To my mind, the greatest cinematic depiction of a serial killer is Richard Attenborough’s astonishing portrayal of real-life murderer John Christie in Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place. Made fifty-one years ago—before the term “serial killer” was known to the general public—Rillington Place jettisons the psychopath archetypes entirely. Attenborough’s Christie is a tangle of chilling and pathetic characteristics—a mysterious collection of traits that are all the more terrifying in their messy, unclassifiable ambiguity.
The serial killer is an icon of evil. He (it’s almost always a he) is easy to depict, and almost certain to terrify. Both criminal investigation and pop culture are quick to brand the serial killer as a “psychopath”—incapable of human feeling. In popular culture, there are two archetypes for the psychopath serial killer. Most famously, there is the scheming Hannibal Lecter mode (a character who was cobbled together from real serial killers and some FBI spitballing.) Lecter’s psychopathy is cold, diamond-brilliant and diabolical: his absolute belief in his intellectual superiority lets him treat his pursuers and victims as mere playthings, subject to his byzantine and gruesome plots. The other kind of psychopathic serial killer, also drawn heavily from FBI profiling, are the dead-eyed monsters of shows like Mindhunter, whose affectless, monotone recitations of their grisly crimes suggest an uncanny banality, and a total detachment from normal human experience.
In an essay for The Believer, Sarah Marshall brilliantly dissects the “psychopath” label for serial killers, showing how the term obscures more than it reveals: for example, oft-reported incidences of abuse and mental illness in the killers’ childhoods, and their self-reported feelings of torment at their own impulses and actions, and their desire for love and connection that seem barred to them. We have to confront the serial killer as something much more complex: a hard-to-quantify mixture of the feeling and unfeeling, victim and victimizer, a psyche that is some tangle of ruthless violence, cruelty, cunning, and self-loathing, longing and fear that eludes neat clinical classifications.
Rillington Place, which Fleisher shoots with taut Hitchcockian suspense, gives all the thrills and baroque chills you’d want from a serial killer story. (Attenborough’s work is textured, but he goes full-throttle on the truly nasty bits.) However, the film adds another, equally horrifying layer as the story unfolds and another man is accused of (some of) Christie’s crimes. As the film becomes more of a legal thriller, Fleisher ratchets up the suspense and makes the criminal justice system as big a monster as Christie himself: equally manipulative, unfeeling, and with a thirst for death that rages on without a tinge of mercy or common sense.
The story of Christie, and the man falsely accused of his crimes, beggars belief and sparks outrage. Christie strangled at least eight women in his London apartment over the course of a decade. The film focuses on his killing of his upstairs neighbor, Beryl Evans, and her baby daughter Geraldine. Beryl’s husband, Timothy Evans, was convicted and hanged for the murders. It was not until 1953, when the bodies of Christie’s other victims were found, that doubts were raised about Evans’s guilt. Christie eventually confessed to Beryl’s murder (though he denied killing Geraldine), and was himself hanged in 1953. The case was a scandal in the UK, and sparked vociferous debate about the death penalty.
Attenborough was not eager to play a serial killer, but agreed because of the film’s social importance. Perhaps some of his distaste for the character is what makes the performance so great: shades of disgust and piggy little self-delusions make Christie both more loathsome and more human. Neither ingenious nor witless, alternatively manipulative and ingratiating and dull and soulless, he keeps both the spectator and his intended victims off-guard. Our first glimpse of him is just a sliver of his face peering through drawn curtains. He’s watching surreptitiously as one of his Early victims, Muriel Eady, approaches his door. (Eady was seeking treatment for chronic bronchitis. Christie had received some medical training during the war, and he lured his victims in with promises of special remedies. These “cures” were an excuse to gas the women, so he could subdue them before strangling them.) As he watches Muriel, his face is a pale little oval in a sea of dark gray; it betrays the predator’s triumphant elation, but also the trembling of a far more timid creature, one who’s not sure it can go through with the deed.
Once Christie gets Muriel in his kitchen, we see how he uses a veneer of prim middle-class respectability to reassure his victims. He is cheerily efficient and solicitous as he reassures his jumpy “patient.” “We’ll have a cup of tea before we start,” he says, soothingly. Christie is constantly offering his victims cups of tea, to the point where Fleisher starts shooting them in ominous close-ups. The cup of tea, an enshrined social gesture of comfort and domesticity, is a clever ruse: it’s a gesture of reassurance, true, but it’s also an offer too polite to refuse—one that might box a woman into a social situation that’s already making her a bit uncomfortable.
