Is there a masochistic as well as a sadistic component to the mayhem? Maybe some moviegoers need to identify with people being cut to feel something, too. I can think of no other reason to endure Greg McLean’s extraordinarily cruel Wolf Creek. As potential victims, we fear serial killers, yet we also seek to identify with their power.

Some of these movies are so viciously nihilistic that the only point seems to be to force you to suspend moral judgments altogether. In Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, crazed mass murderers take a group of touring musicians hostage before slaughtering them all. Well, one of the women isn’t exactly slaughtered: She’s left hanging in the doorway wearing her lover’s detached face; she ends up running into the road, where a semi turns her into multiple heaps of gleaming innards. When, during filming, the actor playing the most sadistic of the psychos became traumatized by what he had to do, Zombie reportedly told him, “Art is not safe.” But with characters who have no larger awareness—who are just inexplicably deranged—The Devil’s Rejects isn’t art by any definition I can think of.

The issue of where the spectators sympathies lies at violent movies has always been a complicated one. But there’s no doubt that something has changed. Serial killers occupy a huge share of our cultural imagination: As potential victims we fear them, yet we also seek to identify with their power.

New York, February 12, 2006