Rafter Chapter 3

The films depict even violent criminals as sympathetic figures, attractive and heroic which keep these killers within the human fold. Rafter explains in this chapter the ideological frameworks of violent films to explore what they say about criminal nature. He looks at slasher, serial killer, and psycho movies. Slasher is usually about teenagers and sex. Usually has an heroic teenager in the story. You have to kill the villains more than once and the villains usually return for a squel. They tend to be not true crime films. Serial killer films portray killing as a compulsive, recurrent behavior. Most serial killer movies is to construct a stereotype of the violent predator: abnormal, incomprehensible, beyond the pale of humanity, bloodthirsty, sexually twisted, and lurking in our midst, a threat to us all. A good example to this would be American Psycho. Psycho films have predators who have an excuse such as money or revenge for their psychopathic behavior.  They believe they have to take the law in their own hands. Most psycho films have a predicable ending.