It seems like ages ago that the film industry came to life. Discussing cinema today wouldn’t be possible without the decades of technological and artistic progress dating back to the end of the 19th century. Sometimes, we seem to forget exactly how fortunate we are that this medium exists, and that we are able to create immortal pieces of art through it. With that in mind, and solely for the purpose of a most absorbing and instructive experience, we’ve decided to sift through the dusty pages of cinematic history and take a trip down celluloid memory lane.

The first decade of cinema history pretty much begins in 1895. Up to that point, mankind’s main forms of entertainment revolved around literature, theatre, the visual arts (painting and ballet, for the most part), musical concertos, and storytelling. But the moving image as an art form was difficult to establish, mainly due to technical insufficiencies. Apart from the magic lantern phantasmagoria shows of the 18th century and the camera obscura, we didn’t get to the seedlings of cinema until the development of chronophotography. 

This was an antique photographic technique of the Victorian era, which captured movement in several frames of print. These, in turn, could be subsequently arranged either like animation boards or layered into a single frame. It started with Eadward Muybridge’s studies of the motion of animals and humans, swiftly followed by other esteemed chronophotographers such as Étienne Jules Marey, Ottomar Anschütz, and Georges Demenÿ. These efforts led to viewing moving images through zoetropes, and later to animating the same sequences into short films.

CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY ON A FIXED DISK WITH A ROTATING MIRROR, 1888, BY ÉTIENNE JULES MAREY

The real breakthrough came through the invention and the progression of the camera, then merely fastened to tripods. Once the aspiring filmmakers had this first device, they were able to shoot and screen their earliest work.

1895: The Film Luminaries Who Made History

It all started with the Lumière brothers, who gave us the first camera movements by mounting the camera on a moving vehicle. ‘Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station’ was basically a scene from the back of a train, and it was screened on December 28th, 1895 for paying customers. This marked the birth of cinema as entertainment and of motion-picture exhibition as a business.

ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT STATION (1895), ©LUMIÉRE

Auguste and Louis Lumière were manufacturers of photographic products from Lyon, France, and they were responsible for devising the patented apparatus capable of both photographing motion on film stock and projecting its results onto a screen. Prior to their December showing, they’d managed to introduce their ‘Cinématographe’ to Parisian industrialists and scientists, playing the one film they’d shot at the time: ‘Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory’. Later, they were able to produce more ‘views’, as they called them, further arousing interest among photography specialists.

THE BROTHERS LUMIÉRE

But it was ‘Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station’ that was a truly seminal moment, as they introduced the new wonder machine to the general public. The premiere took place in a room called the ‘Salon Indien’ in the basement of the Grand Café on Boulevard des Capucines, close to the Opéra, which could seat about a hundred people. There were four evening shows on that historic date in December 1895, and they brought in a mere 35 francs—which didn’t cover the brothers’ expenses, but business rapidly picked up afterwards. 

Long lines of eager spectators stretched across the boulevard, and the success drove the Lumière brothers to rent a new and larger venue in April 1896. They called it ‘Cinéma Lumière’.

1896: Stop Motion by Mistake

An accident was at the origin of the development of the first special effects in cinema, and Georges Méliès was responsible for this amazing breakthrough. His rudimentary first camera was prone to jamming, a defect which, according to Mr Méliès, ‘produced an unexpected effect one day when I was prosaically photographing the Place de l’Opéra. It took a minute to unblock the film and get the camera going again. During this minute, passers-by, buses, cars had changed their places, of course. In projecting the film, joined together again at the point where the break had occurred, I suddenly saw a Madeleine-Bastille bus change into a hearse, and men change into women’.

GEORGES MÉLIÈS

He had stumbled upon an exquisite and crucial trick which he quickly transformed into an intentional application with ‘Escamotage d’Une Dame au Thèâtre Robert Houdin (The Vanishing Lady)’ in October 1896. Discovering discontinuity within the apparent continuity of existence later paved the way for the enduring art of stop-motion animation, best represented by Willis O’Brien’s ‘The Lost World’ (1925), followed by ‘King Kong’ (1933), and by Ray Harryhausen’s ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’ (1953) and ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963).

