making the question not “What have I done?” but “What happened to me?” Nonetheless, memory and the self are presented as riddles to be solved.

Broadening the effect and the meaning of an individual murder is what the Dead Girl Show is all about.

Freud’s centralizing of the Oedipus complex structures the human psyche around a question of personal guilt: “He . . . placed the questions ‘What have I done?,’ ‘Am I a criminal?,’ . . . at the heart of self-inquiry.”

She had the impulse to ask her professor “whether women were somehow always already dead,

It’s another case of destructive masculinity requiring both one’s self and one’s enemy to be larger than life.

He views crime as a natural phenomenon, like a weather pattern, which comes and goes in streaks like seasons, and the serial killer as a pure “bad guy” whose habits are too dark and powerful to be conceived of:

the maternal element returns “via horror, repulsion, the uncanny, haunting, melancholia, depression, guilt.”

it mystifies the killer in ways that are not only counterproductive but also insidious.

Externalizing the impulse to prey on young women cleverly depicts it as both inevitable and beyond the control of men.