The Allure of the Psychopath Father

In his latest movie, one of America’s premier directors of the strange, M. Night Shyamalan, tells the story of a dad taking his teenage daughter to a pop concert. This man has many of the appealing quirks of the Good Father—he cracks dad jokes, tries to learn teenage lingo, and even endures a concert mainly attended by teen girls for the sake of his kid. Only there’s one difference: He’s also a serial killer nicknamed The Butcher.

Played by Josh Hartnett, the psychopath dad is good-looking, affable, and grounded. Even as the audience learns that he is evil, the camera remains largely focused on his point of view. In other words, we are meant to sympathize with his plight. We sit on the edge of our seats as he discovers that the concert itself is a trap (hence the name of the movie: "Trap") to catch him. The authorities believe that The Butcher is attending the concert.

While this is not Shyamalan’s best film, this movie does a good job of getting the audience to, if not root for a villain, to at least hope that he doesn’t get caught too soon. Bad guys can be appealing. In this case, Shyamalan delivers a villain who is actually a pretty good father. He is a paradox. He takes care of his kid, and he also imprisons his victims in torture rooms.

He can do this because he has effectively separated his life into two dramatically opposed halves. On the one side, he is a family man (and a firefighter to boot) who cares about his wife and kids. On the other, he kidnaps and kills people using safe houses, away from his family’s orbit. As he tells his wife at the end of the film, he’s tried so hard to keep the two lives separate.

The overall effectiveness of the movie depends on the allure of the psychopath. Audiences can’t get enough of this character.

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In this case, Shyamalan piles up the likeable qualities thickly, better to jolt us with the incongruity of his evilness. This psychopath is a first responder who spends quality time with his daughter and stands up for her against school bullies and their pushy moms.

What also makes Hartnett’s psychopath alluring, I think, is how he appears to have every angle covered. We can only admire his intelligence and forethought. Caring dad? Check. Heroic day job? Check. Ability to evade squads of cops and an FBI profiler? Check. We are impressed with his savvy, his nerve, and his appeal.

Hollywood has pulled this trick lots of times, perhaps most famously with Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs." In that movie, Anthony Hopkins plays a psychopath of great intelligence, whom the audience basically falls in love with. He is witty, urbane, and incredibly smart. He likes classical music and good wine. We like him so much that we applaud his escape from authorities, and many of us would go on to see him do it again in more movies.

Hartnett’s psychopath also impresses us with his command of the situation. There is research to back this up. In a university study conducted by Kristopher Brazil and Adelle Forth, researchers tested to see what qualities women found attractive. They learned that women found men with more psychopathic traits to be more desirable than men with less psychopathic traits.

As Brazil explained, “It rather seems that psychopathic individuals are good at displaying exactly what is attractive to others in a romantic context—things like confidence, making eye contact, putting the other person at ease and seeming sincere and interested.” In other words, the psychopaths were more in tune with what women were looking for. In a sense, they were smarter than non-psychopathic men.

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This “smartness” is what makes the celluloid psychopath appealing, too. We find traits of command and control attractive. As cinema audiences, we are also intrigued by watching a compelling person commit incredibly heinous crimes. Making this character into a Good Father adds to our level of interest, as this character now must successfully juggle two entirely different life agendas.

Of course, Hollywood psychopaths are often too smart to be realistic. Hartnett escapes the legions of police and SWAT so many times that it becomes a bit silly. But silly is fine with us—so long as we are entertained.