Discussion Criminal Justice

A comment from Murray Ewing: “Dracula isn’t just the source of so many vampire novels and films, it’s also at the fountainhead of another modern genre, the serial killer story. And this makes much more sense when you blend Renfield and the Count into one figure. That’s when you get the sort of monomaniacal, over-clever but bloody-handed and unbalanced psychopath you see in Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs (where again we get the high/low split of the serial killer into the lofty Lecter and the lowly Buffalo Bill, only this time it’s Lecter who’s locked up and Buffalo Bill who’s loose), as well as countless other serial killer films. Just as Renfield makes obsessive notes of his fly-and-spider eating experiments in a little folded-up paper notebook, so the serial killer of Se7en puts together the scrapbooks that make up the film’s title sequence; just as Buffalo Bill invests his obsession with transformation into his keeping and breeding of Death’s Head Moths, Renfield obsessively collects insects (including “The Acherontia Atropos of the Sphinges, what you call the ‘Death’s-head Moth’”). And just like Count Dracula, these serial killers have borderline supernatural abilities in being able to kill with such horrendous violence then disappear into the night.
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In effect, she (Mina) becomes a female Renfield, and it is at this point that Renfield, now superficial to the plot, is killed, most bloodily, by the Count. And here we get another moment from Stoker that never fails to surprise me, as Mina insists that, even while the men track down the Count with the sole intent of killing him in revenge for damning her to Hell, they have pity on him. (After all, she says, “perhaps… some day… I too may need such pity.”) Mystically linked to the Count as she now is, she can also provide information as to where he is and what he’s doing. And so Stoker touches on another archetype of the modern serial killer myth — the serial-killer hunter, or psychological profiler, who can enter the mind of the killer, to the dangerous extent of empathising with, even becoming taken over by, him.  www.murrayewing.co.uk/…/05/29/whats-the-point-of-renfield
Although Dracula does have some human characteristics, he lacks others.  **Do Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill lack some of the characteristics associated with human identity?