns, very colorful; afterwards his paintings were very dark. It was basically a skeleton or a skull dressed up or painted up to be a clown.

We’ve have got thousands and thousands of pages of correspondence between a number of serial killers. Richard Ramirez, the night stalker. We’ve got Keith Hunter Jesperson, another famous serial killer, his complete manifesto of why he killed, written in his own handwriting. We have greeting cards, we have photos, we have serial killer art. But the museum itself, and here is where the value of it is, for the most part, almost all of the research of law enforcement is usually done interacting with the subject rather through an investigation, or, in what we do, more of a research-type of approach, where we would sit down with protocols and interview them like we do with the serial killers, or like we are doing with the hostage takers now. This is stuff that is taken out of their most personal possessions. Things that were not taken as law enforcement, but were taken on search warrants, or provided, maybe after they were executed, by their family. And so it gives a completely different perspective of their mindset—where they are coming from because this is correspondence to themselves, correspondence between them and their loved ones—their mother, their father—correspondence between them and other serial killers, and even correspondence between them and the many groupies that write to them and develop a relationship as a pen pal. And so this is a very exciting research, this research museum, where we are looking at their motivation and try to understand them from a perspective that, as far as we know, has never been undertaken.

That's entertainment!

But don't pack the kiddies in the station wagon just yet. You need to be a genuine researcher with the F.B.I.'s visiting scholars program to check out all the fun.

But fear not, you can visit vicariously through the pages of Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association (he said "annals"). They've got a downloadable PDF article on visiting the museum with plenty of photos. Enjoy.

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Comics: Play them like a Harpe from hell.

The Newsrama site is hosting a preview of Harpe: America's First Serial Killers, a graphic novel that recounts the "true story" of Micajah and Wiley Harpe, two 18th Century outlaws who tore through the frontier from 1797 to 1799, leaving an estimated 20 to 40 victims in their wake.

I use quotes on the "true story" not to impugn the veracity of the comics creators, Chad Kinkle and Adam Shaw, but rather because it is difficult to separate frontier legend from the actual criminal career of the Harpe brothers, so the project is inherently going be a little wobbly on the truth matricies.

Still, whatever the author's allegiance to the historical facts, the Harpe's story is sufficient grisly enough to make a promising premise for comic project. Worth checking out.

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Link proliferation: The secret lives of horror-themed cereal mascots, sleep paralysis, and making psychopaths.

A Boo-Berry Shaped Hole in His Heart

My vocation as a bon vivant man of leisure requires I commit a certain portion of my day engaged in the aimless wanderings of the amateur flâneur. During yesterday's existential tinged meandering, I came across Artez'n, an Atlantic Avenue shop that sells creative products from Brooklyn-based creative types.

The shop's full of nifty stuff, but the following horror-themed postcards from Ghastly Greetings caught my eye.

Here's "Rise and Shine," by Mister Reusch.

Here's "Boo Hoo," by Bradford Scobie.

Not in Brooklyn? Das cool. You can snag Ghastly Greetings products over their webby site. You dig?

"It’s going to drag me down into an abyss . . ."

In the August issue of The Psychologist, Julia Santomauro and Christopher C. French survey the state of knowledge regarding sleep paralysis: a temporary an consciously experienced state of paralysis, occurring while going to sleep or starting to wake, often accompanied by elaborate and multi-sensory hallucinations.

The article author mention the most common forms of hallucination:

- Proprioceptive hallucinations: sensations of floating, flying, out-of-body experiences; feelings of being lifted up, of spinning and turning; and sensations similar to those felt when going up or down in a lift.

- Tactile hallucinations: sensations of pressure; touching or pulling on the chest, limbs or head; pressure on the bed; feeling the bedclothes moving; and feelings of tingling, vibrating, shaking, pain, smothering or choking.

- Auditory hallucinations: hearing footsteps, knocking, shuffling, breathing, talking, indecipherable whispering, mechanical sounds
(e.g. humming) and other noises.

- Visual hallucinations: seeing wisp of cloud or smoke-like substances or areas of intense darkness; seeing a human, animal or monster and possibly interacting with them.

- Olfactory or gustatory hallucinations.

