Jim Thompson’s Lou Ford is a creepy, self-absorbed bastard who thinks of his mild-mannered persona about town as a deliberate game that he plays with the locals, conversing with them in folksy aphorisms and other deliberate banalities to prevent them from comprehending the true extent of (what he believes is) his genius.

There’s the taut grace of Affleck’s actions on screen, his attack slicing across your field of vision, and the blunt impacts made by camera placement and sound design. You can admire the economy of the language that conveys such brutality, or the sick wit with which Thompson gifts his entirely loathsome protagonist. On the page, it’s literary, even if it makes you ill. Some cold shit.īut it’s one thing for Lou Ford to tell you that he’s beaten a woman to death, and it’s quite another for Jessica Alba and Casey Affleck to get up there on screen, he pounding the living hell out of her face, smashing his arm from left to right across the image over and over again, his fists making sickening noises on impact just outside of the frame. “I wiped my gloves on her body it was her blood and it belonged there,” Ford tells the reader. And sheriff’s deputy Lou Ford, the narrator of The Killer Inside Me, isn’t just a killer but a sociopath. The character’s disregard for the humanity of the woman he’s killing is manifest in his choice of metaphor - she is vegetable matter. “I backed her against the wall, slugging, and it was like pounding a pumpkin,” Thompson writes. It’s the old question of show versus tell.

It’s a question of medium - you can’t replicate the book’s suffocating interior monologue, the puffed-up rant and ramble of a serial killer, because as soon as you dramatize the events in question for a movie camera you make them real in a way that they’re not, quite, when they’re still sitting on the page. It’s impossible to really film The Killer Inside Me.

The killer inside me book review