[Revised transcription of the video essay Angst Through the Ages: Nate Roscoe on the Chokehold of the Serial Killer on 20th Century Cinema, featured on Umbrella Entertainment’s UHD/Blu-ray Collector’s Edition of Angst (1983); issued October 2025.]

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ave you ever come face to face with a killer? Have you peered into the marred pupils of a pathological being, felt the vile breeze of their breath as they carry out unthinkable acts of cruelty? Have you fought them, fled from them? Pleaded with them to stop? It’s safe to say that most of us will never have to endure such an encounter. And yet, we’ve all witnessed it, haven’t we. From the comfort of our couches, from the gloom of an auditorium. We’ve watched. Reacted. Participated. Time and again, between the advent of the motion picture and the twenty-first century’s feral, streamer-fed infatuation with true crime, homicidal maniacs have enthralled us into submission.

Five whole decades before ‘serial killer’ was a phrase upon lips, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)—his silent mystery charting the pursuit of a Jack the Ripper-style rogue in post-Edwardian England—set the benchmark for an emerging strain of filmic narrative that had long been percolating in broadsheet periodicals, folkloric whisperings, and the dog-eared pages of Poe and Conan Doyle. Considered to be the first “true Hitchcock,” the picture served as a valuable springboard for the aesthetical examination of the human condition, its blackest chasms sliced open through themes of obsession, betrayal, conflict, guilt, persecution, and vengeance. Hammering out the genre’s framework some four years later, Fritz Lang’s German-made M. (1931)—a terse abbreviation of ‘murderer’—bestowed upon the silver screen a state-of-the-art plunge into the mindset of a criminal deviant. Set amid the gloom-engulfed alleyways of an oppressively bleak Berlin, Lang’s debut talkie presented a work so intrepid, so emblazoned with radical technique and sociopolitical insight, that its fingerprints can still be spotted on even the most contemporary of movie thrillers. Dissimilar to The Lodger, which had nailed an ambiguous question mark over the culpability of its protagonist, M. afforded no such puzzle, its perpetrator’s foul intention crystal clear from the very start. As sickened by his own wickedness as he is beholden to it, Peter Lorre’s contemptible kiddie-slayer cuts an astonishingly pitiable figure, his rotund build and bug-eyed countenance a freakish contrast to the matinée-star baddies that had come before him. That we feel sorry for this deplorable creature is testament not only to Lorre’s performance, but to the astuteness of Lang in injecting his monochrome monster with three-dimensional colour.

Though kept relevant over the next thirty years through hardboiled detective stories and the public’s thickening appetite for real-world bloodshed—with Ed Gein, the notorious body snatcher from Wisconsin, becoming a fifties poster child for degeneracy—the big-screen serial killer stayed cloaked in the shadows for the best part of those decades, crime and corruption kept snugly cocooned within the thieving, blackmailing, double-crossing margins of film noir. Anomalies did occur: the twistedly comedic Monsieur Verdoux (1947), for instance; a rare occasion for Charlie Chaplin to flex his evil streak as the titular bigamist-cum-spouse-butcher, and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), in which Robert Mitchum’s terrifying, knuckle-tatted preacher—Harry Powell—produced a reprobate for the history books. A false prophet with the most insidious of agendas, the manipulative Powell misused his faith as both a means of exploiting trust and of self-rationalising his malevolent goals, the narrative’s liaison with loss of innocence suggesting a grim deterioration of rural, Depression-era decency; while lending credence to the idea that religion can be a hell of an unholy tool in the wrong hands.

Ultimately, it was the muscular one-two punch of Peeping Tom and Psycho, unleashed a mere two months apart in 1960, that would open the door to a new breed of cinematic madman. With Michael Powell’s Tom, in which a disturbed cameraman records the death throes of his victims while skewering them, we were thrust further into the soullessness of serial homicide than ever before, its fetid, front seat-ish voyeurism leaving viewers aghast—and critics exasperated. Thematically approximate yet disparate in design, Hitchcock’s Psycho—at its core a satiric assessment of mid-century mundanity—proffered an altogether more palatable approach. With titillating motifs of maternal domination, disordered identity, and long-festering desire, it’s as perverse a picture as Powell’s on paper, but Hitch resolved to keep things convivial: from the rousing strings of Bernard Hermann to the skittish allure of the boyish Norman Bates, its exuberant popcorn thrills were the total reverse of Tom’s suffocating mean-spiritedness. That Powell’s career never recovered from the critical trouncing of Tom seems particularly harsh when considering in hindsight that it’s his work, not Psycho, that may have showered the biggest influence on its immediate successors.

