Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me remains the best-known of Thompson’s novels, though it is also one of the more extreme ones, perhaps rivaled in its exploration of violence and psychopathology only by his later novels Savage Night (1953) and Pop. 1280 (1964)[1]. It is thus a good illustration of the reasons why Thompson’s novels were never adapted to film during the original noir cycle. At the same time, it is no surprise that, after the collapse of the Production Code made it thinkable to bring Thompson’s fiction to the big screen, The Killer Inside Me was both one of the first Thompson novels to be adapted to film and one of the hardest to adapt faithfully. Thus, the 1976 adaptation—which showed little in the way of graphic violence and only hinted at just how psychopathic Ford might be, was not at all successful. Polito called it a “car wreck” of a movie and noted that Thompson himself (who died in 1977) was horrified by it (497).one of the best and one of the darkest works by this famously dark author, is an excellent example of the reasons why Thompson’s novels were never adapted to film during the original film noir cycle.However, Michael Winterbottom’s 2010 adaptation is much more faithful and a much better film.
Were an unwitting and uninitiated reader to pick up and start to read a copy of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me, having no idea what to expect, they would immediately be plunged into a classic noir setting as the first person narrator describes having pie and coffee at a late-night diner. We will eventually learn that this narrator is Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford. He seems an affable sort, joking with the waitress (a newcomer to town) that he doesn’t need to carry a gun or other weapons because Central City has so little crime. As he leaves the diner, he accepts the thanks of the “Greek” proprietor for helping to set the man’s once-arrant son onto the straight and narrow. Ford responds with a barrage of clichés, which (at first) seems to suggest that he might be a bit shy and uncomfortable with praise. The deputy, it would seem, is an all-around good guy. However, as Ford steps out into the “cool West Texas night,” his thoughts suggest that the clichés were a puzzling form of unprovoked hostility. Then he finds a bum waiting for him on the street as the chapter ends.
In the second chapter, in a flashback to three months earlier, Ford is assigned to run an apparent prostitute, Joyce Lakeland, out of town. When Joyce talks back to him with surprising defiance, Ford becomes enraged and feels his “sickness” (which he has apparently been attempting to suppress for some time) coming on. He then viciously beats the woman, though he stops short of seriously injuring her at this point. She herself seems to have a perverse streak that makes her actually enjoy the beating, though Ford’s violence, especially against women (though also against men), will escalate to a deadly level of brutality as the novel proceeds. Meanwhile, this chapter ends as we loop back to the end of the first chapter. The bum innocently asks Ford for a handout, and Ford (his sickness having been fully released by months of sado-masochistic sex with Joyce by this time) responds by grinding a burning cigar into the man’s hand, obviously relishing this opportunity to inflict pain. By this time, even before he embarks on a string of brutal murders, it is clear that Ford is not your typical protagonist and that we are likely to be traveling into shocking territory.
Ford as it turns out, is a genuine psychopath who has engaged in disturbing behavior since his childhood—with hints that his physician father might have been a psychopath as well, though perhaps with more control over his impulses. Part of the problem with the 1976 adaptation was that Lou Ford was played by Stacey Keach, an actor with a sinister aspect that led him to be cast, a few years later, as the sadistic private detective Mike Hammer in a television film and then a television series based on the fiction of Mickey Spillane. But a key element of Lou as a character in the novel is that he conceals his violent and perverse tendencies by looking so innocent and harmless. For that reason, the casting of baby-faced Casey Affleck in the role for the 2010 remake seemed quite promising, especially after Affleck’s impressive Oscar-nominated performance as Robert Ford in the noir-inflected Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)[2]. That promise of potential faithfulness to Thompson’s novel is largely fulfilled in Affleck’s harrowing performance in The Killer Inside Me, even if his periodic voiceover narration is not entirely able to capture the tension of Lou’s narration in the novel, which brilliantly reflects the violent rage that seems on the verge of erupting from beneath his affable exterior at any moment. The rest of the film is surprisingly faithful to the original novel as well, including a number of graphic scenes of violence, much of it sexual. Indeed, director Michael Winterbottom has said in interviews that fidelity to the original was one of his key goals in making the film.
