The Science of Monsters

In Jennifer’s Body (2009), a horror-comedy directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Academy Award winner Diablo Cody, a succubus preys on a Midwestern town. High schooler Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) embodies all that the myth suggests. She is beautiful, has an innate sexuality, and most significantly, she must feed on humans in order to survive and retain her beauty. When Jennifer recognizes her body weakening, much like a vampire, she must hunt and kill in order to restore herself. As in the legends of succubi, Jennifer uses her sexual charm to hypnotically lead unsuspecting men to their doom. Because she is much like Count Dracula, who can appear normal and even comforting, Jennifer is herself a snare trap and a monster. Though when she is angered, weak, or hungry, the supernatural awakens within and the true, ugly self rears its head. In Jennifer’s Body, the hero, Needy Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried) researches succubi and finds there is a way to kill them. Again, just like vampires, there are rules under which succubi must operate. While they have powers, they also have weaknesses. Every monster has its kryptonite. This is particularly relevant in films, when the hero must banish the monster through death or other means. As outlined in her research, Needy waits until Jennifer is in a feeble state. She then kills her with a stab to the heart. Unfortunately for Needy, she is bitten by Jennifer in the resulting struggle, so, in the tradition of vampirism, the film ends with Needy becoming a succubus herself.

As we delved into the research of succubi, we became fascinated by the rarity of female monsters. According to the United States Department of Justice, 89.5% of convicted perpetrators of homicide are male.² This led us to dig deeper into female killers, especially those who killed serially. As they constitute such a stark minority, what are the psychological imperatives of female murderers? And are their motives different than their male counterparts? In order to learn more, we consulted academic research on the similarities and contrasts of male and female serial killers. In a 2015 study published in The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, a robust group of sixty-four American female serial killers were analyzed to further our scientific understanding of their psychology. An interesting fact noted in the study seems to support this notion of women using their sexual appeal much like a succubus: “Where data were available, two-thirds of these women had average to above-average attractiveness. This may be a quality the female serial killer uses to her advantage.”³

The motives of the sixty-four female serial killers were grouped into several categories. The highest number of these women were found to be in the “hedonistic” classification. “Consistent with previous research, we found that these women killed for money, power, revenge, and even notoriety and excitement.” Money has long been a motive for female serial killers. At the turn of the twentieth century, plain yet charming Belle Gunness led a number of men to their deaths. Much like the succubus myth, Gunness used her femininity to entrap her prey. Through correspondence she convinced many a farmer to move to her farm in La Porte, Indiana. When the men arrived, cash and valuables in hand, Gunness would murder them and bury their corpses in her fertile farmland. While we can never know what sort of thrill Gunness got from killing, we do know that she gained a hearty pile of money from her deeds. “Baby farmers,” women who killed unwanted infants, also murdered for financial comfort. Amelia Dyer is one such murderess who is known as one of the most prolific serial killers in history as she murdered between two hundred and four hundred children. Dorothea Puente, who killed the elderly and mentally disabled so she could collect on their social security, is another example of a hedonistic serial killer.

Men, on the other hand, tend to kill serially for more deviant reasons. As outlined in a 1995 study, their motivations are more sexually sadistic: “it appears that a substantial proportion of male serial murderers violate their victims sexually, it is important to examine the role sexual behavior has in the killings.”⁴ A sexual impetus in female perpetrators of serial murder is almost non-existent. While females tend to use their sexuality like a succubus, leading men like the Pied Piper to their eventual death, there are very few examples of women admitting to sexual thrill as a reason for murder. One example of this deviation from the rule is killer nurse Jane Toppan, who described to police that she got an “erotic charge”⁵ from climbing into bed with her dying patients who she had killed with a fatal cocktail of medicine.