Emboldened by the abolishment of the Motion Picture Production Code, the emergence of American New Wave cinema between the late sixties and early 1970s signalled an uncharted modus operandi, its roots entrenched in the extreme paranoia spurred by Watergate, Vietnam, and the assassinations of Kennedy and King Jr. The uncovering of the crimes of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy dumped an additional pail of gasoline onto the cultural inferno, society compelled to reckon with the fact that it had never been more attuned to—or in fascinated fear of—the serial killer. With ferocious, rule-breaking features such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Badlands (1973), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), filmgoers were slung into avant-garde realms of rebelliousness and ruin, coerced into perusing their own moral compasses while playing witness to unprecedented levels of savagery. In Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place (1971), the deed of murder was portrayed as frigidly and impersonally as one would suppose it in practice to be, the film’s bursts of violence imbued not with artistic oomph, but stagnant, clinical authenticity. Casting a tenebrous torchlight on the true transgressions of John Reginald Christie, the bogus backstreet abortionist who raped and smothered a string of women within the decrepit walls of his Notting Hill terrace, Fleischer’s refusal to consider what’s motivating Christie—and Dickie Attenborough’s complete evasion of humanising him—left viewers no choice but to observe from the sidelines in powerless discomposure.

Across the alps in Italy—a nation at the cutting edge of cinematic flair and enterprise—the serial killer was procuring a chic refurbish in the form of the giallo, a modish brand of genre picture combining facets of whodunnit, police procedural, and sexploitation. Birthed in the mid-sixties before fine-tuning their rhythm throughout the seventies, these singular works of audiovisual embellishment left scant room for the complexity of character, their clandestine villains habitually sketched in broad, exaggerated scribbles. Still, they were busy making stylistic mincemeat of the competition; a fact not lost on spectators the world over—even Hitchcock, whose Frenzy (1972), the mischievous tale of a debonair, necktie-brandishing bedlamite, delivered the sleaziest, most vicious, and sexually charged coup of his career. Quieter, more contemplative works were appearing elsewhere, like Martin (1977), George A. Romero’s abstruse study of a disoriented young mind driven to murder through a veil of vampiric duress; Martin’s urge to kill steered not so much by mania, but a lifetime of ridicule and rejection. And in Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979), an outrageous urban fever dream born of cerebral infection and Grand Guignol theatrics, Reno Miller—a struggling painter-turned-power drill aficionado—embodied something universally profound: the notion that any one of us, at any given time, could crumble under the ingrained enormity of self-expectation. Unfolding against the backdrop of a disintegrated New York City, Miller’s trail of destruction feels as pertinent as it does repugnant: the psychological implosion of a creature ill-equipped to cope with the demands of the world around him.

Looking back, the surface-level gear shift of the eighties was nothing of a surprise. Discontented with doom and gloom, audiences were itching for good old-fashioned escapism. They wanted Spielberg and Schwarzenegger. George Lucas and John Hughes. But scratch beneath that cloying, consumerist veneer of McDonald’s tie-ins and videogame spinoffs, and you’d see nihilism was still very much in vogue; the meteoric ascent of the slasher picture having invigorated fresh bloodthirst within a particular stripe of moviegoer. While its stalk-and-kill moments could fight even the best of that subgenre’s offerings, William Lustig’s Manhattan-set Maniac (1980) tethered doleful weight to its butchery with a mood-ruining delve into the cataclysmic effects of childhood trauma. Traversing the fevered brain of broken man-child Frank Zito, we detect that his abominable inclinations spring from the untold miseries of maternal abandonment—and a skewed belief that robbing his victims’ lives will force them to stay with him forever. Almost simultaneously, over in the Meatpacking District, a leather-attired lunatic was lurking amid the sticky, neon-bathed pandemonium of the Big Apple’s gay bars, in William Friedkin’s glitteringly controversial Cruising (1980). Via provocative motifs of promiscuity, sadomasochism, and the contaminative bedrock of law enforcement, the film evoked a besmirched portrait of a metropolis turned mouldy: a place disembowelled of refuge and fair treatment, where a sidewalk feels as hellish as the dank confines of a basement, and a cop car is every inch as intimidating as the whetted blade of a knife.

If Cruising filtered its serial killer tropes through a prism of societal sabotage, then Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983) plucked out the innermost kernels of filmic psychopathy and mushed them into their yuckiest, most concentrated form. Acknowledging that his primitive need to defile, torture and kill is inescapable, an unnamed, freshly un-incarcerated fiend embarks upon a 24-hour pilgrimage to the outermost reaches of inhumanity, his sick, carnally induced proclivities laid bare by incessant narration that hog-ties the viewer to his thoughts. Through balletic, boundary-demolishing camerawork and intricate POV, we ingest every molecule of the experience—whether we want to or not. Gliding from one debased, animalistic moment to the next, the quirkiest little details become respite from the repulsion: the meticulous looping of shoelaces . . . the palpable throb of an Adam’s apple . . . the crunching of teeth as they decimate a bratwurst . . . the innocent gawk of an inquisitive Dachshund. But Kargl insists we stay rooted into the killer’s psyche, his cluttered stream of consciousness a billowing smoke signal of interior disease. Details: they really are where the devil resides—just ask Raymond Lemorne, the beige Grim Reaper-in-training at the charcoal heart of George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988). A self-styled family man, Lemorne’s fixation on the mechanics of killing seems to come less from the desire to do harm than from a desperate wish to show his wife and children that he’s more than just some cog in the breadwinner machine: he deserves acknowledgement and veneration. One would assume that cold-blooded murderers possess an intrinsic grasp on the science of their crimes, but here, we watch tentatively on as George engages in a stringent tango of trial and error, his hankering to perfect the use of chloroform reaching a morbid zenith when he guides his oblivious schoolgirl daughter through a dress rehearsal abduction.

