#SERIAL HUNTER STEPHANE BOURGOIN HANSEN SERIAL#
#SERIAL HUNTER STEPHANE BOURGOIN HANSEN SERIES#

Before leaving the dinner, she asked him to write up a pitch for a documentary, and soon enough they were at work together on a film.

#SERIAL HUNTER STEPHANE BOURGOIN HANSEN SERIAL#

Yet Kehringer also knew him to be what she called a “walking library”, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his preferred subjects, and that evening, for every question she asked about serial killers, Bourgoin offered an extensive response. “He was a charming young man,” a friend from that period told me, “who had an extreme attraction to the macabre.” He kept a trove of photographs of cadavers in various states of mutilation, which he liked to show around, and also delighted in telling the story of his mother’s first husband, a German who had been decapitated by the Nazis.

#SERIAL HUNTER STEPHANE BOURGOIN HANSEN SERIES#

Among these was a hand-labelled series of recorded newscasts, showing all manner of accidents and natural disasters. These skewed sharply toward the bizarre and, increasingly, the gruesome.īourgoin was a lover of cinema, and the walls of his apartment were lined with an immense collection of VHS cassettes.

Yet he tended to grow quite animated – blue eyes shimmering, his speech breathy and fervent, a mischievous smile spreading over his lips – when discussing his pet interests. He spoke in a small, satiny voice there was something vaguely spectral about him. Before the bookshop, he had been an assistant on the sets of a few minor pornographic movies. His frame was slight and boyish, but he had grown rather doughy by his late 30s, with a pot belly and a pallid complexion that suggested, along with his spectacles, a sedentary life in the half-light of the margins. Bourgoin ran Au Troisième Oeil – “The Third Eye” – a tiny secondhand bookshop specialising in mysteries and crime. She was fond of him, but also found him to be “a bit out of sync”, she said, “always in his own little world”. “I started asking him all sorts of questions,” she said, “and the more he spoke, the more I thought to myself: ‘We’ve got to do a film!’”īourgoin was a friend of Kehringer’s parents, and Kehringer had known him since she was a child. Kehringer was then in her 20s, starting out as a television producer. “We were utterly captivated,” Carol Kehringer, who was among Bourgoin’s guests that night, recalled recently. They listened, as millions of other French-speakers would listen in the decades to come, horrified, nauseated and rapt.īourgoin told his invitees of the FBI programme, of the traits of the typical killer, and of some of the more awful American specimens. Bourgoin’s guests were barely familiar with the concept at all. The serial killer was not yet a cultural vogue in France, much less the cliche it was already becoming elsewhere. That phrase, and the notion that such criminals were a breed apart, impelled by a special, sexualised depravity, really entered into the popular imagination only in the 1970s, and then mostly in the US, where the FBI had established a unit of so-called “profilers” to catch them. But these people had not been understood as “serial killers”. As a cultural trope, the string of mysterious homicides had of course been a fixture around the world since at least the time of Jack the Ripper, and the French more specifically had been acquainted with the idea since as early as the 15th century, when the nobleman Gilles de Rais was found to have kidnapped, tortured and ritualistically murdered nearly 150 young children.

The figures for camera movement and Scale of Shot are not the total numbers for those films, but normalized to the number per 500 shots.O ne night in the early 1990s, at a dinner party at his home in Paris, Stéphane Bourgoin, an author and bookseller then of no particular renown, began to hold forth on the matter of serial killing. The 'Country' column only contains an entry if the film was entirely financed from one country, and the 'Studio' column only contains an entry if one major studio financed the film. 't' means that it is a 'made for television' movie, 'v' means that it went straight to video, 'a' means that it is an animated film, 'd' means that it is a documentary. In the 'Scope' column, 's' means the intended projection aspect ratio of the film is 1:2.35 or 1:2.2. In the table of ASLs, their length is calculated at 24 frames per second for sound films, and silent films are calculated at the projection speed that gives natural movement. Shots running under the main titles are NOT included, but any title included in the main body of the film is counted as a shot. If there is a pre-credit sequence longer than one minute, this is added on to the data. All the data in these tables is for the complete length of the films, taken between the director credit and the end title.

Serial hunter stephane bourgoin hansen