‘CORALINE’ (2009), ©FOCUS FEATURES/LAIKA ENTERTAINMENT

More recent examples of glorious stop motion animation films include ‘Coraline’ (2009) by Henry Selick and based on Neil Gaiman’s superb children’s book, ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ (1993) by Tim Burton, and ‘Isle of Dogs’ (2018) by Wes Anderson. In an era of CGI and special effects, stop motion animations have become veritable gems of cinematic passion.

1897: The World of Cinema Evolves

Three key events best defined this year. First, Robert William Paul developed the first rotating camera, which was able to take panning shots. He used it on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Panning describes the movement of one’s camera horizontally, either left to right or right to left, while its base is fixed on a certain point, and it’s an excellent method of establishing a sense of location within the story. D.W Griffith was one known adept of the panning shots, using them not only to provide visual information, but also to engage the audience in the complete environment of his films.

QUEEN VICTORIA’S DIAMOND JUBILEE (1897)

Second, Georges Méliès built one of the first film studios in May 1897. Conceived after the model of large still photography studios, it had three glass walls and a glass roof, and it was fitted with thin pieces of cotton fabric which could be stretched to diffuse the brighter sunlight. From that studio, Mr Méliès went on to produce, direct, and distribute more than 500 short films—most of them one-shot pieces completed in one take.

GEORGES MÉLIÈS’ STUDIO

Third, the world’s first film archive was established, now considered an unfulfilled promise of historical awareness. Robert William Paul donated some of his films to the British Museum, hoping they would begin acquiring other reproductions of notable events in the form of moving pictures. The venerable institution didn’t really know what to do with the reels, however, and there never was a second donation. The first film archive was a mystery even for its owners. Denmark and Sweden tried the same later in the early 20th century, but there’s a certain pathos in the British precedent—there are hundreds of film archives all over the world today, yet their status is as fragile today as it was in 1897.

1901: Fatal Attraction, Beta Version

Films made before 1906 were generally categorized as ‘cinema of attractions’, a form of narration based on a single event of curious, extraordinary or otherwise remarkable nature—a train arriving in a station, the expression of a man suffering from indigestion, the grimaces of a playful child, and so on.

Georges Méliès’ ‘The Brahmin and the Butterfly’ is something else entirely. At first glance, it’s a two-minute scene, apparently made in a single shot, but there are in fact optical tricks that required in-camera editing. This wonderfully hand-coloured oriental garden of events depicts a Brahmin who summons a large caterpillar with his magic flute, then puts it into a cocoon, thus giving life to a gorgeous female butterfly.

‘THE BRAHMIN AND THE BUTTERLY’ (1901)

Mesmerized by her beauty, the Brahmin wraps the butterfly in a striped cloth, and she turns into a ravishing Hindu princess. The man declares his unrequited love, only to see his courtship rebuffed, ending up with his head under her foot, then suddenly transformed into a crawling caterpillar similar to the one at the beginning of the story. Originally titled ‘La Chrysalide et le Papillon’, Méliès’ film is the most concise and cynical tale of ‘fatal attraction’ or ‘amor fou’. It’s the first of its kind, and possibly also the meanest.

1903: American Cinema Takes Centre Stage

The early 20th century can best be described by the speed with which cinema advanced and its visionary pioneers. Prominent among them is Edwin S. Porter, a jack-of-all-trades of turn-of-the-century America who is credited as the first filmmaker to assemble separate individual shots into a continuous sequence of parallel actions.

‘THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREFIGHTER’ (1903)

He began his foray into the film industry when he joined the company that marketed Thomas A. Edison’s Vitascope back in 1896. Later teaming up with Mr Edison in New York as a machinist, then as a projectionist, Mr Porter finally had the opportunity to shoot and edit his own film. In 1903, he combined stock footage of horse-drawn fire engines leaving a fire station house with staged sequences of firemen saving a woman from a burning house. Crosscuts of the rescue both inside and outside the building were compressed into a six-minute film that, for the first time, created the illusion of linear continuity.

JUSTUS D. BARNES IN ‘THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY’ (1903)

After ‘The Life of an American Fireman’, Mr Porter went on to create over 50 movies. Among them, his most memorable and a true masterpiece of its era remains ‘The Great Train Robbery’, also filmed in 1903. With the former, he gave us the first film where single shots were edited together to form a narrative story. With the latter, he gave us one of the best-known shots in primitive cinema—the outlaw firing at the camera. This moment of Justus D. Barnes’ outlaw character looking directly at the camera lens and emptying his revolver point blank at the audience has often been imitated since, and for good reason, too. It remains wickedly effective even for the more sophisticated modern audience. 

