Modern audiences love killers and anti-heroes, often finding both in the same figure. Dexter (2006), a Miami Metro blood spatter analyst who moonlights as a “moral” serial killer offing guilty criminals who slipped through the cracks of justice, may be one of the most prolific yet beloved killers in recent onscreen history. He racked up over 130 kills (on-screen and off) in eight seasons of television. The list of serial killer icons/anti-heroes in our current TV landscape is long: Walter White in Breaking Bad (2013); a number of characters on Bates Motel (2013); the primary antagonist of The Following (2013); Mads Mikkelson’s revamped version of Hannibal (2013), which builds on Anthony Hopkin’s supremely charismatic performance as cannibalistic killer Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs (1991); and numerous examples on Criminal Minds (2005), to name a few. Not all of these killers are the stars of the show, per se, nor are they all equal in terms of perceived culpability or motive, but all drive their relative stories. And in cinema, tales of serial killers have drawn attention decade after decade.

Fritz Lang’s M (1931) is an early example of cinema focused on the nefarious deeds of a serial killer—of children, no less. Well before the Nazis came and destroyed German culture for a generation, the country served as an incredible base for innovative Jewish filmmakers. Most of these filmmakers flourished throughout the silent era, many successfully making the transition to sound pictures. One of the products of this generation is German Expressionist cinema, which created dark, heavily thematic, adult films with distinctive lighting, contrasts, angles and enhanced production design. Films of the style accentuated visual details to narrative effect to produce an emotional and potent experience. Fritz Lang is a renowned figure of German Expressionism for his 1927 silent masterpiece Metropolis, but he evolved further with his equally dystopian M. His first sound picture, M is an incredible precursor to the thriller genre, an indictment of mob mentality and a message picture about the importance of watching one’s children.

M’s serial killer, Franz Beckert (Peter Lorre), is small, squirrely, terrified—he is perpetually stepped on by everyone who meets him. Of course, little sympathy is garnered for a psychotic man who kills kids, but it’s notable how different Beckert is from the serial killers of today’s media. The Dexter-types manage to gain our sympathy and support for their deeds, while even today’s villainous ones mange more chutzpah and braggadocio than the meek character in M. Peter Lorre’s villain is as far as possible from a modern day archetype.

M contributed substantially to the noir genre, and Lang himself would later make films classified as such. Peter Lorre’s child-killer influenced villains throughout noir and eventually helped shape the monsters of modern horror. Who is Freddy Krueger but a fedora-wearing child-killer who utilizes song as a means of warning?

M does not ask us to care about its killer. At the end of the film, a group of criminals (angry that the hunt for the killer is inhibiting their usual business) form a kangaroo court to try Beckert, during which the question of whether a man can be charged for the crimes of insanity is raised. Whereas Dexter’s vigilante justice is (if occasionally questioned) given a strict moral logic, Beckert’s murdering of children is potentially offered the psychological explanation of insanity but never resolved. Lang enjoys challenging the ways in which society searches for a guinea pig to blame and manipulates the workings of justice. He uses Beckert to examine sociopolitical tendencies within all people, instead of suggesting a concrete interpretation of the man’s deeds.

We trust Dexter-types to be doing away with those who deserve to die, and characters like Walter White we hesitate to even label as “serial killers,” even though the label fits, because the show encourages us to find logic in what White does and participate in his dark journey. No matter the horrible things Dexter has done, we are guided to side with him. M gives us a much more complex situation when the mob mentality of common criminals leads to sentencing a killer to his death, without due process, for actions he claims he can’t control. In this moment of the film, we are shocked to find that we do sympathize with Beckert, but not out of any dark admiration (as we might have for Dexter or for White)—what we feel is pity, mixing with our lingering disgust. The shift in audience sentiment is subtle but swift, its power undeniable. If we can justify our interest in characters like Dexter because the show gives us an argument, however flawed, for the social good of his actions, Beckert is presented to us as scum, the lowest of the low. Yet we feel something for this monster because we are reminded that he is, still, human—he is suffering, and he is most likely the victim of mental illness. At the same time, Lang never makes it easy on us by minimalizing the monstrous aspect.

Since M, we might argue that not much has changed as we might imagine in our societal attitudes toward terrors like child-killers. Today we are afraid of so many horrors that we find comfort in shows about serial killers, murderers, and crime, so long as this material is presented through a morally conscious, aestheticized light. M is still an unusual film—as much now as then—in that it challenges us to think on a broader scope and doesn’t succumb to the temptation to explain away murderers with any comfortable resolution that makes it easy to decide where we stand.

Lang’s child killer is the catalyst and starting point, not the ultimate focus of M. In the end, M questions society as a whole and the way we view our roles within it, turning the lens back on us.