The critics are right about one thing: David Fincher's brilliant, sublimely disturbing Zodiac dismantles this trope so thoroughly that it's unclear precisely how many murderers are practicing their craft in the course of the film. This destabilizing effect subtly implicates our lazy fascination with sensationalized slaughter and impatience with quotidian murk; indeed, the sole suspect the movie's cops shake loose (there were a few in real life) couldn't be further from Hannibal Lecter—paunchy, pathetic and bitterly anti-intellectual, Arthur Leigh Allen has more in common with Lecter's creator, the formula-enslaved Harris, than everyone's favorite cannibal aesthete. Moreover, the film is inconclusive as to whether this smirking slob is a killer at all.
The lack of a full-fledged demon on which to hang our moral panic (and surreptitious titillation) also underscores Zodiac's suggestion that commonly decent people can't catch uncommonly monstrous ones, particularly when hunter and hunted alike aspire to the same overblown fantasies of universal renown. Fincher's movie thus serves as a virtual apology for his earlier, more traditionally exploitative serial-killer flick, Se7en, but it also echoes two equally innovative films from even farther back—both of which are newly available on DVD.
Like Zodiac, Richard Fleischer's 1971 10 Rillington Place, recently released on disc by Sony, is based on a true-life killing spree. (The DVD is a Region 2 UK import, but those without multiregion players can still find a domestic VHS version online or in specialty video rental stores.) It tells the story of John Reginald "Can't Do It" Christie (Richard Attenborough), a necrophiliac loon who, while living in a seedy postwar London flat at the titular address, used an inhalant quack remedy as a means to incapacitate female victims whom he then raped, strangled and stashed in a wallpapered-over coal bin. (He was otherwise impotent, hence the colorful nickname.)
Fleischer's film, which focuses on the gradual unraveling of Christie's vocation after he slays a pregnant neighbor, is an overwhelmingly bleak affair that deglamorizes serial murder at least as completely as Zodiac. Attenborough's Christie is a downcast, mediocre brute who bullies his prey with pseudo-educated double-talk and religious guilt, and Fleischer and screenwriter Clive Exton slyly align his methods with the British government's knee-jerk persecution of the working class: The court trial that occurs in the film's latter third is for the young woman's illiterate husband (played by a shockingly young John Hurt), whom Christie framed for the murder and who was executed before the real killer was found out. One monstrous turn deserves another, apparently.
Where 10 Rillington Place ends with a capture by happenstance, Shohei Imamura's 1979 Vengeance Is Mine—also based on factual events—begins with one. The police apprehension of virtual killing machine and inexplicable ladies' man Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata), who left a trail of corpses across Japan over several months in 1963 and was caught only when he stopped running, precipitates an ambitious series of flashbacks and flash-forwards in which his motives are laid bare.
Like most of Imamura's films, Vengeance is brimming with elliptical tangents that flesh out the remorseless killer and his warped family bonds, as well as provide flashes of uneasy humor. The director indulges somewhat in pat psychology, but Ogata's seething flat affect, the jarring matter-of-factness of Enokizu's murders and an ambiguous ending that out-Zodiacs Zodiac make Vengeance a searing portrait of the hollowness and unaccountability of contemporary evil. Criterion is releasing the film on disc in May (its first domestic DVD appearance), complete with a customary bonanza of extra features.
For all the vicarious thrills offered by the Silence of the Lambs model, in which we're invited to identify with charming, unequivocating maniacs who eradicate life's frustrations with the slash of a knife, their true appeal lies in the implication that such murderers employ intricate but ultimately traceable plans. The formless impulsiveness in Zodiac, 10 Rillington Place and Vengeance Is Mine, to say nothing of their open-ended resolutions, tells a far more chaotic and threatening story. While every serial-killer movie asks why such people do what they do, these three daringly suggest that such motives are, finally, unknowable.