Flynn
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Post by Flynn on Feb 2, 2018 2:29:40 GMT
I've been listening to a couple of podcasts lately, one on serial killers, another on cults. They've confirmed something I've long suspected, that there was a significant uptick in serial killers in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, 1974 was a dandy year for serial killings. As once source I found pointed out:
Ted Bundy committed his first murder in January 1974.
Dennis Rader (BTK-Bind-Torture-Kill) first murdered in January 1974.
John Wayne Gacy killed the second of his 34 victims in January 1974.
Coral Eugene Watts murdered the first of an estimated 90 victims in 1974.
Paul John Knowles went on a killing spree, murdering 18 people in 1974.
I suspect that this increase in serial killer activity as well as the growing awareness of serial killers in general probably led to what we would come to know as the slasher subgenre. While I don't think the traditional killers we associate with slashers are in fact serial killers, or even spree killers, they surely stem from a fear of serial killers that most certainly would have developed at the time. I bet the newspapers and nightly news programs were abuzz with reports of missing youngs. Combine with that a tendency for these killers to sexually molest their victims, and you've got a pretty close similarity to slashers: youths killed with sex being a seemingly primary motivator.
Anyway, it was something that has given me something to think about, so I thought I'd see what you all think.
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Post by masterofallgoons on Feb 2, 2018 15:36:06 GMT
There may have been an uptick in serial killers in the 70s, or they may have been simply more reported or discovered at that time.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 2, 2018 17:36:30 GMT
It would be interesting to see some sociological research on the topic and see if there's any kind of causes or trends.
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Flynn
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Post by Flynn on Feb 3, 2018 2:48:18 GMT
There may have been an uptick in serial killers in the 70s, or they may have been simply more reported or discovered at that time. Sure, I accept that distinction, but that's not really what I was getting at. Regardless of whether the growing awareness of serial killers in the '60s and '70s was founded on an actual uptick in killings (which, by the way, I'm pretty sure research shows) or simply was the result of a popularity fueled perhaps by the increasing prominence of national TV news outlets, my point was that the growing awareness of serial killers that occurred in the '60s and 70s surely must have contributed to the nascence of the slasher subgenre. The kids who were often the targets of serial killers in the '60s may have grown up to express their fears of serial killers in the '70s and '80s. It's all speculation, though. I thought it was an interesting thought, and so I thought I might share it. I could be totally wrong.
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Post by masterofallgoons on Feb 3, 2018 13:43:44 GMT
No I don't think you're wrong at all. Certainly we know that the earliest slasher movies, namely Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were directly based on or inspired by the same real case. While I imagine that those films probably have as much to do with inspiring the subgenre as much as anything (certainly as they came before or right around the year you cited), I think it's certain that the public fascination with, and fear of serial killers was reflected by horror stories.
I think you can see a very similar trend in British exploitation literature around the late 1880s when Jack the Ripper was the biggest story around.
Do you happen to know if that time period saw an uptick in serial killers elsewhere in the world or just in the US? I think slasher movies were sort of being made every where once they became popular enough, and I wonder if international filmmakers were being influenced just by exported American films or also by local and contemporary events.
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Flynn
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Post by Flynn on Feb 4, 2018 4:54:08 GMT
Do you happen to know if that time period saw an uptick in serial killers elsewhere in the world or just in the US? I don't know, but the podcast "Serial Killers" did just cover a male and female pair of British serial killers in Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who killed five kids from 1963 to 1965. I think it was a trend in at least England as well, but I don't have numbers to support that.
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Post by telegonus on Feb 4, 2018 9:15:26 GMT
Interesting about the increase of serial killers/ killings. I didn't give it much thought at the time, as it seemed like a weird carryover from the wild "anything goes" Sixties, with everyone wanting to get into the act, so to speak,--no, I don't mean to make light of it.
Not to minimize the seriousness of the topic, but the publicity serial killers got, like political assassins, was humongous, and it was a way of getting really famous, of doing something that would guarantee at the very least the Andy Warhol defined "fifteen minutes of fame".
Yes, I know there's more to the pathology of serial killers than that, yet the fact that their crimes make the headlines and the evening news puts the murderer's deeds out there, for all to see and learn about, and that is, in a (very) twisted sense a way of making a statement.
The emotional isolation of so many such killers, their inability to connect with others, to feel empathy, is terribly sad all by itself. Most of us are so outraged and horrified by such acts that it's difficult for us to understand that they were committed by people with feelings very like our own, only unfulfilled.
Leaving aside Psycho for the time being there are a couple of other movies from somewhat later, also in black and white, that dramatize the inner lives and torment that serial killers go through: The Strangler, with Victor Buono as the perp, and Who Killed Teddy Bear, with Sal Mineo in the lead.
The basic sadness, the melancholy at the core of those earlier films seemed to lift somewhat as crime pictures got more graphic, more on-screen nudity was permitted, as censorship restrictions were relaxed by the second half of the Sixties.
By the time the Seventies came along movies could show much more,--of just about everything and anything. Even so, some good non-sensational films were made about serial killers. I think of Terence Malick's "existentialist" Badlands, which features a young couple on a killing spree. These two suffered from alienation from societal norms, and with a capital A. Total disconnect.
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