The authors also run down various historical and cultural non-scientific explanations for the phenomenon. Here's a sample:

For example, in Newfoundland sleep paralysis is called the ‘Old Hag’. This is described as suddenly being awake but paralysed, usually just after having fallen asleep, and often feeling a weight on the chest and sometimes seeing a grotesque human or animal astride the chest (Ness, 1978). Newfoundlanders think it might be caused by either working too hard, the blood stagnating when they lie on their back, or hostile feelings from another person.

In Hong Kong a condition that seems identical to sleep paralysis is termed ‘ghost oppression’ (Wing et al., 1994). Chinese people have often thought that ‘the soul of a person is vulnerable to the influence of spirits during sleep’ (Wing et al., 1994, p.609) and, in a dream classification book written around 403–221bc, there are six types of dreams described. Wing and colleagues suggest that e-meng, dreams of surprise, are actually sleep paralysis and are distinct from ju-meng, fearful dreams.

Amongst the Inuit of Canada sleep paralysis is interpreted as attacks from ‘shaman or malevolent spirits’ (Law & Kirmayer, 2005). In Japan sleep paralysis is called kanashibari and is related to the magic of one of the Buddhist gods, Fudoh-Myohoh. Historically, it was believed that monks could use this magic to paralyse people in their sleep; more recently it is often believed that evil spirits cause the phenomenon (Fukuda et al., 1987). In St Lucia, sleep paralysis is termed kokma and is alleged to be caused by the spirits of unbaptised babies who haunt the area (Ness, 1978). In Korea, it is termed ha-wi-nulita which can be translated as being squeezed by scissors (Dahlitz & Parkes, 1993). Many other cultures have their own interpretation of sleep paralysis and often the cause is attributed to some supernatural force.

Throughout Europe, from the 1500s until the 1700s, sleep paralysis experiences were often considered to be the work of witches who were accused of using their witchcraft to terrorise sleepers who had offended them in some way. Such episodes were sometimes termed as being ‘witch-ridden’. In 1747, a woman testified at a witch trial that she found her husband in bed ‘lying there stiff, barely drawing breath’, and when he woke up he said, ‘My Lord Jesus help me! Oh! Fiery witches took me to Máramaros and they put six hundredweight of salt on me’(Davies, 2003, p.186)

Recipe for a Serial Killer

Jim Fallon is the Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at the University of California Irvine. He's been studying the brains of psychopathic killers and believes that he's discovered some shared traits. The following is his TED talk on his studies in which he ponders the question "How do you make a psychopathic killer?"

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Movies: But it's got a great personality.

It is pretty easy to dismiss Scott Reynolds's 1997 The Ugly as a cut-rate Kiwi knock off of the far superior Silence of the Lambs. After all, that's pretty much what it is. The flick revolves around a very familiar premise: a woman must conduct personal interviews with a incarcerated serial killer, finding the truth about his past while resisting the caged psycho's efforts to crawl inside her head. Admittedly, The Ugly includes a whole supernatural angle and there's a distinctly un-Silence-ish focus on the life story and thwarted central love of the killer (though, honestly, this seems as if it was heavily "influenced" by Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer); still, it's hard to shake the feeling that you've seen the film's core premise done better.

That said, after the initial disappointment, I found myself digging on The Ugly to a surprising degree. While the plot seems to be, at best, a serviceable jerry-rig of parts from better flicks, the film brings a pleasingly excessive, low-fi, originality to its visual presentation that reminds me of the giddy stylistic excesses of flicks like Evil Dead and Dead Alive. Not that The Ugly has the same splatter aesthetic – compared to the goo and gore of those other two films, The Ugly is downright demure. Rather, like Evil Dead and Dead Alive, The Ugly loses its stylistic inhibitions as it goes along, getting aggressively odder and more boldly quirky even as it settles in a predictable narrative mold. The film gives off a sort of film tech geek charm, a product of its formal playfulness, that I thought was genuinely amusing.

For example, during one of the film's many flashbacks to episodes within our killer's bloody career, we see Simon (the film's homicidal protagonist) off a dude outside a rock club. The scene's only soundtrack is the power pop that, one assumes, is pouring out of the club. Simon catches a glimpse of a witness: a young girl inside what appears to be an abandoned furniture factory next to the club. Simon bursts into the club after her and, once inside, the music stops and the film is silent. Watching this scene, I assumed that the change in the soundtrack was strictly diegetic. The sound cut off because the characters where now isolated from the source. However, as Simon and his witness play a frantic game of hide and seek in the factory, the sound cuts in and out, alternating between blasting cheese rock and silence. Ok, I thought, so it isn't diegetic; instead, the filmmakers are having a little fun with sound design. However, at the end of the scene, Simon catches the witness and notices that she's got a non-functional hearing aid. She's deaf. The sound was, in fact, diegetic from the start and it was switching from the Simon's "point-of-hearing" (if that's a term) to the witness's throughout.

