Indian Predator And The 'Serialising' Of Serial Killers

This column was originally published on 27 September 2022, as part of our newsletter The Daily Show. Subscribe here . (We're awesome about not spamming your inbox!)

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The serial killer film began as a sub-category under the detective story. Among the earliest serial killers to be fictionalised was Jack the Ripper, who terrorised the impoverished parts of London (Whitechapel) in the late 19th century through the brutal murders of female sex workers. That he was never brought to book fired the imagination of filmmakers, and there are various renderings of the story in cinema. Since the Sherlock Holmes stories are roughly situated in the same period, the detective and Dr Watson are pitted against the killer in perhaps one of the best Holmes films ever, Murder by Decree (1979), starring Christopher Plummer and James Mason. 

Since then, the serial killer film has developed into a genre by itself with a vast majority of the films set in the US. The first truly noteworthy onscreen exploration of serial killers in the Indian milieu is Richie Mehta’s Delhi Crime Season 2 on Netflix — although Season 1, about the 2012 Delhi gangrape case, was more compellingly made. A documentary series, Indian Predator (also on Netflix), is not as well-crafted as Delhi Crime, but presents a more startlingly authentic picture of India. Serial killer narratives may essentially be about uncovering crimes but there is always covert discourse pointing to some mythologies and conflicts central to the societies where the films are set. Indian Predator admits many things about crime in this country that the best Indian films do not.

Looking at American films first, Dr Hannibal Lecter (made famous in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, 1991) is perhaps the most famous of the fictional serial killers. Strangely, however, in none of the films in which he appears is he the quarry, i.e. it is not his deeds that are being investigated. Lecter is actually a sympathetic character who has killed in the past but now assists the law; he is a ‘consultant’ who operates according to rational, psychoanalytical principles, and his ‘madness’ (since he is incarcerated in a psychiatric institution) is simply an effort to make him colourful — the same way Holmes’ violin playing and cocaine addiction were included to infuse him with colour. The detectives in these ‘whodunnits’ are essentially rational intelligences of the problem-solving kind; absence of colour would hurt the fiction, make it seem too dry and lacking the human factor. 

The detective’s quarry in Demme’s film, in contrast, is irrational and disturbed. An element of the occult occurs as a key one in many serial killer stories — such as the excellent HBO 2014 series True Detective Season 1, written by Nic Pizzolatto. The serial killer commits unspeakable acts but for irrational reasons. Few serial killers, for instance, kill for rational reasons like material gain. In The Silence of the Lambs, James Gumb/’Buffalo Bill’ is skinning ‘large-sized’ women to stitch himself a jacket. Dr Lecter explains the ‘psychological longing’ that the acts are fulfilling, that it is an effort to change his gender by ‘getting into a woman’s skin’. In Red Dragon the quarry kills as directed by his alternate personality, which he calls the Great Red Dragon, named after the William Blake painting ‘The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun’, which he has tattooed on his back. He believes that each victim brings him closer to becoming the Dragon, as his psychopathology originates from childhood abuse by his grandmother.  

It is particularly interesting that many of these crimes are committed in areas distant from the cultural mainstream, (i.e. places like Washington DC, New York City — representing prosperous liberal America); the bigoted Deep South is a particularly popular location to mine for such stories. This helps introduce conflict within the law since the investigating agent — usually from the FBI — is then hindered by local law enforcement. It is significant that when a film follows an actual series of events as in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) the location is California, but in fiction like True Detective (S1), the location is (more typically) Louisiana. In The Silence of the Lambs the first victim is from Belvedere, Ohio while in Red Dragon it is St. Louis, Missouri. The ‘Behavioural Science’ unit of the FBI is a key player in these narratives and Mindhunter (2017) foregrounded the innovations in setting up the unit, where we see two FBI agents (aided by a psychologist) interview serial killers like Edmund Kemper, David Berkowitz (‘Son of Sam’) and even Charles Manson. Manson was the leader of the cult that killed Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate and others in August 1969 in Beverly Hills, Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino made an ‘alternate history’ fantasy film on the subject in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) in which the killings are averted. 

