Our hero is an analogue for Douglas: FBI Agent Holden Ford ( Jonathan Groff), a young G-man who finds himself in 1977 feeling lost and unsatisfied. Once conceived as a film, Mindhunter would now be not just a series but one that took advantage of the episodic format, showing how, step-by-step, the Criminal Profiling Program came into being while taking individual episodes as an opportunity to explore fascinating one-off characters.
By cutting back through decades of cliché and expectation, Mindhunter returns to a time when these ideas were new, playing like an origin not just for criminal profiling but for the serial killer genre as a whole. The conventions of serial killer stories – the compulsive killer who can only be stopped by an equally compulsive investigator, the crime scenes that quietly reveal the murderer’s psychology, even the term “serial killer” itself – can in many ways be traced back to Douglas, an author of many books and an inspiration for Thomas Harris’s original Hannibal Lecter novel Red Dragon. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, first published in 1995 (the year Se7en was released), telling the story of how Douglas, a veteran agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, created the FBI’s first Criminal Profiling Program in the 1970s. Mindhunter is adapted from a book of the same name by John E. What more was there to say about serial killers? Fincher found his answer by returning to the beginning.
In 2017, Fincher returned to the serial killer subgenre by taking his project Mindhunter to the streaming service. The Fincher style – dark lighting and sickly colors, obsessive attention to detail, unblinking looks at violence – has served as a template not just for other movies, but also for TV shows of both the prestigious and potboiler variety and for the ever-increasing number of investigative podcasts and Netflix documentaries. Se7en announced him as a major director while Zodiac revealed him as a master.
If anybody could find something new to add to pop culture’s fixation with serial killers and true crime, it would likely be David Fincher.