The film's playful style isn't always so clearly in the service of some descriptive or thematic function. Throughout the film, for example, blood is depicted as being inky black in color (except for one odd scene at the end of the flick where blood runs a standard red). Why? I have no idea. One could also make a drinking game out of every time an empty shopping cart appears on screen. I might be missing some profound significance empty shopping carts have in New Zealand culture, but I doubt it. They're there because they're there. Drink.

There's also the curious acting style that's too straight-faced to be overtly campy, but too broad to be considered realistic. This is most notably true of Roy Ward's Dr. Marlow, who seems like a bizarre impersonation of a B-movie asylum warden. As the movie goes on, even Marlow's outfits get more and more like something out of Mark Robson's 1946 crazies-and-costumes melodrama Bedlam. And his final scene is so inexplicable as to be laugh inducing, and intentionally so I think.

Still, unlike Jackson or Raimi's films, The Ugly never just takes off the breaks and goes nuts. Both Evil Dead and Dead Alive fulfill their narrative designs by the three-quarter mark and then become a sort of plotless action/comedy splatter showcases. In contrast, The Ugly has a narrative arc it is wedded to and that keeps it from spinning off the rails. Which is unfortunate as the plot is the film's weakest element and this forced march along a very well tread saps the energy of the flick, chills the mood, and smoothers the wild energy that might have elevated it to cult fave status.

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Movies: Everything falls into place.

Though the 1970's has been pretty much stripped mined as far as horror cinema diamonds in the rough go, its odd that under appreciated flicks can still be found there. And yet, despite the relentless and meticulous efforts of exploitation era cinema-archeologists, weird good stuff still litters the ground. How are these pieces overlooked? Because much of the myth of 1970s horror cinema rests on a sort of gonzo aesthetic of "batshit crazy," the horror fancy often overlooks that some of the finest '70s era specialized in a sort of ultra low-key, faux social realism that placed a sort of lush squalor before stylishness, bleak minimalism before show-stopping pyrotechnics. Such films were exploitation to the core and pandered in straight-out sleaze as their primary draw, but these flicks also trafficked in a lightly worn documentary feel that gave them an unearned gravitas. This shallow 'realism' didn't make these flicks any smarter of more artistic than their more overtly trite exploitation brethren, but it did mean that they unfurled at a more deliberate pace, included thoughtfully rendered characterization, tonal grace notes, and attracted A-list talent. It has become unfashionable to suggest that some works transcend their genre the same way it has become gauche to suggest that some children are simply brighter than others. Yet, fashionable or not, the fact remains; genre fans are often satisfied with subpar work, and films that both deliver the goods and still go above and beyond the call of duty should be celebrated as doing more than they need to. That's called transcending the genre.

Richard Fleisher's 1971 true-crime serial killer pic 10 Rillington Place is one of those pictures that, though firmly rooted in the traditions of sleazy exploitation, manages to approach something almost Dostoevskyan by allowing the visuals of squalor and the power of two first rate leads to drag the story into affecting human directions it wasn't originally meant to contain.

Based on a much recounted historical incident, the plot of 10 Rillington Place tells the story of a blue collar couple who run afoul of a genuine monster. In the post-war squalor of Austerity Britain, illiterate Tim and Beryl move into a crumbling townhouse in Notting Hill occupied by John Christie. The role of Tim is rendered with pity-inducing inarticulateness by an excellent and shockingly young John Hurt. The cruelly meticulous and avuncular Christie is brought to chilling life by Richard (the old dude in Jurassic Park) Attenborough.

