It's still rare to find a film that invites us to identify with the killer while continuing to show his actions as repellent, and the grand master of these has to be Imamura Shohei's 1979 Vengeance is Mine. More recently the subgenre has been played for dark thrills, with the torture porn influence resulting in films that focus on the sometimes lingering suffering of the victims. It took a while for this emerging subgenre to catch on elsewhere, hardly surprising given the hostile critical reaction Michael Powell's superlative Peeping Tom or the rejection by some countries of the whole concept of domestic serial killers – if official sources are to be believed, the phenomenon did not hit South Korea until 1986, a case that later gave rise to Bong Joon-ho's superb Memories of Murder. It was Hitchcock, of course, who helped shape the genre as we now know it by making the killer the central character, first in the 1943 Shadow of a Doubt and famously in 1960 with a black-and-white low-budgeter named Psycho. But in film he (and it almost always is a he) remained a minor character or a background threat, providing a reason for suspicion in Hitchcock's The Lodger, or a dark conclusion for Pabst's Pandora's Box. Serial killers have been with us since the early days of dramatic cinema, thanks largely to the fame and dark allure one of the most notorious, a certain Jack the Ripper. Just as serial killers are often regarded as a modern and primarily American phenomenon (the term 'serial killer' was apparently first coined in the 1970s by either former FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler or LAPD detective Pierce Brooks, depending where your research leads you), the widespread popularity of the serial killer film is also a comparatively recent development. A UK region B review of VENGEANCE IS MINE / FUKUSHÛ SURUWA WARENAI by Slarek
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