期刊名称：Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
电子版ISSN：1070-8286
出版年度：2003
卷号：10
期号：1
出版社：State University of New York at Albany
摘要：The most gripping and recurrent visualizations of the "monstrous" in the media and film lay bare the tensions that underlie the contemporary construction of the "monstrous," which ranges in the twilit realm where divisions separating fact, fiction, and myth are porous¡ªa gothic mode. There appear to be two monstrous figures in contemporary popular culture whose constructions blur into each other, and who most powerfully evoke not only our deepest fears and taboos, but also our most repressed fantasies and desires: the serial killer and the vampire. The social construction of these figures, in feature films that invoke the genre traditions of the documentary, melodrama, horror-psychological thriller, and romance form a significant section of this article; it is the easy slippage between cinema-verit¨¦ depictions and horror-psychological thriller narrative modes that renders the gothicization of the serial killer as vampire compelling. This social construction will not only cover the cinematic depictions of these figures and their significance in terms of a critique of popular culture, but also in terms of contemporary criminological theories concerning how to discuss "evil" in relation to depictions of crime and the deviant. The ongoing fascination with the serial killer, both in the Hollywood film and criminological case studies, points to the emergence of a "gothic criminology," with its focus on themes such as blood lust, compulsion, godlike vengeance, and power and domination. Rather than assuming that film is a medium that tells us little about the reality of criminological phenomena, gothic criminology as envisaged here, recognizes the complementarity of academic and aesthetic accounts of deviant behavior