For horror fans, Attenborough's Christie would be enough to recommend the film. Played with dark humor, Attenborough's Christie is at once a ruthless predator and fussy old grump. A passionless unman who covers his pathetic unlife with an endless gloss of lies, he's only filled with energy when raping the corpses of his victims (mostly women who come to him under the misapprehension that he's a former medical man with a special passion for treating female complaints). In many ways, his protean shallowness reminds me of Warren Oates's pathetically mercurial G.T.O. from Two Lane Blacktop, trickster as crippling condition, a man whose great tragedy is that his only pleasures must be fleeting, which dooms him to live in the sharp clawed clutches of a desire greater than his decaying and insufficient frame. Though where G.T.O. is all American tall tale and gregarious banter, Christie is the murderous reflection of British reserve and the famed stiff upper lip. There's a scene is in the film where Christie stands by an old gas light (to save money, you know) talking his victims into their own doom, as the gas sputters with a constant snake hiss. The shot is one of the most perfect in all horror cinema. Attenborough's Christie ranks up with Perkins's Bates, Rooker's Henry, and Hopkins's Lecter. He's that good. Seriously.

The plot is as trashy as they come. The film opens with a sort of intro killing by Christie back during the war. Taking advantage of a wartime blackout, a young seeks Christie's unregulated amateur care. He hooks her up to a homemade gas delivery system, convincing her that it will cure her of her chronic pain condition. When he fight of flight reflex eventually kicks in, she's too weak to fight Christie, who overpowers her, strangles her, and sexually abuses her.

Jump forward: post-war Austerity Britain. The nadir of modern British culture – think Swinging London and then imagine the point furthest from which that can still boast enough infrastructure to support electricity. A time period when the national color was brownish-grey and the chief domestic product was diminished expectations.

A young couple, Tim and Beryl avec infant daughter, move into the Christie's apartment building. Beryl is a stifled ghetto flower whose desire for better things drag the family deeper and deeper into debt. Tim is a semi-alcoholic truck driver with a flair for self-aggrandizing tall tales. Their home life is tempestuous and, perhaps, not quite loving. When Beryl is knock up and with second child, she attempts some pill-delivered remedy of dubious utility. Her attempts at self-medication fail and she ends up confessing her problems to the awkward, but seemingly friendly Mr. Christie. Christie claims to have become familiar with abortion techniques when he served as a special policeman during the war and offers his assistance. Beryl and Christie convince the doubtful Tim to go along with it. (Which leads to the grimmest joke of occasionally darkly sharp flick: Christie rehashes an old joke about delivering babies and recontextualizes it to discuss the planned abortion: "Don't worry Tim; we haven't lost a father yet." Careful listeners might remember the same joke, used to very different effect, in Disney's Lady in the Tramp.)

Shortly thereafter, while Tim is at work and Christie's wife, Ethel, is off on an errand, Christie uses the fiction of his medical prowess to get Beryl up in his apparatus. He gasses and then strangles her. Christie then informs Tim and Ethel that Beryl died during the operation. He convinces Tim it would be wisest to help Christie hide the body and then flee town until such time as Christie can get everything sorted with the police. When Tim asks what will happen to his infant daughter, Christie says he knows of a nice, childless couple that would be happy to care for the girl in the meantime. Tim packs up and flees immediately. With the father gone, Christie takes one of Tim's neckties and strangles the daughter.

The frame up, though hastily constructed, is enough to trap the dim-bulb Tim, who eventually turns himself over the cops for the crime of hiding his wife's body. The cops, of course, want him for the double homicide of Beryl and his daughter. Stunned he confesses, then recants. He's tried, convicted, and hung for murder.

In the months that follow, Christie (whose façade of lower middle-class civility was cracked, but not completely breeched on the witness stand of Tim's trial) and his wife grow estranged. Ethel now knows on a gut level that he's a monster, though the scope and exact details of his crimes are still a mystery to her. For his part Christie increasingly understands that framing Tim was a Pyrrhic victory: he's managed to escape the noose, but at the cost of his home and his sense of safety.

Christie's life quickly spirals out of control. He kills Ethel, kicking off a short string of uncharacteristically sloppy killings. He looses his job and then his house, becoming a homeless drifter. The house's new residents discover the hidden room Christie used to hide the corpses of his post-Tim victims. The police quickly realize their error and launch a manhunt.

Like so many serial killers before and after him, Christie is caught when, during a chance encounter, a beat cop happens to recognize him.

