“Look at you. Death is looking down your neck, and you’re playing your little male come-on games.”

Studying psychopaths is not an easy undertaking, not least because we don’t fully understand what psychopathy is: “Is it a disease? Is it a personality disorder?” says Samuel Leistedt, a professor of forensic psychiatry in Brussels: “We don’t know.” Samuel Leistedt, physician Paul Linkowski and his team have analysed film psychopaths who mirror their real life counterparts. The team compiled a database of 400 films, although less than a third were selected for analysis based on the realism of the characters. Their study, which was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences called Psychopathy and the Cinema: Fact or Fiction? (PDF HERE)found that psychopaths in the movies have become more clinically accurate over time. Cinematically, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn) is one of the most realistic characters in the study. Read more here (DW), here for a Boston Globe article on the topic with an interview with Leistedt himself and recommend Werner Herzog’s brilliant documentary series On Death Row here.