Psycho Paths: Tracking The Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film And Fiction; Author: Simpson, Philip L.; Paperback

Author: Simpson, Philip L.
Paperback
256 pages
Published: October 2000
Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 080932329X

Simpson theorizes that the serial killer genre results from a combination of earlier genre depictions of multiple murderers, inherited Gothic storytelling conventions, and threatening folkloric figures reworked over the years into a contemporary mythology of violence. Updated and repackaged for mass consumption, the Gothic villains, the monsters, the vampires, and the werewolves of the past have evolved into the fictional serial killer, who clearly reflects American cultural anxieties at the start of the twenty-first century.This is a broad overview of the evolving serial killer genre in the two media most responsible for its popularity: literature and cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. The author theorizes that the serial killer genre results from a combination of earlier genre depictions of multiple murderers.