A more controversial choice came in the best actress category, where Sanaa Lathan triumphed for her role as a successful career woman who embarks on a relationship with a psychopathic man in thriller The Perfect Guy.
These findings are interesting, since deliberate manipulation of peer relationships by, for example, ostracism, gossiping and telling lies about the victims has been seen as a typical female phenomenon, and among adults, the prototypical psychopathic woman exhibits more manipulation than the prototypical psychopathic man does [ 38].
And he is right – yes, both novels are about psychopathic men obsessed with killing and mutilating women's bodies.
Although modern Gothic novels narrated by psychopathic men, like John Fowles's thriller "The Collector" (1963), have inspired actual crimes, the genre of the captivity narrative is very different.
Our latest research shows that female psychopaths seem to prefer to date non-psychopathic men in the short-term, perhaps as a plaything or to allow easy deception and manipulation.
And in the brazenly nightmarish "Twilight" (2006) a mortician's grisly secret — he defiles the corpses he buries in especially macabre fashion — is discovered by a pair of teenagers who are set upon by a psychopathic hit man the mortician hires to dispatch them.
"The interplay between them," he said, "is one of the most hideous, dysfunctional, psychopathic couplings between man and woman that I've ever read.
It is not psychopathic monsters but "ordinary men" (and women) in Nazi Germany, in Bosnia, in Vietnam, in Iraq, who are capable of acts the mere recital of which is enough to turn the stomach and make one wish to close one's eyes and stop one's ears.
In the 1987 film "Fatal Attraction," a psychopathic woman terrorizes a married man with whom she has had a one-night stand, making more and more threatening gestures toward him and his family until her violent demise becomes inevitable.
Sean Penn gave a strong performance as a psychopathic sergeant who orders his men to take a Vietnamese girl (Thuy Thu Le) prisoner.
Mr. Carlo, a bullet-domed Brooklynite who grew up surrounded by criminal intrigue, has built his career profiling serial killers, psychopathic crime lords, Mafia hit men and sexual predators.
