Starling into the margins and snagging Anthony Hopkins a Best Actor Oscar. In the three cash-cow sequels that followed, the increasingly populist Lecter went from being essentially terrifying to slightly titillating, a master of puns and kooky stares. “That was there from the very first movie,” explains the French actor Gaspard Ulliel, the most recent actor to play Lecter (in Hannibal Rising). “The way everyone talked about Lecter, the way he was treated, and the way people reacted to him – he was clearly a kind of hero.”

The glorification of Lecter set a precedent for screen serial killers. Nothing was too camp, too flamboyant or too incredulous to be excluded from the villain’s bag of tricks. Movies such as Copycat, American Psycho and The Cell proudly sported serial killers as screen chewers.

Menace was out. Big speeches and cock-eared accents were in. Here, it was all about the juxtaposition of grisly murders with cold-faced expressions and insane-in-the-membrane dialogue. “I’m death and life to you, Doc! Death and life!!” snarled Harry Connick Jr’s hayseed maniac to a clearly unterrified Sigourney Weaver at the

What is it with pop culture and mass murder? Whether it’s Anthony Hopkins torturing a new victim in Hannibal or, as witnessed last week at Virginia Tech, the student killer Cho Seung Hui pulling poses from his favourite Korean action movie Old-boy, there seems to be some ineffable bond between the excesses of multiple homicide and cinema. Kill one person and you make the news; kill 30 and you’re a mythic character, complete with your own T-shirts and catchphrases. Nowhere is this eerie interpenetration of life, death and art more visible than in the ever-fecund world of the serial-killer flick, whose latest example, Zodiac, opens on May 18 – focusing on the murder spree perpetrated by the notorious Zodiac killer in 1970s San Francisco.

BACKGROUND

• Zodiac

• Zodiac - Sunday Times review

• The world of a serial killer

• The killers who conquered cinema

• The murderer I grew up with

A deadly obsession

Who was Zodiac? Robert Graysmith believes he knows, he tells Martyn Palmer

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Related Links

• How to crack Hollywood

Buzzing through a century of real-life multiple murders, acclaimed movies such as M, Psycho, The Boston Strangler, The Silence of the Lambs and Seven all gave us portraits of serial killers as mediated by a voracious popular culture. Thus, in the hands and minds of movie-makers, the killers instantly became Jungian archetypes and Nietzschean supermen, blackhearted creatures from the abyss who respected no laws or human rights. Plus they had great one-liners – there are few words from the entire history of Western cinema more memorable than: “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

Most importantly, however, these screen killers were terrifying. Their all-consuming blood lust and their blatant disregard for the sanctity of human life was deeply disturbing, and part of their macabre allure. And yet, by giving audiences a tantalising glimpse into the repellent life of a psychopath, these movies also helped to reaffirm central Western notions of inherent evil and Manichean moral struggle. After Seven, in other words, we knew that killing was bad, and that detective work and family life were good.

Somewhere in the Nineties, however, as was typically the case for that irrepressibly ironic decade, the moral waters were muddied. An absence of traditional screen bad-dies (the Commies were officially useless, while the Middle Eastern terrorists were yet to emerge) led to an opening in the market for serial-killer hysteria. Meanwhile, a penchant for allusive, wink-wink, self-referential film-making gradually transformed the serial-killing protagonist, as exemplified by Hannibal Lecter, into some sort of ironic folk hero. After only 16 minutes of screen time, for instance, Lecter became the public face of The Silence of the Lambs, elbowing the genuine protagonist Clarice climax of Copycat. The result of this transformation was that all credibility left the serial-killer genre. And inevitably, after poor reviews and even poorer box-office takings (American Psycho, released in 2000, made only $15 million), even the serial killers themselves left the serial-killer genre.

They migrated instead to the deeply fertile terrain of the bona fide horror movie, where they can now be found living it up in torture porn favourites such as the Saw series, Jeepers Creepers or Wolf Creek. Here they spearhead a billion-dollar global movie phenomenon. In hugely successful box-office smashes they repeatedly reenact the reductio ad absurdum of the Lecter method.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the mainstream serial killer movie, left without a screen-chewing protagonist, has been forced to evolve into a compelling police procedural. Films such as The Bone Collector and Taking Lives function precisely because we are familiar with the evil archetypal serial killer without needing to witness his distracting antics on camera.

Thus it was hardly surprising that when the director of Seven, David Fincher, was approached to direct another serial-killer movie, Zodiac, he chose to concentrate on the cops rather than the perpetrator. “I’m not interested in the whole serial-killer thing,” he said recently. “I want to make the Citizen Kane of cop movies instead.”

And, given the legacy of the hackneyed crazy-faced mass murderers cluttering up the movie annals, who could blame him?

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010