Stranger-killing  

"Stranger-killing, the killing which has no motive, is something which we associate to "pure evil", and that we fear more than anything else in the world. There are several excellent examples of this morbid fascination, especially in the world of cinema: some of the most "relevant" contemporary blockbusters deal with the theme of serial killing (Ridley Scott's "Hannibal" and "The Silence of the Lambs", David Fincher's "Seven", Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho", Mary Harron's "American Psycho")." -- Albert Hofer in "The Sinister Innocence," a chapter on Trevor Brown in his MA Cultural Studies dissertation The Wound and the Mutating Body submitted at Goldsmiths University in June 2002.

"Did it date from so far back, from the harm women had done to his race, from the rancour laid up from male to male since the first deceptions at the bottom of the caverns?"--Jacques Lantier, protagonist of La Bête humaine (1890), wondering why he desires to kill women he does not even know