The plot, while lurid, benefits from an odd structure that continues the story long after the "thriller" aspect – centering around the destruction of Tim, Beryl, and their daughter – has past. By giving equal time to the aftermath, both in terms of the legal consequences and the slow decay of Christie himself, the film weds its exploitative and sleazy aspects to a genuinely dramatic framework that emphasizes the dreary fatedness of these characters.

Saving the exercise from completely lapsing into a dreary social realism is the disciplined hand of the vastly underrated Richard Fleischer. Son of the legendary animation producer Max Fleischer, Richard made his early rep cranking out budget-minded and successful film noirs flicks. He then moved on to a series of Disney produced effects-driven actioners, most notably 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the original Doctor Doolittle. However, Fleischer's directorial career shows an astounding range and includes a surprising number of hits and enduring cult classics. Aside from big ticket pics like Tora! Tora! Tora! and the Neil Diamond version of The Jazz Singer, the sci-fi cult classics Fantastic Voyage and Soylent Green both belong to Fleischer. He's also behind Violent Saturday, Compulsion, The Boston Strangler, and the exploitastic Mandingo. Fleischer keeps Rillington moving at a calm, creepy pace, he let's his actors infuse certain scenes with almost Coen brothers-style humor. He also knows when to let the characters inject excruciating levels of pathos into a scene. These emotional tones counterbalance the detached stoicism of the rest of the flick.

10 Rillington Place is one of the better flicks in the serial killer subgenre and I think it deserves to be better known.

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Comics: Roberts' rules.

The Roberts, a two-ish mini by the writing team of Justin Shady and Wayne Chinsang with art by Erik Rose, seems like a throw back to the serial killer chic of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.

Pop culture fads - like the civilizations that spawn them or their upmarket analogs: art movements - run through four stages of development before before collapsing: primitive, classic, baroque, and decadent. In the case of serial killer chic, the exemplars of each stage remain with us: respectively, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the Hannibal franchise that exploded with the film adaptation of Silence of the Lambs, the novel American Psycho, and Se7en. Though these were just the highest points of a vast continent of trendy serial killer junk that has, for the most part, been submerged by the waters of our fickle popular attention. We still recall Bret Easton Ellis's OCD satire of Wall Street greed and media violence, though we tend to forget, for example, that Paul Theroux also tried his hand at the exploitative genre. Always a handy figure for filmmakers, serial killers with over-the-top motives and methods pretty much carried the horror genre limping along until the mid-1990s slasher revival. This time period also gave us the bizarre spectacle of Oliver Stone following up his epic J.F.K. with the psychotronic, but vacuous Natural Born Killers. A little late to the party, even Spike Lee decided to crank out a serial killer pic. Shirts with Manson on the front could be found in Sam Goody's suburban record shops. The mainstream media happily ran inch-filling stories on whether or not serial killers represented an evolutionary adaptation to "modern life." The figure of the serial killer didn't vanish, of course. But the weird moment when figures like Hannibal were not only seen as icons, but as essentially realistic passed us by. Movie-goers have no problem with serial murder, what they can't stand is over-earnestness.

The high concept pitch of The Roberts is Cocoon meets Dexter. In the Shady Lanes Retirement Community, two aged serial killers, the Boston Strangler (they caught the wrong guy) and the Zodiac Killer, are whiling away their golden years, both hiding under the name Robert. They talk shop, boast a little, and eventually decide to hold a contest: who can knock of the well-meaning but mentally deficient old biddy that lives down the hall from both of them. Flush with new-found purpose and the youthful energy that only human predation can provide, one of the killers starts expanding the parameters of the game, threatening to bring the heat they've so long avoided crashing down on them.

Shady and Wayne settle on a very unusual structure for their story, dedicating pretty much the entire first issue to character building and serial killer small talk. In a very leisurely way, we watch the Strangler and Zodiac trade stories and put up with indignities of the old folks' home that live in. They are built like a comedy team: the Zodiac is verbose and friendly, but a little goofy. The Strangler is more sharp-witted, but more grim and gloomy. The Zodiac is always pulling the Strangler to awkward social functions, the Strangler is always deflating the Zodiac's curious notions of self importance. There's a particularly nice scene in which the two killers discuss movies that have been made about them. The Strangler hates what Tony Curtis did to his character, but the he still shames the Zodiac because he was most recently depicted by several nobodies. The joke here is the Strangler's flick is a relatively mediocre film while the Zodiac's film was an Oscar nominated de-romanticization of the whole serial killer figure. The reason for the flicks' differences is lost on them both; they just want to know who played them.

