#90 Years Ago, Fritz Lang’s M Laid The Groundwork For Every Serial Killer Thriller You’ve Ever Seen

“M” is a must-see for genre fans and students of film history. Anyone who loves a good thriller will find much here to engage their senses. The film opens with a girl standing in a circle of children on a playground, doing a dark German version of, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” She sings, “The man in black will soon be here with his cleaver’s blade so true. He’ll make mincemeat out of you!”

One, two, Freddy’s coming for you. Him, and Candyman and a whole host of other murderers and monsters, who stalk the celluloid annals from suburban houses to inner-city housing projects. “M” is at the root of a twisted film family tree that includes many branches.

On this street, a shadow falls over a wanted poster. That’s Peter Lorre, a Jewish actor who soon left Germany for Hollywood after Adolf Hitler became head of state. Lorre would appear in a number of classics, including “The Maltese Falcon” and “Casablanca,” both with Humphrey Bogart. In “M,” his character, Hans Beckert, whistles “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and writes to the newspapers, while the police analyze his postcards for handwriting and fingerprint samples. This was 1931.

In 2021, we revisited both Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” and David Fincher’s “Seven,” two of the most influential serial killer thrillers of the 1990s. Yet “M” prefigured both of them, showing a killer mugging for the mirror and cops sleeping on benches at the station. Lang’s use of POV shots — where the camera takes on a character’s perspective, looking around the room or into another character’s eyes — are particularly evocative of techniques Demme would use sixty years later.