Drawing on ‘the Nietzschean idea of a superman’ Rue Morgue editor Dave Alex leads off this film season’s ode to hero murderers with an attempt to explain “the iconic status of the character Hannibal Lecter,” and others, by drawing a parallel with the rise of the iconic fictional serial killer in popular culture—which I would trace to Bram Stoker’s Dracula—and the rise of atheism as a godless ethos that leaves our dark place empty and yearning for a death deity. This provocative editorial does not seek to answer, so much as ask, and what it asks is profound.

Dave makes a salient point when he evokes the inability of our social structures to “prevent bigger evils, such as terrorism.” He cites David Schmid’s 2005 book Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. This may well be a title worth sourcing.

Of course we could always go back to the beginning and note that the idea of a peaceful hope-giving God, as personified by Jesus, or an introspective exemplar of the following of a universal path, such as the Buddha, were religious aberrations; that death dealing Gods such as Yahweh, Zeus, and Odin and the myriad Aztec deities were the rule through most of history.

It is a fact that from Hybrias, to our latest gangster rapper, men have tended to worship their death dealing devices. With the oracler properties of the television and the temple iconography of the cinema, why would we not expect a sense of retributive carnage to rise in our postmodern public consciousness?

Perhaps our collective fascination with serial killers is the most logical “back to nature impulse” currently surfacing from the polluted well of our denatured society.