The entire "game" plot rolls mostly through the second issue and is handled efficiently. Playing off the reader expectations regarding the use of the Strangler's narration allows the writers to pull a clever bait-and-switch that gives the whole thing a twist that doesn't seem forced. It does feel unevenly "compressed" compared to the breathing room the characters previously enjoyed.

Rose's art has a scrawling, nervous, almost outsider art feel to it. His jittery lines render the ravages of old age with a particular violence. The Strangler, especially, appears to have his wrinkles carved into him. Rose isn't big on backgrounds, often dropping out detail or simply forgoing the backgrounds altogether. While this occasionally makes his blocking difficult to figure out and can obscure the flow of action, it does jibe nicely with the raging monomania of the Roberts.

Curiously, the book's obsession with serial killer minutia is the only drag. Part of what drove the serial killer chic era was the refusal to see grotesquely mundane aspects of serial killer. The killer's became mythological predators in a modern world that had become a jungle. Less was said about how, in general, most serial killers were barely functional individuals. Far from being evil geniuses, the records of the killers showed that community apathy and police blundering were more often than not the reason they could continue their murderous rampages. Like all good pop icons, the killers couldn't survive being outted as pathetic. The Roberts suffers from an overabundance of the romantic mentality without showing any understanding of the flip slide of that coin. The name-dropping and research would be made more palatable if the reader felt that the authors knew that their characters were, at base, just really shitty human beings. This is odd sense of killer-cool is further reinforced by the extras the team has packed into the trade, including copies of several letters from Charlie Manson and Richard Ramirez. It's unclear if we're supposed to laugh at the incomprehensible ravings of Manson or give the authors cred for communing with evil. In my opinion, neither result would justify even the slightest possibility of giving Manson the solace of knowing he's still thought about and discussed in world outside his prison.

That said, the original premise is fresh and the characterizations compelling. The art is striking in a suitably off-kilter way. The whole package hangs together well. The Roberts is a well done, inventive, and refreshingly low-key slow-burn thriller.

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Link Proliferation: John can give you cancer.

Belle on Earth

Via Christine Quigley: the vintage true crime tale of Belle Gunness, perhaps the world's most prolific female serial killer.

From the Biography Channel's summary:

Serial killer. Born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth on November 22, 1859 in Selbu, Norway. The daughter of a stonemason, Belle Gunness immigrated to America in 1881 in search of wealth. What followed were a series of insurance frauds and crimes, escalating in size and danger.

Not long after Gunness married Mads Albert Sorenson in 1884, their store and home mysteriously burned down. The couple claimed the insurance money for both. Soon after, Sorenson died of heart failure on the one day his two life insurance policies overlapped. Though her husband's family demanded an inquiry, no charges were filed. It is believed the couple produced two children whom Gunness poisoned in infancy for the insurance money.

Several more unexplained deaths followed, including the infant daughter of her new husband, Peter Gunness, followed by Peter Gunness himself. Her adopted daughter Jennie's body would also be found on Belle's property. Gunness then began meeting wealthy men through a lovelorn column. Her suitors were her next victims, each of whom brought cash to her farm and then disappeared forever: John Moo, Henry Gurholdt, Olaf Svenherud, Ole B. Budsburg, Olaf Lindbloom, Andrew Hegelein, to name just a few.

In 1908, just when Hegelein's brother became suspicious and Gunness's luck seemed to be running out, her farmhouse burnt to the ground. In the smoldering ruins workmen discovered four skeletons. Three were identified as her foster children. However the fourth, believed to be Gunness, was inexplicably missing its skull. After the fire, her victims were unearthed from their shallow graves around the farm. All told, the remains of more than forty men and children were exhumed.

Ray Lamphere, Gunness's hired hand, was arrested for murder and arson on May 22, 1908. He was found guilty of arson, but cleared of murder. He died in prison, but not before revealing the truth about Belle Gunness and her crimes, including burning her own house down—the body that was recovered was not hers. Gunness had planned the entire thing, and skipped town after withdrawing most of her money from her bank accounts. She was never tracked down and her death has never been confirmed.