This faithfulness to the original means that The Killer Inside Me can be a highly uncomfortable viewing experience—probably more uncomfortable than the novel itself, largely because we can actually see the violence on the screen[3]. A great deal of this violence is directed at women, who here have none of the power and agency of the classic femme fatale character. There are, in this film, only two important female characters. Jessica Alba plays the prostitute Joyce Lakeland as very much the ravishing beauty that she is described as being in the novel—as opposed to the rumpled and aging whore she appears to be as portrayed by Susan Tyrell in the 1976 film, where her contrast with the seemingly wholesome schoolteacher Amy Stanton (Tisha Sterling) is quite stark. In the 2010 film, Kate Hudson plays Amy in a way that places her much closer to Joyce in character. Indeed, Lou is struck (as he is in the novel) by the extent to which they remind him of each other. Some of that might be his own projection, of course, but the one thing the film seems to suggest is that both women are willing to tolerate Lou’s sexual violence (though it appears that Joyce genuinely enjoys the pain he inflicts, while Amy is merely willing to tolerate it as the price of being with him). Then again, it is not clear how much of the women’s compliance is filtered through Lou’s distorted perceptions and thus presented to us inaccurately. In the cases of both women, though, this compliance makes Lou’s treatment of them seem more horrifying, rather than less, the physical violence extending to psychological domination. Meanwhile, Lou does not hesitate to murder men as well as women, but he murders the men relatively quickly, such as by gunshot or strangling and does not appear to particularly relish. But he appears to murder both Joyce and Amy by beating them to death with shocking brutality. Granted, we learn in a plot twist that Joyce actually survived the beating, but then he murders her again, just before he is himself killed. There is, in fact, an inevitability to Lou’s ultimate demise, and one can feel his fate closing in on him from the very moment his long-dormant “sickness” is triggered by the first sight of Joyce Lakeland.
All of this brutality is conveyed in a film that is extremely well crafted. For one thing, iven the focus on character, it is crucial that the film is extremely well acted. But the film has extremely high production values throughout. It is well lighted and beautifully shot, its elaborate set dressings evoking its early-1950s Texas setting in a way that seems almost too gorgeous, setting the film starkly apart from the typical film of the original noir cycle, which added to the noir atmosphere with low-key lighting and rough-hewn cinematography. Music was also key to the creation of atmosphere in the original noir cycle, typically through the use of ominous (original) jazz-inflected soundtracks. With rare exceptions—such as several noir Westerns or Reign of Terror (1949, aka The Black Book), set during the French Revolution—the original noir films were set in a time contemporary with their making and release, so that creating period atmosphere was not really an issue. Made more than half a century after the setting of the film, The Killer Inside Men, on the other hand, effectively creates a 1950s atmosphere both visually and through the use of actual popular music from the 1950s or slightly before. Much of this music tilts toward the blues, though it also includes Country-and-Western tracks intended to evoke the Texas setting, such as Al Petty’s “Steel Guitar Wobble” and other steel guitar music. Particularly crucial is Spade Cooley’s “Shame on You,” which actually dates back to 1944 but definitely has a 1950s feel, reminiscent of the better-known music of Hank Williams, Sr.[4] This song appears on the soundtrack during the film, is briefly at one point sung by Lou himself, and then accompanies the apocalyptic ending[5].
This use of so much recognizable music, much of it very upbeat, combines with the seemingly excessive visual artistry of The Killer Inside Me to create a conflict between the film’s style and content, producing a sort of Brechtian estrangement effect that signals to viewers that they should be thinking about the meaning of this film in a critical way. This aspect of the film sets it apart from the original noir cycle, which was typically characterized by a remarkable synchrony between noir style and noir content. Here, though, one finds none of the Expressionistic light-and-shadow effects or heavily stylized exchanges of snappy dialogue that characterize the typical film of the original noir cycle, while the content is darker than that of any film in the original noir cycle.
The Killer Inside Me is a hard film to love, thanks largely to the fact that so many of its scenes are simply unpleasant to watch. On its initial release, some critics were outright dismissive of the film as a total failure, as was the case with A. O. Scott of the New York Times. Among the film’s initial critics, even those who appreciated the film’s artistry tended to fall short of praising the film overall. Roger Ebert’s review of the film was fairly negative, largely based on his sense that Ford, as played by Affleck, “remains a vast empty lonely cold space,” leaving viewers little with which to connect. But this emptiness, of course, is precisely the point to Ford and the key to what makes him such a frightening character. Though intelligent and well- (though self-) educated, Ford believes in nothing, loves nothing, and has no moral compass whatsoever. One gets the sense that there is almost nothing he wouldn’t do, to the point that it comes as no surprise that he ultimately destroys himself—but in an apocalyptic ending that also takes out as many other people as possible, while destroying the home in which he has lived his entire life and in which he was first exposed to perversion.
