M (1931): Fritz Lang and the First Serial-Killer Film

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Watch enough crime films and you start to feel the whole genre bending back toward one point of origin, the way iron filings arrange themselves around a magnet you cannot see. That point is a chalk letter pressed onto the shoulder of a coat in Berlin, 1931. Fritz Lang’s M is the film where the serial killer stopped being a penny-dreadful bogeyman and became a case — a man to be hunted, catalogued, profiled and, most unsettlingly of all, understood. Everything that followed, from the wall of index cards to the psychiatrist explaining the childhood, is downstream of ninety-nine minutes Lang made at the exact moment German cinema was learning to talk.

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M (1931): Fritz Lang and the First Serial-Killer Film