Died in a Drive-By

As part of their regular feature on cover songs, the fine folks at Aquarium Drunkard compare the Jim Carroll original "People Who Died" with the cover the Drive-By Truckers have made their go-to encore when they play live. Free downloads of both at the end of the story.

On Carroll's original:

But despite the occasional twinges of genuine anguish that come through in Carroll’s voice, “People Who Died” sounds like something more factual than mournful. Perhaps it’s in the way that several verses are repeated - lives recounted again within the same song. Here these lives become just a recounting of experience. Emotions expressed (“..and Eddie, I miss you more than all the others / and I salute you brother”) become simply a world-weary incantation - a recitation that gives away its narrator’s acceptance of the reality. It’s a delivery befitting Jim Carroll given his experiences. There comes a point where another death is just another death.

On the DBT:

If you go back to 1999’s sadly out-of-print Alabama Ass Whuppin’, the early line-up of the band tears through the song with abandon. Muddling the verse order, and shuffling and adjusting lyrics as he goes, Patterson Hood’s delivery of the song is a howling maelstrom of grief. There are times where his vocals become muttered and incoherent, others where the pain is howled into the Plutonian shore. Imagining the narrator now in the small towns of the deep South, where friends are people you’ve known since you were born, not just the guy you met hustling on the street the other week, the deaths rack up in a much more serious way. As friends drop left and right, everything that seemed true is revealed in the harsh light of reality.

Speaking of DBT live, here's their "Where the Devil Don't Stay" from a 2004 set.



My Most Blatant Bid Ever to Drive Traffic to My Blog

Stephanie Meyer's, Twilight, the word "porn."

Those search terms alone should pretty much guarantee that this becomes my most read blog post ever.

From the online front of feminist mag Bitch: "Bite Me (Or Don't): Stephenie Meyer’s vampire-infested Twilight series has created a new YA genre: abstinence porn. From the article:

The Twilight series has created a surprising new sub-genre of teen romance: It’s abstinence porn, sensational, erotic, and titillating. And in light of all the recent real-world attention on abstinence-only education, it’s surprising how successful this new genre is. Twilight actually convinces us that self-denial is hot. Fan reaction suggests that in the beginning, Edward and Bella’s chaste but sexually charged relationship was steamy precisely because it was unconsummated—kind of like Cheers, but with fangs. Despite all the hot “virtue,” however, we feminist readers have to ask ourselves if abstinence porn is as uplifting as some of its proponents seem to believe.

Thanks to the MNJ blog for the head's up.

This is the Watchmen We've Been Waiting For

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Books: The short, strange, and fake life of Abu Tubar.

I recently finished Wafaa Bilal's autobiography/project diary Shoot an Iraqi. Netizens may remember Bilal's "Domestic Tension" project: a conceptual art piece in which the Iraqi-American Bilal spent a month living in a small room with a paintball gun that remote Internet users could control and fire (pictured above). Bilal created the piece after receiving the news that his brother had been killed in Iraqi, the civilian victim on an airstrike that had been targeted by a Predator drone.

Though not horror (though, in many ways, horrifying) Shoot an Iraqi was my introduction to the curious story of Abu Tubar.

The name Iraqi name Abu Tubar presents some translation problems. Given alternately as "the Man with the Axe," "Father or the Axe," "Father of the Hatchet," or "the One with the Axe," the tricky part seems to be how you translate "abu." Often "abu" means "father of" in a literal, genealogical sense, but it can also express linkages that are not genetic. For example, the famed poet Qais is sometimes referred to as Abu Leila, after his muse. In fact, the links implied by the use of abu can get downright weird. For example, Isa (or Jesus) is sometimes identified as Abu Mariam, which implies he's Mary's father and not her son. To confuse matters, titles using abu are often given as nicknames or used as generic slang terms (in some regions of Iraq, all soldiers are known as Abu Khaleel, the title of the religious figure Abraham, and cops are called Abu Ismael, the title of Ishmael). Confused yet? Wait. Abu can also "owner of" or "the one with." Sometimes this association work through synecdoche: power, light, and water meter readers are often called Abu Electricity, "the one with the electricity."

Regardless of how one translates it, Abu Tubar was the nickname the residents of Baghdad gave to what they believed to be their first serial killer.