The key feature here is the conflict between local law enforcement — irrational, prejudiced and ill-informed — and the (rational, scientific) FBI and I would read this as a persisting tension in the US, where the individual states are allowed enormous freedoms within the Union. The tension between Federal Law and local authority is also sharply portrayed in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988) about the slayings of four African-American activists by members of the Ku Klux Klan. I would propose that this conflict has now also been manifested (with the Trump Presidency) in the electoral space, in the hostility between Republican and Democratic America. The US may appear to outsiders like a uniformly modern nation without divergences but the conflicts portrayed in the serial killer genre suggest that divergences are getting stronger. Hollywood is considered a liberal bastion and the genre also lends credence to that viewpoint. 

Delhi Crime creator Richie Mehta is a Canadian of Indian origin. Unlike Season 1, Season 2 is fictional rather than factual, but draws from actual happenings. S2 begins with the horrifying murders of several upper-class senior citizens in a South Delhi gated colony. The modus operandi caught on camera suggests the culprits are members of the ‘Chaddi-Baniyan’ gang: Masked people clad only in their underwear break into homes, bludgeon their victims to death with crowbars or hammers, steal their valuables, make merry with any liquor and food in the house, urinate and defecate in the premises, and decamp. The gang was active in the 1990s and the question is whether it might have been revived in 2020. 

The first thought is to round up people in a particular locality all said to belong to certain ‘criminal tribes’ (thus labelled by the British), arrest and interrogate them to get leads; the ‘Chaddi-Baniyan’ gang were from the group and everyone in the area is known to the police personally, along with their criminal pasts. The tension in the TV series is between the immediate pressure to follow routine procedure and the need to investigate – voiced and carried through by the protagonist DCP Varthika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah). She, despite pressure from political interests (through the Commissioner) that want ‘quick results,’ believes in investigation, rather than torturing the suspects. 

The conflicts in the aforementioned American films and shows are between political groupings and represent an actual tension in the US between the states and the Union. But the one in Delhi Crime is a fictionalised conflict between an honest and upright individual and a corrupt system driven by political compulsions. The familiar moral in the series — both Season 1 and 2 — is that the individual can make a difference even if the system is corrupt. This is no doubt a noble sentiment but it clouds truths about how the system works, revealed much more by Indian Predator — albeit inadvertently, since it is a documentary that presents facts. 

Predator’s first season relates to decapitated bodies dumped periodically outside Tihar Jail’s gates. Normally, such crimes involving unidentified victims do not get too much attention, but the killer leaves a letter abusing the police and also makes jeering telephone calls to them. Later it is found — through the calls/letters — that the first instance of these victims being discovered by the jail occurred years ago, but was not taken cognisance of. The only way of solving the crime, since neither the fingerprints nor DNA can be identified, is through informers and it is as though the murderer seeks to be apprehended. The culprit has let it be known that he hates the police for having brutalised him for a crime he was innocent of. And he is also so sure of the law that he knows he cannot be punished unless he not only admits to the killings but also provides the police with evidence! The culprit will be acquitted unless he participates fully and enthusiastically in his own conviction.

Eventually it is discovered that the murderer is a casual labourer from a village in Bihar. His victims were all acquaintances who he was briefly angered by, and killed for their ‘bad conduct’. It is revealed in interviews with other villagers that the perpetrator was known to have gotten rid of people earlier, and hence most ‘kept their distance from him’. What this implies is that police cases were not even registered because of the social insignificance of those involved — the poor victims or the equally pathetic perpetrator. It should be the normal course in a well-governed society for citizens to report crimes. But here, the safest course was to avoid becoming one of his victims!

In the midst of such material the film also interviews a researcher/psychiatrist in charge of the ‘behavioural science’ wing of the investigative agency who tries to psychologically reason out why the culprit went about killing people. Did he have a hatred for his mother since he uses ‘mother-centered’ curses in his letters? It would appear that Indian investigative agencies perfunctorily copy US methods. In the US, individuality is a key notion and psychology is a way of profiling differences. In the spaces where Indian Predator is set, the perpetrator and victims — since no record of their existence is available — are perhaps not even ‘persons’ as they should be in a democratic country. In such a scenario, what would be the meaning of ‘psychiatric history’ or the ‘mental profiling’ of criminals? 

MK Raghavendra is a well-known film critic who has authored eight books on Indian and international cinema.