1905: Little Hitchcock Goes to Jail

Around this time, Alfred Hitchcock recalled having ended up in prison, though he was only a child. According to Donald Spotto’s ‘The Dark Side of Genius’, which dates back from 1979, Mr Hitchcock repeated a quite memorable anecdote: ‘When I was no more than six years of age, I did something that my father considered worthy of reprimand. He sent me to the local police station with a note. The officer on duty read it and locked me in a jail cell for five minutes, saying “This is what we do to naughty boys”’. He told François Truffaut the same story 17 years earlier, and both times, he could not remember what he’d been punished for.

JUSTUS D. BARNES IN ‘THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY’ (1903)

Mr Hitchcock did go on to state numerous times that his youthful incarceration might have played a part in his subsequent interest in crime and punishment. This aforementioned insistence that he didn’t know his ‘crime’ also connects to his films’ repeated emphasis on unjust penalties: in ‘The 39 Steps’ (1935), Richard Hannay is plunged into a nightmare for showing casual sexual interest; in ‘Strangers on a Train’ (1951), Guy Haines is punished for simply desiring his wife’s death; in ‘The Wrong Man’ (1956), Manny Balestrero is persecuted by a Kafkaesque justice system; and in ‘Psycho’ (1960), Marion Crane is murdered after deciding to do the right thing and return the money she stole from her employer.

Whether it is true or not, Mr Hitchcock’s prison anecdote certainly goes to show exactly how personal his work really was. In fact, most of cinema’s early productions revolve around a most intimate side of the filmmakers—their own lives and their daily observations. The very events that sparked their interest and their imagination gave birth to what is now a multi-billion-dollar industry that shows absolutely no sign of stopping. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

With the second season of ‘Mindhunter’ (2018) currently streaming on Netflix and excitement already bubbling for the third, it’s time to look at our fascination with serial killers, in general, since it certainly didn’t start last year with David Fincher’s latest directorial masterpiece. For decades, we have been ravenously consuming true crime and fiction stories about them, in books and on the screen. 

From a psychological point of view, the public’s appetite for the macabre has existed since antiquity. The gladiator fights of the ancient Roman Empire, the hangings of suspected witches in Salem and all across North America, the public executions in Britain that went on until the end of the 19th century—these are mere snippets that prove our species’ attachment to violence and bloodshed. When we cannot enact it ourselves, we take pleasure in watching others, specifically authorities, do it. We revel in the violent punishment of evildoers. It is an indisputable fact and an aspect of mankind that we may find unpalatable.

©PATRICK HARBRON/NETFLIX

With the evolution of forensic sciences and investigative techniques, as well as the elimination of public executions from all over the Western world, our attention has been captured by serial murderers, mostly due to the number of victims and often nightmarish ways in which they are killed. These individuals have often caused frenzies, mainly because their crimes seemed so random. Anyone could fall prey to a Jeffrey Dahmer or the BTK Killer.

According to the Crime Classification Manual (whose authors include John Douglas, the original ‘Mindhunter’), a serial killer is an offender who has killed more than three people across different locations, with cooling-off periods in-between each murder.

It often happens that these killers gain incredible notoriety thanks to the police’s public efforts to hunt them down. The authorities’ appeals to the general public through the press and the media inevitably turn these people into infamous, larger-than-life monsters. Of course, the authorities’ sole interest is to capture the killers before they create more victims. The newspapers and journals, however, spring for notoriety, which, in turn, feeds this public craving for morbid details of the actual crimes. 

Today, there are several names in the serial killer hall of fame. Men (and a few women) of a dark, legendary status. Jack the Ripper of Victorian London. H.H Holmes. John Wayne Gacy, nicknamed The Killer Clown. George Metesky, also known as The Mad Bomber. Aileen Wuornos, considered to be the most famous female serial killer. The mysterious Zodiac Killer. Ted Bundy. Charles Manson, the biggest monster of them all. Jeffrey Dahmer. Ed Kemper, best known as The Co-Ed Killer. The list continues, and it is filled with horror—eerily fascinating horror.

©MERRICK MORTON/NETFLIX

‘Mindhunter’ and the study of monsters.

