16 - Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie

Summary

This chapter identifies the category of the serial killer road movie, which it finds to be less a genre and more an encounter of two phenomena – killer and road – both subject to modern mythology. Their encounter offers, however, an opportunity to understand the function of mobility to such mythology, for not only is mobility a common characteristic in establishing a serial killer's existence beyond normal society, its importance derives from the very centrality of mobility to that society. Mobility is thus a vehicle of both commonality and aberrance, a paradox I have chosen to illustrate through a comparison of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986) and Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012). These somewhat atypical serial killer road movies seek not so much the thrill of the road as to destroy its romance, by engaging a critical awareness of the cultural meanings of mobility in the diverse contexts respectively of American independent cinema and British comedy. Such critical awareness helps put into relief a poetics of automobility, and the three main aims of this chapter: to demonstrate mobility as a bearer of broad significance which, secondly, is determined by the particularities of convention (as illustrated here in the contrast between the UK and the USA), alighting finally on a general cultural property of mobility, that is, how it assumes this significance. This how, I conclude, lies in the special narrational position that mobility offers, one of simultaneous involvement and remove with respect to the characters who undertake it.

The Mobility of the Movie Killer

The wider corpus of the serial killer road movie is a varied one, and can point to a hypothesis that the road movie is an inherently hybrid form. It includes the ‘rural horror’ movies Stefano Baschiera discusses in this volume, whose travellers get lost in the savage wilderness of a gothic pre-modernity (see also Ballard 2008). It can provide a vehicle for the slasher film or torture porn to meet the older traditions of the cinematic thrill-ride, injecting horror into the action-adventure of the ‘car-chase film’ (Romao 1994).