Stranger Danger?: Sadistic Serial Killers on the Small Screen

Abstract

This chapter examines the most gruesome of crime fantasies which is now commonly portrayed on American television: the sadistic serial killer. It will analyse episodes of American crime dramas, 'Criminal Minds', 'Dexter' and 'Law and Order: SVU', which feature sadistic serial killers in the plots. By examining these representative crime dramas, the manner in which television narratives of violence are disconnected from the corporeality of gendered, heterosexual violence through imaginations of sadism as a form of criminal violence, will come clear. However. popular cultural constructions of fictional sadistic serial killers do not recognise the differences between sadomasochism and criminal violence. Rather, the criminally violent offences depicted are often fused with elements of sadism, especially sexual sadism, to produce a neatly defined culpable body.