The 'serial killer' has become increasingly prevalent in popular culture since the term was coined by Robert Ressler at the FBI in the mid-1970s. Murders and Acquisitions explores the social and political implications of this cultural figure. The collection argues that the often blood-chilling representations of the serial killer and serial killing offered in TV series, films, novels and fan productions function to address contemporary concerns and preoccupations. Focusing on well-known popular culture texts, such as The Wire, Kiss the Girls, Monster, the Saw series, American Psycho, The Strangers, CSI and Dexter, this eclectic anthology engages with a broad spectrum of cultural theory and performs critical textual analysis to examine the sophisticated ways the serial killer is deployed to mediate and/or work through cultural anxieties and fears.

Acknowledgments1. Dissecting the "Dark Passenger": Reading Representations of the Serial Killer (Alzena MacDonald)2. 'Made-up and Made-over': Faking the Serial Killer and the Serial Killer Fake (Sara L. Knox)3. Serial Killing, Surveillance and the State (Alzena MacDonald)4. Forced Entry: Serial killer Pornography as a Patriarchal Paradox (Robert Cettl)5. Defining Deviance: The Rearticulation of Aileen Wuornos in Monster (Kumarini Silva and Danielle Rousseau)6. "LOOK AT ME": Serial Killing, Whiteness, and (In)visibility in the Saw Series (Mark Bernard)7. Shopping and Slaying, Fucking and Flaying: Serial Consumption in American Psycho (Christina Lee)8. 'Slash Production': Objectifying the Serial 'Kiler' in Euro-Cult Cinema Fan Production (Oliver Carter)9. Do Serial Killers Have Good Taste? (Louis Bayman)10. Defacing the Acquisitions: A Museal-Analysis of Serial Killing Horror in Cinema (Janice Baker)11. "There's Blood on the Walls": Serial Killing as Post-9/11 Terror in The Strangers (Philip L.Simpson)12. Hunting Minds, Hunting Genes: From Profiling to Forensics in TV Serial Killer Narratives (Sofia Bull)13. Homme Fatal: Illegitimate Pleasures in Darkly Dreaming Dexter (David Buchbinder and Ann Elizabeth McGuire)List of ContributorsIndex