The creature-feature horror with ghosts or vampires often relies on what you so nearly, almost, but can’t quite yet see . . . only you know it’s coming. Legend has it that neither apparition nor bloodsucker can be captured in a mirror (though it can be regularly caught on camera, apparently—Dracula’s the most-filmed non-human character); the serial-killer flick, however, derives much of its chilling fascination from the extremity of what we all know is coming. It’s existentialism at its most brutal and death at its annihilating worst—the sense that some murderers’ victims just vanish. Like a thing discarded or dismembered or dumped, the body’s simply erased, perhaps not unearthed again or, if so, forever, horribly changed—a grotesque mockery of a person once so alive. But two classics of the sub-genre, nearly a half-century apart, remind us the camera-lens can do more than just reflect our post-industrial, post-God dread of being rendered, suddenly, into non-being. Cinema’s onlooking-glass can also reflect the monstrous erasure of the victim and the replacement of the victim by the egotistical murderer himself—a nothing or nobody, seemingly incapable of self-reflection, who’s elevated into horrible notoriety for his inhumanity.

In David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007)—based on the 1968-69 Bay Area killings and one man’s investigation of them—even the name of the unknown killer looms over all, there in the title. His identity obsesses newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), as if it’s a puzzle to be solved or a code to crack (the killer sends cipher-messages and cryptograms to the press). Years later, following a film-related lead, Graysmith meets a man, Bob Vaughn (Charles Fleischer), who pulls up outside a theatre marquee. It’s a California noir-meets-Gothic scene—a dark sedan, night-time, rain, a private investigator, soon an old wooden house—but it’s the low angles, amped-up ambient noise (the loudness of the rain, the footfalls and creaks in a basement, the depth of awkward silences) and the unsettling mini-lapses in point-of-view (on occasion, we don’t see what Graysmith does until moments later or we see what Graysmith will moments before he does) which make it the film’s creepiest and eeriest sequence. It’s also a sequence dominated by tightly-controlled images and by let-loose imagination.

As Graysmith talks to Vaughn through the only half-opened glass of his passenger-side car-window, the man—an organist for a movie theatre, we soon learn—is mostly obscured by shadow. The older man’s mastery of the situation and steady, assured tone (Fleischer’s known for his voice-work,

especially as the title character in 1988 animated noir Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) alarmingly contrasts with Graysmith’s youthful naïveté as he agrees to go to his place. When we reach Vaughn’s house, though, we don’t follow them but enter first. The camera’s already inside, framing a wooden hall-closet with a full-length mirror on its door and the front door itself, opening now to admit Vaughn and his guest, both of them briefly reflected in the mirror. (Other details are slightly unsettling: there are four umbrellas hanging up, yet Vaughn didn’t take one with him on such a rainy evening; what exactly are those three old photographs on the mantle by the mirror?)

Image, imagination, and the immediate here-and-now quickly blur. After Graysmith asks Vaughn about his theatre’s projectionist, in 1969, of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), about a man hunting humans for sport, Vaughn notes that the target-like mark at the start of reels looks much like the Zodiac’s infamous signature to his letters. After Graysmith wonders about the projectionist’s writing on the film posters, which seems similar to the Zodiac’s, Vaughn tells him that he himself did all the posters. By the time they descend to Vaughn’s dark, cramped basement, Graysmith (“Not many people have basements in California”) feels he’s being hunted. (The moment’s also a metaphor for Graysmith’s obsession—even fearing the worst, he can’t help but follow Vaughn downstairs, on the off-chance he’ll be one turn closer, in this labyrinth, to confronting the Zodiac.) He panics and leaves in a rush, returning the way he came—as the teapot, no longer a harbinger of hospitality, comes to an ominous boil—and runs to the front door, where he rattles the lock, trying to leave. The camera now shows him side-on, that hall-closet mirror behind him, and Graysmith’s eyes are almost out of the frame (breaking the “rule of thirds”), staring up—presumably to see if the door’s somehow locked at the top, but it’s as if he’s seeking heavenly intervention. And so, right then, when Vaughn’s reflection only appears in the mirror, so suddenly, right behind Graysmith, it’s not just

 uncanny. It’s as if image and imagination (movie and movie-inspired fear), melding into one, have at last overtaken not only Graysmith but us, too.

Graysmith’s dread is channeling ours as we identify with this amateur detective, and it’s a self-conscious, post-modern, film-savvy dread. We know the slasher movies and serial-killer flicks and recognize their usual-suspect sequences (odd house, dark basement, creepy stranger), but it’s exactly our knowledge of those conventions that gives Graysmith’s and our dread weight—just because it only seems to happen in those earlier, more pulpy films doesn’t mean it can’t happen right here and now in this one, does it? Is this the moment the serial killer reveals himself? And what lies at the uneasy, quickening heart of it all is the film which killed off a central character long before the end, brought about the slasher and serial-killer subgenres, and launched more than a million fears of dark basements and curtained showers—another California thriller whose title proclaims the murderer in its misty midst: Psycho (1960). 

