'Made-up and made-over' : faking the serial killer and the serial killer fake

In the decades since the peak of the serial killing crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s-an era that saw the trials of some of the biggest names in the pop cult pantheon of killers1-serial killing has become "something to do (a lifestyle, career, or calling)," and the serial killer, as Mark Seltzer (1998, 4) puts it, identifiable "as something to be (a species of person)." The serial killer still routinely features large in the true crime genre, and is drawn frequently in those genres that have made his (or, less frequently, her) name: the thriller, detective nair and, his exemplary realm, horror (Simpson 2000; Hutchings 2001). So, too, is the figure of the serial killer well exercised in contemporary cultural theory.