The 1950s have been the object of more cultural nostalgia than any other decade, based partly on a recognition that so many important aspects of later American culture (such as television and rock ’n’ roll) were still in their infancy. But 1950s nostalgia also depends on the notion that American society at that time was itself younger, simpler, and more innocent than it would soon become. This memory, of course, is selective and was furthered by idealized contemporary representions such as television sitcoms. But this picture partial and elides many aspects of the 1950s that were deeply oppressive for large numbers of people who were, on the basis of race gender, or class, excluded from many of the positive aspects of life in the America of the 1950s. The brutality of The Killer Inside Me sheds particular light on gender inequities and misogynistic tendencies during this period, though other aspects of inequality in America are also addressed, but in more subtle ways. Highlighting the era’s racism, there is clear ethnic condescension in the way Lou regards “the Greek” Pappas (Ali Nazary) and the Greek’s son Johnnie (Liam Aiken). Lou will eventually murder Johnnie in an act made to seem even more heinous by the rather simple-minded trust that Johnnie places in Lou[6]. It is important to remember, though, that we receive information about Johnnie from Lou’s point of view, so it is impossible to know how simple-minded he might really be or how much of his depiction is due to Lou’s racist assumption that Johnnie’s ethnicity makes him less intelligent. Meanwhile, the local rich capitalist Chester Conway (Ned Beatty) looms in the margins of The Killer Inside Me as a corrupt and sinister figure. Again, his negative characterization might be treated as reflection of Lou’s view of him, given Lou’s suspicion that Conway had been responsible for the death of Lou’s adoptive brother. However, other characters view Conway with suspicion as well. In addition, capitalist figures tend to be treated negatively throughout the fiction of Thompson, a former member of the Communist Party who maintained certain leftist leanings despite his disillusionment with politics in general by the 1950s.
The original noir films have been widely noted for their presentation of the dark side of the American dream, a presentation that stood in stark contrast with official Cold War images of American righteousness and prosperity. However, whatever the specific content of the imagery in The Killer Inside Me,the general air of perversion and corruption that pervades the film goes so far beyond anything in the original noir cycle that the seriousness of the social critique in the original cycle is called into question. Indeed, what has often been seen as an exposé of the dark underbelly of American society in the original noir cycle suddenly looks almost more like a cover-up, the tameness of the material allowed by the Production Code throwing a blanket over the truly darkest aspects of America.
The original noir films have their crazed killers, of course, and the killings even sometimes have a sexual element to them. Probably the best example here would be the sinister Harry Powell (played by noir icon Robert Mitchum) in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955). But even in this film, which is extreme enough to be often considered a horror film, the violence is mostly just hinted at, without any of the kinds of graphic scenes we see in The Killer Inside Me. In addition, The Night of the Hunter includes some of the most striking (and most stylized) Expressionist visuals in all of the original noir cycle, creating an effect of artistry that tends to make the perverse violence seem stylized and artificial, while Powell is also made less threatening by the fact that he is ultimately killed by a kindly little old lady (played by one-time silent film star Lillian Gish).
The contrast between the bright surface of American society as depicted in official visions and dark depths of American society as probed by The Killer Inside Me is striking, much more striking than the same contrast in the original noir films. Meanwhile, Lou himself embodies this same contrast in the stark contrast between his harmless-looking external appearance and the vicious killer that lurks inside him. Indeed, this contrast is one of the key reasons why he is such an effective character—and why the casting of Affleck in the role was so much more effective than the casting of Keach in the 1976 film.
