Before he went off to join the Japanese Red Army, avant-garde filmmaker Masao Adachi crafted a number of politically-minded films including the unnerving 1969 feature A.K.A. Serial Killer. Drawing from the radical Marxist “landscape theory” that Adachi helped develop, the film tells the true story of nineteen-year-old serial murderer Norio Nagayama through biographical information in a voiceover narrated by the director himself. But instead of editing archival footage or staging scenes with actors, Adachi employs an observational approach for his visual aesthetic focused on locations (the places pertinent to Nagayama’s life, including where his spree took place) in order to express the influence that environments have on politics, social standing/class, and psychology.