Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Access Criminology and Criminal Justice journals now

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Crime, Media, Culture
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via HighWire
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Jarvis, B.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture

Brian Jarvis

Loughborough University, UK, b.jarvis{at}lboro.ac.uk

Serial killing has become big business. Over the past 15 years, popular culture has been flooded by true-life crime stories, biographies, best-selling fiction, video games and television documentaries devoted to this subject. Cinema is the cultural space in which this phenomenon is perhaps most conspicuous. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) lists over 1000 films featuring serial killers and most of the contributions to this sub-genre have been made since 1990. This article examines seminal examples of serial killer fiction and film including Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels and their cinematic adaptations, Bret Easton Ellis and Mary Harron's American Psycho (1991 and 2000) and David Fincher's Se7en (1995). The main contention is that the commodification of violence in popular culture is structurally integrated with the violence of commodification itself. Starting with the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed, this article then attempts to uncover less transparent links between the normal desires which circulate within consumer society and monstrous violence. In `Monsters Inc.', the serial killer is unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer.

Key Words: commodification • consumerism • popular culture • serial killer • violence

Crime, Media, Culture, Vol. 3, No. 3, 326-344 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1741659007082469
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Crime Media CultureHome page
K. D. Haggerty
Modern serial killers
Crime Media Culture, August 1, 2009; 5(2): 168 - 187.
[Abstract] [PDF]

Home page
 Crime Media CultureHome page
S. A. Kohm
Naming, shaming and criminal justice: Mass-mediated humiliation as entertainment and punishment
Crime Media Culture, August 1, 2009; 5(2): 188 - 205.
[Abstract] [PDF]