The film’s lurid style is surprisingly adept at illuminating Christie’s complex, yet totally horrifying, nature. Fleischer shoots the murder scenes from alternating high and low angles, to show the total dominance Christie holds over his victims as he gasses them. In close-ups, we watch Christie’s shifting moods: the little quivering anticipatory sighs as a victim starts to go under, hard eyes and a wobbly face as he quells the struggling Muriel. There’s both forensic curiosity and self-loathing in his eyes when she finally loses consciousness. When he murders his neighbor Beryl Evans, there’s a horrifying pair of matched close-ups: her eyes go wide and full of terror as she finally realizes his true intentions. Christie’s matched gaze is awful: a mixture of his steely determination and self-loathing about what he’s capable of. Deranged tenderness is quickly followed by ruthless brutality. “Don’t make me hurt you,” he whispers, before punching her violently. “Oh Beryl,” he whispers again and again, raining kisses on her head after she’s lost consciousness. his assaults on Beryl’s body grow increasingly sexual, and the camera mercifully cuts away.
But Rillington Place is unique and gripping because it knows that Christie’s awful crimes are only one part of a bunch of broader, more ordinary horrors. The film makes clear that Christie is no Lecter-style mastermind, and reminds us that serial killers do not operate in a vacuum. Christie evades suspicion in large part because of the dire state of post-War London. He exploits the miserable social conditions and the desperation of the women he encounters. Much of the film was shot in the actual 10 Rillington Place, and its cramped, oppressive atmosphere amps up the dread. Characters are pressed together in tight shots of narrow hallways and staircases. The production design evokes the scant and squalid nature of life in this place and time. The building is all dingy greys and browns, with years of grime and smoke caked onto the walls. Old Art Deco wallpaper—a remnant of more prosperous times—is slowly peeling away.
These conditions mean that victims practically fall into Christie’s lap. Muriel Eady’s bronchitis is due to the poor air quality in London during the post-War period. Aspirations to middle-class respectability, constantly threatened by the claws of poverty, make Beryl Evans a convenient victim. She’s panicking over an unplanned pregnancy that her family can’t afford. Beryl (the doe-eyed and hapless Judy Geeson) is trapped at home with no money for groceries and a baby that cries incessantly. Christie tells Beryl he can perform an abortion, which was then illegal in Britain. Beryl’s total ignorance about the procedure makes her acquiescent, and she doesn’t realize she needs to fight back until it’s too late.
When Beryl’s husband Tim (played with virtuousic sad-sackery by John Hurt) returns home to discover Beryl’s battered body, his total credulity, along with his own checkered past, makes him the perfect patsy. Like Beryl, he wants to move up in the world, but he is also illiterate, and attempts to cover it with pompous bloviating and tall tales round the pub. He takes his frustration out on his wife, sometimes beating her, and their loud fights have been heard throughout the neighborhood. Next to him, the outwardly respectable Christie is the less likely suspect and, crucially, the more reliable witness.
The scene between the two men, after Evans discovers Beryl’s body, is as grueling and nauseating as any of the murder scenes. As Christie manipulates Evans’s grief, shock and confusion, we see how his prim little affect is not just camouflage, but also a weapon. In most of the scene, Evans (sometimes holding baby Geraldine) is in the foreground, alternating between shellshocked silence and shaking sobs. Christie stands behind him in the kitchen, lazily propped against the counter, idly polishing his glasses, rebuffing all his outpourings of emotion. “Poor old Tim, eh?” he says condescendingly. “I could get you out of this if you only didn’t keep being so silly.” When Evans initially blanches at Christie’s proposal that they drop Beryl’s body in the sewer, he all but dares Evans to go to the police, knowing that he is the one who will be believed. “They’ll have to believe the truth,” Evans blurts out, and here his fate is sealed.
Much of the power of this scene—and what follows in the rest of the film—lies in the guttural rawness of John Hurt’s performance as Evans. Hurt is an actor who often projects keen intelligence. But here he’s just a sitting duck. He perfectly plays Evans’ reeling false confidence, his propensity for anger, and his real struggle to understand events around him. When he learns of Beryl’s death his eyes dart around confusedly, his mouth guppy-fish wide. He makes the most of the incredulity and lugubriousness suggested by Evans’s Welsh accent, as he repeats “Oh Mr. Christie, she was only young!”
