Serial Killers in Contemporary Television

Brett A.B. Robinson holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Brock University, Canada. His primary research interests are in the areas of popular culture, film and television studies, and philosophy. He has completed research on the complex intersections between selfhood and performance as well as material affect’s influence on identity. Christine Daigle is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute, Brock University. She has published extensively in continental philosophy. Her current research, funded by Canadian federal agencies and supported by a fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, pertains to the concept of posthuman vulnerability and its ethical potential.

Introduction - From the Shadows to Our Living Rooms: Serial Killers on Popular TV after 9/11; Section I A Dark Empathy: Identification with Killer Characters; 1. When the Monsters are Real (and They Understand Us): The Horror of Hannibal; 2. Born in Blood: 9/11, Trauma, Selfhood, and Dexter; 3. ‘Too Much History, Too Much Remembering’: National Trauma and Individual Trauma in The Fall; 4. From Villains to Clowns: Adapting Serial Killers to Internet Memes; Section II Death and Sex: Gendered Bodies in Serial Killer Narratives; 5. ‘He is a Murderer’: You, Fandom, and the Romanticized Male Killer; 6. The Killing Characters of Penny Dreadful; 7. The Subversive Powers of Killing Eve; 8. Better the Devil You Know: Nostalgia for the Captured Killer in Netflix’s Conversations with A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes; Section III Unknown Killers: The Ambiguity of Post-9/11 Culture; 9. Dropping the Mask of Sanity: How Mindhunter Deconstructs the Profiling Procedural; 10. True Detective and the Post-Serial Killer Text; 11. Unthinkable Crimes: Representation, Knowledge, Mindhunter