That’s Your Motive?
Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendall, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Patterson. CSI; NCIS; Murder, She Wrote; Monk; Columbo; Broadchurch. From literature to television, fiction storytelling is saturated with murder mysteries, and as readers and viewers we can’t get enough of them. For many of us, the ‘whodunnit’ formula provides us the opportunity to play detective from the comfort of our living rooms and indulge our perverse dark side. Not only do we want to find out the identities of the those responsible, but we also want to discover why they committed their heinous crimes. What drove them to murder? We want a motive.
A killer’s motive doesn’t need to be complicated or rational; oftentimes the simplest explanations are the most emotionally satisfying. We have to believe in a murderer’s reason for killing with a motive that we can understand, and perhaps even empathize with. But sometimes the big reveal, the final piece of the puzzle we’ve been waiting for, doesn’t click. In an effort to outdo their compatriots some writers will concoct motives that are nonsensical or just plain stupid. Instead of being smart and original, the whodunnit ends in a farce.
In the horror subgenre, slasher movies can be divided into two camps: in the first we know who the killer is and what their motive is from the outset; in the second the identity of the killer and their motive is a secret waiting to be revealed in a climactic showdown. Along the way there are clues, subtle hints, and diversionary red herrings for the viewer to navigate and decipher. Can we guess who the killer is before they take off the mask? And can we unravel the ‘why’ of their homicidal spree?
For every logical and believable motive found in a slasher there are an equal number of absurd and laughable alternatives that have derailed entire movies.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
With the box office success of Wes Craven’s Scream in 1996, which is heralded as the first post-modern slasher, writers and Hollywood studios sought to capture and repeat its fortunes. In 1997 Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer, a more straight-faced slasher that wouldn’t have felt out of place in the 1980s.
Having accidentally run over and killed a man, four friends dispose of the body and promise to hide their involvement from the authorities. A year later they reunite and discover someone else knows what happened that night, sending them ominous messages, terrorizing their lives, and hunting them down one at a time, dressed in a slicker and armed with a fisherman’s hook.
Who’s the killer? A man named Ben Willis, who on that same fateful night murdered a teenager named David Egan, who he blamed for killing his daughter a year earlier. As he fled the scene of his crime, Willis was the one who was hit by the car occupied by the four friends who then dumped him in the water, thinking he was dead. The motive for his killing spree was revenge for what they did to him after he had already killed someone.
The problem with his motive? He survived being hit by a car and inadvertently got away with murder by convincing four teens that they killed David Egan that night. Through unwitting good fortune Ben Willis framed a group of strangers for a murder they didn’t commit but believed they did. No one knew about Ben Willis’ involvement until he decided to get revenge and undermine the perfect crime. If he hadn’t sent any letters or started killing people again no one would have ever found out that he killed David Egan.
The killer wasn’t someone acting out of some warped sense of justice for a crime they witnessed — it was a man bearing a personal grudge.
In the sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, it becomes even more ridiculous. Ben Willis, having survived the first movie but missing a hand, orchestrates a plot involving his son, the staging of a fake radio contest, and arranging a trip to a Caribbean island in order to get his poor excuse for revenge.
Scream 4
It’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, but for every Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Hills Have Eyes he directed, Wes Craven produced just as many bad movies throughout his career (Shocker, Cursed, My Soul to Take). And as the Scream franchise progressed the quality of the screenwriting began to decline, ending with the final and worst installment in the series.
The motive of the killers in the first movie made sense and enough clues were interspersed for observant viewers to put the picture together. The protagonist, Sidney Prescott, discovers her boyfriend, Billy Loomis, is the killer, and that their friend Stu is his accomplice. He tells her that his mother abandoned him because his father was having an affair with Sidney’s mother, whom he murdered one year before. He blames Sidney’s family for the breakup of his. (Stu has no clearly established motive other than he’s psychotic.)
Scream 2 had the unhinged Mickey committing murder so he could be brought to trial and blame violent movies for his actions, but also had Billy’s mother return in revenge for her son’s death at the end of the first movie. (The original script had different killers, but was changed when details were leaked online.) Scream 3 finds Sidney’s secret half-brother behind a new string of deaths, once again blaming her for the suffering in his life. It also transpires that he was the person who revealed to Billy Loomis that his father and Sidney’s mother were having an affair, and thus was responsible for everything that happens in all three movies.
With Scream 4 the killings begin again where they first started. In Woodsboro the survivors from the last three entries — Sidney, Dewey, and Gale — return and attempt to find out who’s behind the Ghostface mask.
Who’s the killer? Sidney’s cousin, Jill, and her accomplice, Charlie.
What’s their motive? Jill was jealous of Sidney’s celebrity survivor/heroine status and wanted to take her place. In her desperation for fame she killed her friends and planned to kill Sidney whilst framing Charlie for their crimes (before killing him, too). Having almost gotten away with the murders Jill is discovered and shot by Sidney after a struggle in the hospital, telling her, “Don’t f**k with the original.”
Jill’s motive is intended to be a commentary on the shallow yearning for celebrity that exists in contemporary culture, where fame is the greatest ambition for millions in modern society. The problem, however, is that Jill’s ambition is grossly exaggerated and her methods are over the top. Are we really meant to accept that she is so eager for stardom that she’s willing to kill innocent people via an elaborate and convoluted plan to get it? While the second and third movies had teased with this idea, Scream 4 took things a step too far — it was a weak motive for a weak villain in the series’ weakest installment.
Sorry, Wes.
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
Considered to be one of the worst sequels in the Friday the 13th franchise the fifth entry attempted to continue the story after the gruesome death of Jason Voorhees in The Final Chapter through his killer, Tommy Jarvis. Now a teenager, Tommy struggles with his traumatic experience as a child when he’s sent to a center for troubled youths. After a incident where a mentally challenged kid, Joey, is killed surrounding people begin to die in ways resembling Jason’s MO, leading many to believe that he’s alive and killing again.
It’s not until over an hour into the movie that we see the killer, who appears to be Jason — though the markings on his hockey mask are blue instead of red. Tommy and the remaining characters fight ‘Jason’ and impale him on industrial machinery, revealing that the killer was in fact someone disguised as him.
Who’s the killer? Roy, one of the paramedics called to take away the deceased Joey.
What was his motive? As it turns out Joey was Roy’s son, and when he saw his dead child he used Jason’s myth and likeness to murder people in revenge. The problem with this motive is that Joey didn’t know his father; he explicitly says before he dies that he’s an orphan. So from what little information we have Roy abandoned his son, never made contact with him, but loved him enough to carry his picture in his wallet and pose as a homicidal maniac in order to kill people? And what about Vic, the man who dismembered Joey with an axe? He’s arrested and never seen again. The person directly responsible for his son’s death eludes Roy’s murderous rampage.
After the drubbing A New Beginning received from fans Jason was quickly resurrected for Part VI, aptly titled Jason Lives, and Roy’s copycat exploits were never repeated.
For screenwriters a killer’s motive can be the thematic payoff to a winding and twisting plot, or it can be an obstacle that gets in the way of the thrill ride. They can end up as an afterthought that fails to explain or justify a person’s actions before the mystery is unraveled.
Revenge, power, money, psychosis: the motives people (real or fictional) have for killing aren’t complex. It may be that screenwriters are better off not always explaining why their bogeymen kill people, but when a motive is explicit we have to buy it. We have to believe it, or else the whole movie will fall apart around them.
Coming soon: Monochrome Chills