In 1971, Iraq was going through a massive cultural shift. Back in 1958, the military overthrew the monarchy that ruled Iraq, leaving leadership in the hands of an anti-British, pro-Soviet military dictator. He was himself overthrown in 1963 by another military coup. In 1969, the government changed hands again. The ruling dictator was toppled by the Ba'ath Party, a secular pan-Arab socialist political organization with roots in Syria. Americans would come to identify this "party" as little more than the bureaucracy of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship; but at the time, Hussein was only the deputy to the party's president. Still, though he would not come into power for nearly a decade, Saddam's rise is part of this story.

The pre-Saddam years were an odd mix of promise and paranoia. With its officially secular and pan-Arabic outlook, the Ba'ath party could be considered progressive, especially in contrast to the religious revolution that shook neighboring Iran to its foundations. However, as a one party system born out of a revolutionary effort against a military dictatorship, the government of Iraq tended towards a grim brand of slapstick Orwellianism.

It was during this paradoxical moment, as the party both pushed toward modernism and attempted to clamp down on the hearts and minds of all Iraqis, that Abu Tubar appeared in Baghdad.

From The First Evidence, the memoir of Juman Kubba:

He was the mysterious serial killer of Baghdad in the early Seventies who murdered whole families together and marked the walls with their blood. He was vicious and savage like an animal. He chopped people up and beheaded them, dismembered them; he threw parts of their bodies all over the house. The crime scenes were ugly and bloody. Baghdadis, the citizens of Baghdad, had never seen such a savage series of crimes before, at least in the recent past. In fact, Baghdad used to be relatively; such things did not happen . . .

These Abu Tubar crimes were serious and everyone in the city was occupied with worry and fear. You never knew where or when he would strike. People were fearful and cautious and did not go out alone. The lively city of Baghdad was paralyzed. A sense of doom spread over all homes. Many homeowners trimmed bushes and trees around their houses to keep the area clear of hideouts and added more lights and left them on all night to feel safe. No one went out by himself or herself, no one stayed out late . . .

The authorities were seemingly powerless in the face of this thug. Everybody was talking about Abu Tubar and the events that had rocked the city and brought it to such a fearful state.

Kubba describes Abu Tubar's MO:

The typical crime of Abu Tubar would start with a suspicious phone call by him or one of his "aides." He picked times when people were alone at home. The caller would engage the would-be victim in a useless conversation, threatening and cursing, and then there would be a knock on the door. The victim of their child might answer the door and Abu Tubar, masked and strong and carrying his bloody ax, would overpower the victim or her children and commence his bloodshed. The crime scenes were often marked with vengeful words or comments written on the walls in the blood of the victims. He also often killed people and dumped them in some remote area of Baghdad.

Powerless to stop the killings, a special cross-departmental anti-Abu Tubar task force, including local police, secret police staff members, and civilian organizers and investigators, was established. Juman Kubba's father, identified in her memoir as "Makki," was tasked with running a center that would collect and investigate phone calls offering tips to the identity and location of Abu Tubar. Not long after its creation, the phone center began to clash with the Ba'athist Party leadership. Leads were dismissed arbitrarily by party leaders and, during the investigation's lowest point, the center was invaded and ransacked by the "bodyguards" of party officials (a militarized security force under the command of Saddam). Investigators assumed that the hostility they faced was due to the fact that many of them, including Makki, were not Ba'athist.

Things came to a head when somebody claiming to Abu Tubar phoned the call center. Like all notable serial killers, Abu Tubar apparently could not resist the urge to boast. Once investigators realized who was on the phone, they traced the call. It was placed from inside the Presidential Palace in Baghdad.

When Makki attempted to follow up on this lead, his team was disbanded and he was thrown into Abu Ghraib.

By now, you can probably guess the horrific punchline.

In 1973, the notorious murderer was apprehended and the slaughter stopped. Bilal recalls watching news of Abu Tubar's capture:

Once the killings were finished they [the Ba'athist authorities - CRwM] made a big display of Abu Tubar's capture, parading him before TV cameras wearing a white lab coat splattered with blood. His wife confessed that she would see him come home every day covered in blood. Even as a child I found it ridiculous – if you were an axe murderer, why would you put on a white medical coat?

We didn't learn until later that "Abu Tubar" was actually Saddam's security service, killing communists, educated people, dissidents, anyone who might stand in Saddam's way.

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