Forensic psychology has made great progress by studying these murderous behemoths, mainly through the efforts of John Douglas, Robert Ressler, Roy Hazelwood and several other agents behind the Behavioural Analysis Unit of the FBI. The entire project started out as a study based on interviews with serial killers, combined with professional psychiatric and psychological insights, provided mostly by Ann Burgess and her colleagues. It is thanks to them that today we are able to identify patterns and capture serial killers before they reach a devastating death toll—and these are the heroes portrayed in ‘Mindhunter’, as well.

But the critically acclaimed series is not the only one tackling the subject, though it does it exceptionally well. Long before Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv teamed up to learn about serial killers in ‘Mindhunter’, the cinematic universe had already delivered chilling oeuvres such as Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ (1960), starring Anthony Perkins; ‘Monster’ (2003), directed by Patty Jenkins, which earned Charlize Theron an Academy Award; and Jonathan Demme’s ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991), based on Thomas Harris’s novel, featuring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. 

Today, ‘Mindhunter’ is not alone in portraying psychopaths. But all these productions share a common denominator: they bring the serial killer forth in all his wretched glory. They give us a glimpse into the most deranged of minds while pushing us to make a clear distinction between ‘clinically insane’ and ‘psychopath’. Serial killers are rarely psych-ward material, and they’re often incredibly charming.

©NETFLIX

‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’, and yet, pants-off charming.

Zac Efron offered a surprisingly good portrayal of Ted Bundy in ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ (2019), but people felt as though the movie was glorifying the ill-famed serial killer through the casting of Mr Efron. What they didn’t immediately understand was that Ted Bundy was exactly as the actor portrayed him—charming, handsome, a true ladies’ man. No one at the time could even believe that he had been the one responsible for more than thirty murders. Even Elizabeth Koepfler, his girlfriend, could not be convinced otherwise, until she learned he’d actually tried to kill her once. The tumultuous relationship led to her writing ‘The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy’, which was the basis for ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’.

And if Mrs Koepfler’s book and Mr Efron’s performance wasn’t enough, Netflix gave us another slice of Ted Bundy through ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes’. What eventually got him arrested was his own inability to hide his tracks. Truth be told, despite his talent in leading a double life as a loving partner and a remorseless serial killer, Ted Bundy’s only advantage was his charm. He lacked the intelligence and critical thinking to continuously evade the authorities—unlike the Zodiac killer or Ed Kemper, for example. The latter was only caught after he surrendered himself. With every escape from prison, Ted Bundy sank deeper into his own despair, eventually devolving and killing a twelve-year-old girl.

©PARAMOUNT PICTURES

‘Zodiac’ and the allure of the uncaught. 

David Fincher tried his hand at serial killers before with ‘Zodiac’ (2007), starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo. Given that the real Zodiac was never found, the film focused on the authorities and the media’s efforts to capture him. But even here, we find ourselves drawn to the story—people kept dying, viciously shot in their cars, while the Zodiac Killer sent puzzles to taunt the police.

There have been numerous documentaries that explore this subject, to the point of absolute exhaustion. It’s how we know more about the killers than we do about their victims. And yet, we still can’t get enough. We’ve brought serial killers into the realm of fiction, too, with ‘Psycho’ and ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ being just two examples. However, the deeper we delve into the psyche of such monsters, the more fascinated we become.

©HOME BOX OFFICE/HBO

‘Barry’, the sympathetic hitman.

HBO’s downright superb drama gives us Bill Hader as a hitman from the Midwest who moves to Los Angeles in order to become an actor. While the main character may not immediately come across as a psychopath, he is just that. 

Barry is just smarter because he’s actually making money from killing people. Sure, he wants to explore the city’s theatre arts scene, but his true nature simmers just beneath the surface. He might have good intentions, but he is a serial killer. Even so, we can’t help but like him!

©BBC AMERICA

‘Killing Eve’, or liking the villain a little too much.

Created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge for BBC America, ‘Killing Eve’ has another serial-killer-turned-professional-hitwoman as its central character, exquisitely played by Jodie Comer, going head to head with Sandra Oh’s Eve Polastri. 

We’re drawn to Villanelle. She’s beautiful, resourceful, and incredibly good at her job. We can’t look away, even though we know she’s basically as bad as Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper and any of the other ‘industry greats’, so to speak.

©SHOWTIME

‘Dexter’, our first favourite serial killer.

