7. Killing For Company
As far as moral transgression goes, its hard for any fictional character to plumb the authentic depths reached by Dennis Nilsen in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Convicted of six murders but implicated in an admitted 15, the civil servant and former policeman was brought to book when rotting human flesh was found in the drains of his north London flat in 1983. As might be expected of a man who claimed to have strangled his gay lovers so that theyd never leave him, Nilsen was a strange mass of contradictions. Thoughtful and articulate but alienated and lacking self-control, he became the subject of sympathetic biographer Brian Masters acclaimed 1985 psychological study, KILLING FOR COMPANY. A feature film adaptation was always a tricky proposition even though, as far back as 1993, the producer who held the option at the time assured this writer it would be going ahead, oh, any day now. Twenty-two years on, its not hard to see that a biopic on a necrophiliac Masters was inclined to believe Nilsens assertion that he never had sex with the corpses, others were not so sure may have been a hard sell. Add to this an exploitation movie based on the case COLD LIGHT OF DAY (1989), shot in the West Country by one Fhiona-Louise in which the killers name was changed, possibly to avoid copyright action by Masters. Seen retrospectively, this rather drab and depressing piece (which played in prints running anywhere from 30 to 75 minutes) does at leave give rotting flesh to that hoary old phrase the banality of evil. It also leaves an unwarranted impression that such a subject is always low-budget or underground fare. It neednt have been that way. In the late 1980s, not long after the books publication, I saw a one-handed fringe theatre version of KILLING FOR COMPANY at the Hen & Chickens theatre in north London. The actor who played Nilsen was brilliant in his lonely, psychopathic neediness, drawing you into the clammy killing grounds of his apartments. (Sadly, an internet search has upturned neither any background material nor the actors name.) Featuring recreations of the notorious amateur cine film where Des did himself up in blue mascara as a corpse, it climaxed with his strangulation of an unseen victim via headphones cord as the prog-rock album Tubular Bells played. The forced intimacy of a fringe theatre, though, is more of a shared experience than a cinema or video screen. To date, the nearest anyone has come to a film adaptation of KILLING FOR COMPANY is an 11-minute 2013 short dramatising the second of Nilsens known murders. Shot on an ultra-low budget, it plays as a rough hint of what might have been rather than as a trailer of any future project.
Jamie Langlands as Nilsen, in the truncated short film based on KILLING FOR COMPANY (2013).