Too human inhuman: a paradigm shift in contemporary crime fiction

Abstract

Actual sociology of deviance outlines moral pluralism or even fragmentation which characterize the social moral order. The paper assumes that social reality can be mirrored in media products, influencing their cultural trends, due to the fact that in the consumer society the product should maintain its appeal to the public. The actual moral ambiguity of social order has been thus resembled in crime fiction. The analysis clearly shows a transformation through a historical confrontation of serial killer mediatized representations, comparing Hitchcock’s Norman Bates in Psycho, and the character of Dexter from the homonymous tv show. The paper outlines a passage from the ‘monsterification’ of the former’s psychopathy to the humanization of the latter’s homicidal inhumanity.