All in all, the extreme nature of The Killer Inside Me, a film set in the 1950s and based on a well-known novel from the 1950s can be taken both as a criticism of the sanitized memories that so often feature in nostalgic representations of the 1950s and as a criticism of the limited nature of such criticism that is contained in the original noir cycle, suggesting that these films weren’t violent enough to fulfill their apparent mission. Yet the film’s extreme violence can be interpreted in the opposite way as well. In a contemporary review, Peter Bradshaw, gave the film only 3 of a possible 5 stars, largely because he found the film’s ultra-violence unpleasant to watch. Ultimately, though, he had a great deal of praise for the way this violence is portrayed in the film, which he saw as a “seriously intentioned movie, which addresses and confronts the question of male hate and male violence in the form of a nightmare.” In particular, Bradshaw saw the film as a critique of, rather than a glorification of the misogyny and sexual violence that it portrays. Moreover, he sees the film as a powerful critique of the way violence, including sexual violence, is so often represented in Western culture. For him, this film
is confronting the audience with the reality of sexual violence and abusive power relations between the sexes that cinema so often glamourises. Here, the movie is saying, here is the denied reality behind every seamy cop show, every sexed-up horror flick, every picturesque Jack the Ripper tourist attraction, every swooning film studies seminar on the Psycho shower scene. Here. This is what we are actually talking about.
Here, of course, the film is walking a difficult line. Other films that have critiqued the glorification of violence by showing violence so extreme that surely no one would find it glorious have fallen afoul of the fact that audiences are so conditioned to glorified violence that they automatically parse violence as entertainment, rather than as critique. One thinks, for example, of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), one of the few noir films produced during the peak years of the neo-noir cycle that critically confronts the noir tradition in a mode more typical of the noir inflected films of the twenty-first century. However, the critique of noir is oblique and merely implied in this film, which was more directly intended as a critique of the representation of violence in the contemporary mass media. Unfortunately, the representation of violence in this film (accompanied by a full array of fancy postmodern filmmaking techniques, such as embedded parodies of specific genres) was widely interpreted as spilling over into the glorification of violence, however unintentional.
The Killer Inside Me, though, eschews fancy techniques and presents its stomach-turning violence in a way that would seem to be virtually impossible for any healthy viewer to find entertaining. Clearly not a mere exploitation film, this is a film whose complexities bear considerable examination. But it is also a film that suggests the re-examination of the original noir films as well, asking whether these films were really effective as a means of social critique or whether they ultimately did more to hide than reveal the dark side of American society.
Works Cited
Bradshaw, Peter. “The Killer Inside Me.” The Guardian, 3 June 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jun/03/the-killer-inside-me-review. Accessed 17 December 2023.
Brummer, Jamie. “Gothic Noir: Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and the Crooked Game of Post-World War II America.” Gothic Studies, vol. 20, nos. 1-2, November 2018, pp. 199–213.
Ebert, Roger. “The Killer Inside Me.” RogerEbert.com, 23 June 2010, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-killer-inside-me-2010. Accessed 21 October 2023.
Gjelsvik, Anne. “What Novels Can Tell that Movies Can’t Show.” Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, Edited by Jorgen Bruhn, et al., Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, pp. 245–64.
Jamieson, Gill. “Adapting The Killer Inside Me and the Dynamics of Deviance from Page to Screen.” Crime Uncovered: Antihero. Edited by Fiona Peters and Rebecca Stewart, Intellect Books, 2015, pp. 58–71.
Polito, Robert. Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. Vintage-Random House, 1995.
Scott, A. O. “The Pulp Inside Him as It Turns to Rot.” New York Times, 17 June 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/movies/18 killer.html. Accessed 21 October 2023.
Notes
[1] The extremity of The Killer Inside Me is such that Jamie Brummer has argued that it should be read within the context of the Gothic novel, which Brummer argues helps us to understand its critique of the “cheery jingles, progressive propaganda, and comforting commercialism of America’s dominant cultural narrative” (211).
[2] For a fuller discussion of Affleck’s appropriateness for the role, see Jamieson.
[3] For an extended attempt to understand why watching the film is more disturbing than reading the novel, see Gjelsvik.
[4] Cooley was a prominent Country artist of the period, though his music might have been chosen for this film partly because he was convicted of the 1961 murder of his wife, spending the remaining eight years of his life in prison.
[5] The soundtrack also includes classical orchestral and operatic tracks, possibly to emphasize Lou’s intellectuality. Indeed, at one point late in the film, Lou himself plays Bach on the piano in his home (though not very well).
[6] Greeks appeared in several films of the original noir cycle, serving as relatively non-controversial markers of ethnicity. These characters are often treated with condescension, as with the mechanic Nick (Nick Dennis) in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), whose murder is treated by protagonist Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) almost like the death of a beloved pet.