How One Iconic German Masterpiece Launched The Serial Killer Genre
Everything from Silence of the Lambs to Zodiac owes itself to Fritz Lang’s M.
Cinema’s fascination with serial killers started early, when the Portuguese drama The Crimes of Diogo Alves fictionalized the life of a notorious murderer in 1911. Over the next 20 years, crime and punishment remained predictably popular themes, catering to bloodthirsty audiences with tales about gangsters, outlaws, and murderers with bizarre psychological motives. But with his 1931 film M, which celebrates its 95th anniversary this week, Austrian director Fritz Lang established a format for decades of serial killer movies to come.
While Lang’s silent sci-fi epic Metropolis (1927) is now his more famous work, M is still considered to be one of the all-time greats, influential both on a technical level as an early masterpiece of sound film, and due to its innovations as a procedural thriller.
Set in Berlin, M tracks the public reaction to an anonymous child predator (Peter Lorre) who kidnaps little girls off the streets. As the police launch a manhunt, the city’s crime bosses organize their own search, motivated to catch the murderer so the cops will stop scrutinizing anyone with a criminal record. Meanwhile the murderer himself, a twitchy little man named Hans Beckert, fans the flames of a city-wide panic by sending a letter to the newspapers, prompting a fascinating sequence where the police use early forensic techniques to narrow down his identity.
Beckert’s letter echoes the attention-seeking nature of several real serial killers, beginning with Jack the Ripper, who allegedly wrote letters taunting the London police. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the Son of Sam and the Zodiac Killer both published letters of their own, feeding into the image of serial killers as larger-than-life figures who crave a perverse kind of celebrity status.
Unsurprisingly, Fritz Lang drew a lot of inspiration from real life. M’s council of businesslike crime kingpins was based on Berlin’s version of the mafia, the Ringvereine. Lang also took cues from gruesome homicide cases that made headlines in early 20th century Germany, including several high-profile child murders, and the work of serial killers including Carl Großmann and Fritz Haarmann.
In an article published in 1931, Lang emphasized his interest in the public’s response to these crimes, noting "a strange similarity of events, circumstances that repeat themselves almost as if natural laws were at work, such as the dreadful psychotic fear of the general public, the self-accusations of the mentally inferior, denunciations unleashing the hate and the jealousy that have built up over years of living side by side, attempts to feed the police investigators false leads, sometimes on malicious grounds and sometimes out of excessive zeal." This all plays out in M, as the city descends into paranoia.
Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert on the run from the crime ring pursuing him.
Lorre’s unnerving performance as Hans Beckert jumpstarted his later career in Hollywood, where he was often cast in sinister roles. For viewers watching today, his creepy demeanor remains effective, but is probably one of the more dated elements of the film. In other regards, however, M still feels unbelievably fresh, outstripping the conventions of procedural thrillers that came decades later.
Rather than focusing on a singular investigator, M offers an almost anthropological view of a city living in fear. We meet Berlin first through the perspective of children, Beckert’s potential victims. Then Lang expands our view via groups of police, criminals, and beggars, the latter of whom become an unofficial surveillance taskforce during the manhunt. Organized crime and law enforcement exist within the same ecosystem, temporarily uniting to face an invasive threat.
M is frequently cited as a precursor to serial killer films like Se7en, Silence of the Lambs, and Zodiac, but you could equally connect it back to Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 kidnapping drama High and Low, which is similarly fascinated by procedural logistics. Today we usually see this kind of crime story in its most simplified format, in shows like CSI and Law and Order, but Kurosawa and Lang were working before those investigative tropes were reduced to a TV-friendly formula.
In M, there’s a clear villain but no obvious heroes, offering equal airtime (and equal sympathy) to police and criminals who work toward the same goal. Beckert does get caught in the end, but the film is ambivalent about whether he can be brought to justice in any meaningful way. Even if the manhunt worked this time, Beckert’s victims are still dead and the city has no defense against the next killer who might come along, motivated by impulses that no one else can understand.