While previous eras had merely alluded to the unpalatable notion of the ‘superstar’ serial killer, the 1990s chiselled it vigorously into the cultural marker. Gone were the grievances of ratings boards and parent groups; Generation X were taking over the world—and bringing society’s most depraved along for the ride. Through the televisual eruption of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the literary buzz surrounding Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, the burgeoning reach of grunge rock, and the spotlight-snatching arrest of cannibalistic Milwaukeean Jeffrey Dahmer, homicidal maniacs had finally become cool. Perhaps no coincidence, then, that Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), John McNaughton’s dour dramatisation of the crimes of Henry Lee Lucas, was able to snare theatrical distribution at the beginning of the decade. Lensed five years prior, its prolonged repose proved favourable for a marketing push that took full of advantage of the weapon-wielding big boys who’d been ingratiating themselves in the interim: “He’s not Freddy . . . he’s not Jason . . . he’s real,” teased its tagline, a barbed underscoring of the discrepancy between the immortal brutes of countless slashers and the richer, infinitely more frightening concept of a bona fide human being gone bad. With similarly septic spirit, Fhiona Louise’s Cold Night of Day (1989)—given a brief British theatre run in 1990—forged a veiled reenactment of the Dennis Nilsen case, the Scottish-born necrophiliac whose stomach-turning pastimes had sent shockwaves through the United Kingdom seven years earlier. “I didn’t mean to,” he tells the police when his atrocities have been uncovered. “It just happened.” A feeble statement, but it stings: here we have a person perplexed by their own malignity, a contrite black sheep who retches in disgust as he’s pouring the gelatinous, recently scooped innards of one of his playthings down the toilet; and wails like an infant into the stiff, anaemic torso of another.

If the tumultuous, game-changing murder trial of O.J. Simpson taught the nineties anything, it was how to overindulge. Bolstered by the appearance of postmodern heretics such as Quentin Tarantino and Takashi Miike, barbed cynicism and slick brutality were fast becoming mainstream linchpins. In Oliver Stone’s delirious, gut-punchingly pulpy Natural Born Killers (1994), the parameters of bad taste were shoved defiantly to their limit, as ruthless terminators Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis—Bonnie and Clyde for the MTV crowd—set forth on a cross-country massacre like no other, the film’s surreal, acid-laced comportment revealing a blistering commentary on the love affair between violence and the media, the exaltation of criminals, and the blurring of truth and fiction. Such themes were probed comparably in the Belgian-made Man Bites Dog (1992), in which a faux-documentary film crew fervently records the sadistic adventures of a charisma-laden sociopath; and John Waters’ rip-roaring Serial Mom (1994), a delicious parody that sees Kathleen Turner’s demonic bastardisation of Martha Stewart dismissively proclaim, “the only serial I know anything about is Rice Krispies!” And in Michael Haneke’s German-language Funny Games (1997), the base note of satire is never more pungent than at the point that one of its cocksure, politely unhinged young miscreants turns directly to the screen . . . and winks. Meanwhile, David Fincher’s Se7en (1995)—his cat-and-mouse nail-biter concerning the exploits of a ritualistic nutcase—contrived a sumptuously sinful marriage of archetype and eccentricity, its scathingly defeatist, forties-noir soul given a fashionable lick of green-hued varnish, and its crushing denouement confirming what the misanthropes among us had known the entire time: that evil always triumphs over good.

Of course, few fictitious monsters have wormed their way quite so conspicuously into the edifice of popular culture like Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the steely-eyed, strait-jacketed centrepiece of Johnathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991). An impeccably mannered megalomaniac, Lecter exteriorised a deformed deconstruction of the American Dream: wealthy, well-educated, white; possessed of methodical cunning and a bucketload of egocentrism. Fortuitous though it may’ve been, his catapult onto the A-List—enshrined by an Oscar win for Tony Hopkins—fed flawlessly into the hedonistic zeitgeist of the period. In the film’s final moments, as we observe an escaped Lecter slip discreetly away into a throng of passers-by, a disquieting thought presents itself: we could be a part of that crowd. We could be stood within spitting distance of Satan incarnate. And we wouldn’t even know it.

“Dress him in a suit,” a court clinician once said of Jeffrey Dahmer, “and he looks like ten other men.” It’s a sobering hypothesis. Just how does one discern, on the face of it at least, the dissimilitude between the ordinary civilian and the psychopathic killer? Would a sexual sadist appear suave in a collar and tie? Could the power-berserk authoritarian be described as ‘dapper’ in a polished pair of shoes? Is it conceivable that an impetuous thrill-seeker could choke down their cravings long enough to convince us they were just like anybody else? Perhaps it’s only in the split seconds before they snap that a deranged being divulges their true disposition . . .

As the prowling assailant of Gerald Kargl’s Angst creeps excitedly up the staircase of the family abode he’s about to eviscerate, he reveals something darker than even death:

“I was afraid. Not of the law. I was in a state of mind that excluded every kind of logic. I was afraid . . . of myself.”