Well, I’m one of those guys who has a full deck of serial killer trading cards, so I’ve thought a lot about this. I think there are two things.

One: serial killers represent an extreme - like pioneers, saints and plumbers, they go places ordinary people only wonder about. This is interesting, in a way.

Two: the fictional serial killer artist (the only real serial killer who came close to this is Zodiac, as far as I can tell, and him only because he liked writing codes) fills the same function as conspiracy theory. It’s a way of A. allowing a storyteller to tell a grotesque story and B. assigning meaning and structure to something horrible. Bad things happen. It must be according to some plan, mustn’t it?

I haven’t seen any of the recent torture porn series (unless you want to count Audition, which might have launched the genre), but part of the thing with Se7en is that there was a sense of sin and retribution. Of justice, really. Same with Hannibal - the movie embodies an un-sublimated wish for the coarse and ignorant to suffer and die. And wish fulfillment, I suppose, loops back to rationale One, above. Well, if KEVIN SPACEY can do it, can’t I?