Mirrors are a recurring motif in Hitchcock’s film. They reflect back, film screen-like, flickers: of selves split by geography and circumstance (Marion and Sam, eager to marry but hobbled by his debts, after their tryst in a hotel room); of self-doubt and self-resolve (Marion looks back from her vanity mirror at the money she’s embezzled—how costly will her act of vanity prove?); of self-incrimination (the suspicious patrol officer’s car in Marion’s rear-view mirror); of split selves (good and bad Marion, in the bathroom mirror at the used-car lot, counting out bills from her envelope of stolen cash). Mirrors help us to identify with but also keep us removed from a character, setting us up all the more for the big shocker 47 minutes in when, as critic Robin Wood has pointed out, this woman-on-the-run with whom audiences have been led to identify is suddenly removed. At the moment when she feels she will come clean, having decided to return to Phoenix and turn herself in, she’s bathed in blood, killed by Norman’s mad mother-figure.

When Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) first enters Norman Bates’ realm, though, not knowing she’s slipping into a psycho’s vortex as she crosses the threshold, her reflection appears first; as in Zodiac, it’s her image, not her true self, which first appears in the office mirror there on the wall, by the counter, when she enters to register as a guest (clutching her black bag, the stolen money inside), Norman (Anthony Perkins) following.

But it’s what happens when Sam and Marion’s look-alike sister Lila (Vera Miles) returns that’s most alarming. (Psycho is a film of stand-ins, from its famous motel set to the doubles for Perkins and Leigh in the shower-scene, shot over six days.)

Sam and Lila, determined to get to the bottom of what happened at the motel, pose as a couple stopping overnight en route to San Francisco; Norman, smiling, his sleeves rolled up, acting carefree, almost has a spring in his step as he enters the office. But then, with an ever-so-slight jolt in pacing and point-in-view that Fincher and his editor Angus Wall would magnify 47 years on, after Norman goes into the office and just as Sam and Lila follow, Hitchcock and his editor George Tomasini cut to a side-on shot of the interior of the office, with Norman moving to the right of the camera—so disturbingly close to us for a moment—and Sam coming into view in the office mirror. He’s replaced Marion as possible victim, but this

time Norman’s led the way, his image not appearing in the mirror (because the cut avoided showing it). And it’s not that Norman’s image can’t appear—he’s not some vampire-like monster; we’re offered an involved psychological explanation of Norman near film’s end—but that we didn’t glimpse it, as if we haven’t yet seen his other self. This Bates-place, or baiting-space, has already hinted at Norman’s predator-ness, though. When the private investigator Arbogast visited to check the register, Norman tilted his head to the side to examine the book, the askew view of his neck and throat and chin making him seem suddenly bird-like—all beak, about to strike, or gizzard, about to devour—as if he’s little different from the winged killers he’s stuffed and mounted throughout the parlour behind the

office. And when Lila sneaks into the house, only to be startled in the bedroom by her own reflection echoing back at her in two mirrors, she’s creeping closer to discovering the grotesque alter ego behind her sister’s

vanishing—Norman recently moved his mother’s skeleton from that room to the basement, as if trying to store the secret deeper in the recesses of his depraved mind.

That alarming, vertigo-like effect Lila feels, standing between two mirrors, is a mise en abyme—“placed into abyss”. That abyss isn’t so much dark and sucking, as with the quagmire behind the motel where Norman dumps Marion’s car, but more white and blinding in Hampton Fancher’s The Minus Man (1999). There, the California-travelling Vann (Owen Wilson), in his mimicry and masquerade of masculinity, becomes a blank slate even to himself, a mirror reflecting nothing back. He’s stuck in a kind of self-blanking loop. The peripatetic Vann kills to “erase the path” his homicidal urge travelled. He kills to deny his desire and sense of self and to keep remaking his desire and sense of self. Stuck in this cycle of erasure and rebirth, he nears his fearful desire for death only to avoid it again through the killing of another. (At film’s end, Vann drives out of town, moving on, only to be followed by a state trooper . . . who soon takes a turn-off, leaving Vann free to kill again; the scene recalls the state trooper’s following of Marion on her drive to Sam in California before he turns off, only to come upon her again at the car dealership, as if her conscience has returned.)

Norman, too, can be reborn as his mother but then, unable to kill her (or his split-self) again, kills another. He’s not just one but two . . . but more people than that that fall prey to his rapacious Oedipal ego-complex.

And so, like a mirror, even as these films seem to edge us nearer to the truth (who’s the Zodiac? who killed Marion?) and the horror, they also push us away. For how can we really enter the basement of a killer’s mind, and what would it achieve? Graysmith’s obsession doesn’t lead to the Zodiac being caught or any “justice”; diagnosing Norman doesn’t return Marion to the picture, putting her back into that mirror-frame. Yet cinema’s fascination with serial killers continues, perhaps because they’re such out-sized, sinister stars of their own show—bloated, scarred, twisted egos ending the lives of others.

Works Cited

The Minus Man. Directed by Hampton Fancher, Artisan/The Shooting Gallery, 1999.

Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Universal, 1960.

Zodiac. Directed by David Fincher, Warner Bros., 2007.

The author, a professor of film studies, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All film stills are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.