- #Scholarly journals about what makes a serial killer code#
- #Scholarly journals about what makes a serial killer free#
The 1960s modification of the code, which was largely a response "to the more liberal and tolerant culture of the period, particularly the revolution of social mores tied to the youth movement," enabled the production of tougher, more violent, and more controversial films such as Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).Īs Stephen Prince has noted, it is thanks largely to the efforts of filmmakers like Penn and Peckinpah that graphic screen violence, a new and highly controversial feature of 1960s cinema, has now become a pervasive feature of contemporary filmmaking, "We cannot, it seems, go to the movies today and avoid for very long the spectacle of exploding heads and severed limbs, or escape the company of the screen sociopaths who perpetrate these acts." Although the serial killer undoubtedly plays a dominant role in today's ultraviolent cinema culture, he is by no means an anomalous figure either in the history of film or in the landscape of contemporary film.
#Scholarly journals about what makes a serial killer code#
In 1930, however, in a gesture of self-regulation in the face of concerted censorship efforts, the film industry passed the Production Code, and from that time until 1966, when the code was revised, the possibilities for the depiction of graphic screen violence were restricted.
#Scholarly journals about what makes a serial killer free#
Before 1930, filmmakers were technically free to include as much violence in their films as they wished, as long as they could weather the resulting controversy. Fierce debates about the social consequences of film have been a constant feature of the medium, and more often than not this debate has focused on the supposed consequences of filmic representations of violence. Constructing this history also allows us to track the evolution of the market for serial killer movies. The representation of violence is so central to film that one can even periodize the history of the medium by tracing changes in how it has represented violence. Such examples underline Vicki Goldberg's point that from its very beginnings, cinema "laid claim to a more extensive and intimate view of death." Film's preoccupation with the representation of violence continued in the first narrative movie, Edwin Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), which showed a beating victim thrown from a moving train and climaxed with the massacre of the train robbers. Although the depiction was not entirely convincing, the audience was shown the executioner swinging his axe and Mary's head rolling onto the ground. Holmes, and one of his first kinetoscopes showed the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. One of the earliest phonograph recordings he produced featured an actor reading the confessions of H. One of the founding figures of the medium, Thomas Edison, seems to have had a long-standing interest in violence and was also attentive to the ways in which fame could be used in conjunction with the representation of violence.
Not surprisingly, therefore, film is unique among popular cultural media in its potential to shed light on the reasons why we have celebrity serial killers because it is a medium defined by the representation of acts of violence and by the presence of stars. The existence of famous serial killers in contemporary American culture brings together two defining features of American modernity: stardom and violence. Filmmaker Abel Ferrara Film, Violence, and Stardom Violence is cinematic…It's like putting mustard on a hot dog.
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