The second part of Rillington Place—which follows Evans’s initial false confessions, his trial, eventual convictions and hanging, are just as blood-curdling and enraging as the depictions of Christie’s crimes in the film’s first half. It paints the criminal justice system as just as cruel and dysfunctional a killer as Christie himself. Once a guilt-ridden Evans walks into the police station, the wheels of justice begin to turn inexorably. Detectives surround him as he flails about uncomprehendingly. When Evans learns that his daughter Geraldine is dead (Christie told him he had taken her to a foster family), Fleisher zooms in on Evans’s starkly blank face. The cops surrounding him take no notice of his sudden grief, and keep their heads down, perfecting the wording of Evans’s “confession,” which the distraught and guilt-ridden Evans mindlessly signs. When he later tells the truth, it’s already too late. Christie was right: he is more believable, and becomes the key witness against Evans.
Evans’s trial proceeds with a grim inevitability. Fleischer allows us the suspense of good courtroom drama—full of pregnant pauses and emphatic zooms—and, for a moment, a glimmer of hope. Evans’s skillful lawyer challenges Christie’s credibility by revealing a string of previous criminal convictions. (This is the first time we see Christie publicly flustered, as he starts sweating and stuttering.) Yet the Christie façade doesn’t take much of a beating: he moans about his back pain, and the judge takes pity on him, allowing him to give evidence while sitting down. The courtroom is portrayed from high angle shots, as if from the perspective of some all-seeing deity that ultimately declines to intervene. Once the death sentence is read, there is a long zoom in on Christie, seated in the gallery, as he doubles over sobbing. It is both deeply grotesque and profoundly confusing: the complex picture the film paints of Christie’s psyche means we can’t be sure if this is genuine remorse, animal frustration, or just another manipulative ploy.
From here Evans is swiftly marched toward death. From another God’s-eye view, a board of posh mental health officials deem him a “not an unpleasing” man (“rather nicer than average”), but nonetheless mentally fit for execution. (They completely ignore his repeated assertions of Christie’s guilt as he’s pushed out of the room.) The scene of Evans’s hanging is shockingly abrupt. In a matter of silent seconds, Evans is pushed out of his cell, blindfolded and sent swinging from the rafters.
The film’s coda, which details Christie’s eventual capture, cannot help but feel unsatisfying after the emotional wallop of Evans’s fate. Fleischer, realizing this, keeps things appropriately small and grubby. It starts with the depressingly inevitable murder of Christie’s wife, Ethel, who, realizing the truth about her husband, has decided to leave him. He shuffles wearily, fatalistically as he follows Ethel into their bedroom, necktie ominously poised in his hand. It’s almost as if he’s as exhausted by his crimes as we are. After Christie’s back injury prevents him from working, he slides into penury and he is forced out of his flat.
He reaches his nadir when he ends up in a homeless shelter. He determinedly maintains his false cheer and propriety even though he’s dirty, unshaven, and his clothes are falling apart. He approaches the man in the cot next to him, eager to show off: he has news clippings from Evans’s trial and boasts of his key role in the case. “I have had a very…varied life,” he says quietly and deliberately, not necessarily a mind incapable of remorse or self-reflection. The vagrant sees through Christie. “Pig,” he says, turning his back to him. There’s a wounded flash in Christie’s eyes, and then a sneer of middle-class distaste. “Well of course if that’s the way you’re going to talk,” he says, fussily adjusting his glasses. Another peek into Christie’s psyche: did the middle-class status that he desperately tried to maintain make him feel like something more than just a monster?
Christie’s arrest is a non-event: a cop identifies him on the street, and a defeated Christie shuffles away quietly. A title card tells us that Christie, too, was hanged, and that Evans’s conviction was quashed. It’s a tricky ending for a film that so chillingly elucidates the dangers of capital punishment. Was taking Christie’s life—as dangerous, but also as complex as we have seen him to be—morally justified? Was it a just reparation to Evans (now long past caring)? That 10 Rillington Place leaves us with this sense of terrible waste, with unanswered and unanswerable questions, seems fitting for a film that manages to be both a ghoulish little thriller and yet also so rich and subtle, and so comfortable with its ambiguity. For those who fret over the exploitative and salacious nature of our current crop of true crime content, this horrifying, strange film is a model of how entertainment can lie alongside complexity and societal and institutional analysis, and how the genre can excel.