Showtime’s ‘Dexter’ is yet another prime example as to why serial killers as main characters works so well. As viewers, we felt better about ourselves knowing that Dexter, so wickedly portrayed by Michael C. Hall, only targeted other murderers. 

We were even compelled to consider him an avenging dark angel of sorts, even though he, too, is basically a textbook psychopath. We rooted for him. We certainly didn’t want him to get caught. A similar effect stemmed from ‘Hannibal’ (2013), as well, whose main character—the renowned psychiatrist turned serial killer, is superbly played by Mads Mikkelsen. These guys are terrifyingly irresistible…

©HOME BOX OFFICE/HBO

‘True Detective’ and the fight for justice.

Despite this appeal of serial killer, we do appreciate the hunt. We appreciate cinematic productions where the murderers get caught almost as much as we love the antiheroes who don’t get caught. In that sense, Nic Pizzolatto’s HBO drama, ‘True Detective’, stands out. 

The seasonal anthology series, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, among others, tackles the professional and personal lives of the police officers who chase the very darkness we’re so drawn to.

©BBC NORTHERN IRELAND/ARTISTS STUDIO

‘The Fall’, or how the cat chases the mouse and vice versa.

Taking place in Belfast, ‘The Fall’ follows the incomparable Gillian Anderson as a policewoman trying to take down Jamie Dornan’s seemingly passionate father, who is, in fact, a serial killer. For the umpteenth time, we find ourselves wedged between the hunter and the murderer, drawn to both thanks to their complexity.

It is the same with real serial killers. The terrible nature of their crimes is only outmatched by their personalities. We’re continuously astonished by the fact that people who seem completely normal are capable of such terror.

©CBS

‘Criminal Minds’, the fictional compendium of serial murder.

Before ‘Mindhunter’, ‘Criminal Minds’ (2005) had already established itself as the go-to source of morbid entertainment—a cornucopia of serial killers stretched across thirteen seasons, now going into its final lap. Most of it is inspired from John Douglas and Robert Ressler’s work with the FBI, though Mr Douglas does mention in the eponymous book on which ‘Mindhunter’ is based that profilers did not run around, guns blazing and breaking down doors in order to catch serial killers. Most of their work revolved around close collaboration with the local police and studying the crime scenes.

Even so, ‘Criminal Minds’ has been, by far, the biggest fix for serial killer aficionados worldwide. And while that might be a relatively troubling thing to say, these productions aren’t just well written, they’re also responsible for bringing some awareness to the general public, where serial murders are involved.

Thanks to them, even we are capable of recognizing certain patterns.

EDMUND EMILE KEMPER, ‘THE CO-ED KILLER’. IMAGE CURTESY OF SANTA CRUZ COUNTY SHERRIFF’S OFFICE

The appeal of serial killers will never die out. As evidenced by the many titles above, along with the honourable mentions, it is clear that we cannot get enough of such complex stories. In many ways, fiction is far more interesting than reality—at least on the screen, the serial killers come across as slightly more three-dimensional than their real-life counterparts.

This fervour isn’t waning, either. More and more true crime stories are coming out. The ‘Serial’ podcast broke records with move than 70 million downloads, a figure never before seen in this particular medium. 

Michelle McNamara’s posthumous book, ‘I’ll Be Gone in the Dark’, was completed by crime writer Paul Haynes, investigative journalist Billy Jensen, and Mrs McNamara’s widower, comedian Patton Oswalt. It wasn’t just a bestseller, it also helped Sacramento Police, who arrested James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer and the very Golden State Killer that Mrs McNamara had spent years trying to track down. HBO is currently producing a documentary based on the book.

TED BUNDY. ©BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

There are museum exhibits about famous serial killers taking place almost every year, most of them sold out—as was the case of the Museum of London in October 2015, when 600 objects from the Metropolitan Police’s crime archives went on show. Harold Schechter, a true crime writer best known for his book ‘Deviant’ (published in 1989 and telling the true story of Ed Gein, the so-called ‘original Psycho’), considers this popular interest ‘a kind of cultural hysteria’.

While serial killers are responsible for less than 1% of murders in the United States, our fascination exceeds our concern as we continue to build this mythology of evil and murder. 

In the end, it is our way of accepting that none of the monsters we create through legends, folklore, books or films come close to the monsters that real people are capable of becoming. After all, and as Joseph Conrad was quoted in the very first episode of ‘Criminal Minds’, saying: ‘The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness’.