With his cousin and frequent collaborator David Everitt, Queens College professor Harold Schechter published The Manly Movie Guide, which gives the lowdown on "movies that shoot first and ask if it makes sense later." But his true calling is reporting real-life murder and mayhem. He and Everitt are co-authors of the excellent A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (an invaluable book to read on an airplane, should you wish to avoid conversation with your seatmates).

Unlike most true-crime writers, Schechter bypasses current events and delves into America's horrific history. His notorious subjects include cannibal and child-murder Albert Fish, original Psycho Ed Gein, nineteenth-century Chicago criminal H.H. Holmes (considered to be America's first serial killer), and violent "Gorilla Man" Earle Leonard Nelson. The latest in Schechter's series of horrific historical sketches is Fiend, which focuses on adolescent killer Jesse Pomeroy. In spite of his busy teaching and writing schedule, Schechter was kind enough to speak with LeisureSuit Media by phone and provide some expert insight on our country's favorite pastime: murder.

Why are we so obsessed with murder?
On one hand, you know, deep down inside, human beings are beasts who like blood and seeing other people suffer and so on. But at the same time I think the other part of us has become more civilized. As Freud says, the centuries have progressed, and so we don’t allow ourselves anymore to directly indulge in the kind of things people used to enjoy--like actually torturing people or watching them being tortured. So it titillates the shadow side of us. Basically I’m a sort of unreconstructed Freudian. I believe that reading about these things both lets us release some of these very dark impulses and lets us manage the anxieties about things we don’t have any control over...like the realities of violence in the world or our vulnerability to crime.

Didn't you once debate Senator Joe Lieberman on this very topic?
I wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times after the movie Money Train came out...there was controversy about that because a couple of kids torched a token booth clerk [echoing a scene in the movie] and there was this whole outcry about it and Lieberman got into the act. My op-ed piece basically argued that it was impossible to draw any cause and effect between popular art and extreme acts of violent criminality--that anything can instigate a psycho. I mean, Charles Manson listened to Beatles albums!

Anyway, it led to this public debate between Lieberman and me. I was essentially arguing that first of all, popular culture is probably less violent now than it used to be. I brought a lot of examples to prove my point, going back to the 1840s. And also, I was arguing that far from instigating violent behavior popular culture serves as a kind of social safety valve. Lieberman came with all this ridiculous video of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and [said] how dangerous that kind of thing was.

I pointed out that when he was a child--which is roughly when I was a child--there were 31 violent Westerns on prime-time TV, half of which had the word "gun" in the title. "Gunsmoke," "Have Gun Will Travel," "The Rifleman," "Colt .45"...you know, all we did when we were growing up was to shoot other kids with cap guns and stuff. It didn’t turn us into a generation of killers. On the contrary, it turned us into a "peace and love" generation.

I was basically saying that the government should pay Hollywood to make movies like Money Train, because they’re really ways that mass audiences, (which might otherwise feel very, very frustrated with the failure of established law enforcement agencies that can’t do anything substantial about crime) can see scenes of bad people getting punished by good people.

What's the relationship between the number of fictionalized serial killers and real-life ones?
I think there are relatively very few serial killers, vis-à-vis the population at large, and I don’t think there are any more than there have ever been. In terms of the number of serial killers, nobody knows for sure. The standard figure that the FBI is always reciting is maybe 50. I guess they’re just figuring there’s one in every state [laughs]. Out of those 50 I guess a great preponderance of them are garden-variety. Like guys who dismember prostitutes and stuff.

Are serial killers a relatively new phenomenon, or has the Information Age just made us more aware of an old problem?
I think people thought "Ooh, there’s this new horrible monster around" the serial killer, basically because somebody came up with a new name for something that had always been part of society. They used to be called different things, like lust murderers and homicidal maniacs and sex criminals and so forth.

I think that the prevalence of the serial killer in popular art is a reflection of the way that the serial killer is our perfect monster. Every period has [horror]stories. The monsters will take different forms depending on what’s going on in the culture. So Hannibal Lecter is our [modern] version of Dracula. Grimm's fairy tales are incredibly disturbing. It’s very significant that our children respond to them so strongly.

We need horror stories, scary stories, and stories about monsters, and we need them from a very young age. Basically what’s going on in these things is you’re taking fears and anxieties and putting a name and a shape to them, which makes them less threatening, and then casting them into stories. Freud tells us we make the things that scare us into games. Make-believe makes them less fearful to us.

What’s been your most intriguing case study?
I’d have to say Albert Fish. It was very disturbing, because he preyed on children and at the time I was researching the book my own children were small. He was one of the sickest people who ever lived.