The woman is lying on the bed. It does not move. It is almost like sleeping. Until a man threw himself astride on it. He growls. Let a trickle of drool. Then, he puts a trash bag on the head. The situation is much more sordid than it looks. This poor unknown is the first victim of Fritz Honka, a serial killer cradingue of Golden Glove .

” READ ALSO – Golden Glove: killer without honeymoon

The feature-length film of Fatih Akin poses from the outset the character of Honka (Jonas Dassler): a killer infamous to the physical ungrateful. Nose potato, divergent squint, oral cavity that would give nightmares to many dentists… After M the Damned, Hannibal Rising, and other killers perverse that the seventh art has given birth for over a century, the sadism disgusting Honka deserved that one focuses on the appeal of cinema meurtier in series. As often, Stéphane Bourgoin, the largest specialist of serial killers from France, brings a light on this passion criminal.

“The image seems faithful to the reality of the facts, he said. Fritz Honka was very small and totally complexed. His victims were all women smaller than him. Mainly prostitutes. He lived in an attic on the last floor of a building in Hamburg, where he kept the body he sprinkled water from Cologne to disguise the smell.”

as Much prevent, the film from Fatih Akin is bathed in the filth. The director of Soul Kitchen shows what the viewer does not want to see (a choke-ultra-realistic or a rape with a sausage in Frankfurt…). To install its atmosphere of doom and gloom, he puts his camera in the apartment of Honka – the walls of which are decorated with pornographic pictures – and then in the middle of the “Zum Goldenen Handschuch” (“The Golden Glove”), a PMU seedy, populated pochtrons names not possible (Gunther buffer, Uschi the booze, Norbert SS) where to hangout Honka.

A character of myth victorian

The killer Akin is not the only assassin to have the headlines in germany. “It is a country well known in the field of serial killers, while he has experienced a lot,” says Stéphane Bourgoin. Some of the most deadly of the history.” Among them, Fritz Haarmann “the Butcher of Hanover” and Peter Chooses “the Vampire of Düsseldorf”, two killers to trends cannibals who inspired the tenderness of The wolves , a film by Ulli Lommel produced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the famous murderer tormented by Fritz Lang in M-The Cursed .

” READ ALSO – serial killers French: between terror and fascination.

Since Metropolis , the figure of the serial killer has not ceased to be of interest to the filmmakers, the terrifying Hannibal Rising by Jonathan Demme, to the elusive John Doe of Seven by way of Norman Bates in Psychosis.. . “Since the silence of The lambs , I’ve identified close to 10,000 feature-length films centred on the figure of the serial killer, says Stéphane Bourgoin. And this figure does not take account of the killers related to supernatural phenomena such as Freddy Krueger.”

As explain this fascination? “The serial killer is part of the narrative tradition of the myth of victorian of the monster, in the tradition of Dracula and Frankenstein, writes Stéphane Bourgoin. Today, he represents both the ogre, the werewolf and the vampire stories and legends of the past”. In other words, he is the one who best embodies the figure of the “monster in our modern societies”.

assassins fantasy

On the screen, the archetype of the killer is not fixed. This hydra infamous has several faces: to the perverse, the schizophrenic or the elusive killer, as one can cross it in Memories of Murder or Zodiac . There’s also the aesthete and the narcissist, who imagine their crimes as a form of art Matt Dillon, Christian Bale had loaned their traits in The House That Jack Built and American Psycho .

” READ ALSO – Stéphane Bourgoin: “serial killers are much more frightening in the reality”

assassins fantasy, according to Stéphane Bourgoin: “The film and the series return a false picture of reality,” says the specialist, who interviewed 77 killers in the series for 40 years. Take Hannibal Rising who is the curator of a museum in Venice, the lover of wine and literature. He was always one step ahead of the police. Among all the killers I’ve encountered, none was as sophisticated. Including Ed Kemper, the serial killer “star” of the first season of Mindhunter whose iq was higher than Einstein.”

what, therefore, resemble those men devoid of empathy? That is what motivates them to commit horrendous acts? And this many repetitions… “serial killers can be animated by impulses, often sexual, but what matters most to them, it is the feeling of power that they experience when they kill, explains Stéphane Bourgoin. These people are complexed. By killing, they are no longer victims.” This is true for Fritz Honka, killer helpless and sticky.

● advice cinéma de Stéphane Bourgoin on the killers in series:

* Henry, Portrait Of A Serial Killer by John McNaughton (1986), “this film is considered by Martin Scorsese as one of the best movies of all time”.

* Tony, A London Serial Killer by Gerard Johnson, 2009, “for its realistic”.

* Memories of Murder Bong Joon-ho, 2002, “for its design worked”.

* Scene of crime , by Frédéric Schoenfoerffer, 2000, “for the investigation”.