The European Monster — A Comparative Portrayal of the Serial Killer in Contemporary European Horror Film
The European Monster — A Comparative Portrayal of the Serial Killer in Contemporary European Horror Film

Summary/Abstract: Horror film has been amongst the forefront experiments at the time film art took hold in Europe at the end of the 19th century. Georges Méliès’s intricate and unique illusory effects presented in his early films were able to construct an eerie and equally entertaining atmosphere that scared and proved to generate anxiety in the public. In the following decades, Europe proved itself to be the right place for the horror film to expand its artistic sensibilities: German Expressionism would intertwine eerie settings with unsettling monster figures in anticipation of ulterior political movements that were equally monstruous in their ideology. Moving forward, as film gained an exponential mainstream appeal in American audiences due in part to the supernatural and extraterrestrial portrayals of monsters, European horror sought to distinguish itself from its American counterpart by focusing on constructing the monster through the lens of humanity: the serial killer. This paper discusses portrayal of the serial killer in contemporary European horror film (1990 present) and the means of which its portrayal extends beyond the horror genre’s classic characteristics of this certain trope. By analyzing the serial killer in five contemporary European Horror Films that were produced in Western, Central and Eastern European countries and were released at different times during the last 30 years, the two main goals of this article are to observe the development of the same narrative approach in different but close artistic spaces and to compare and recognize the identity of the Serial Killer as the European Monster whose Western, Central and Eastern European facets are converging to the same intellectual portrayal.

• Details
• Contents