Roy Burns (The copycat): The only one who puts on the mask without being Jason, which is what makes the file useful

By the fifth film the series has a problem: the killer is dead and stayed dead. The solution is a paramedic whose son was murdered at a halfway house, who takes the mask, the machete and the silence, and does the whole thing again. Audiences hated it, and the franchise reversed the decision in the next instalment. But as a document it is more interesting than the eleven films that surround it, because it is the one that accidentally states what the series had been demonstrating all along: the thing being transmitted was never a person. It was a template, and a template will run on anybody.

// The theoryBehaviours transmit. The question is how much

The founding finding is David Phillips's 1974 study of what he named the Werther effect: suicides rose measurably in the period after front-page suicide coverage, in proportion to the prominence of the story and concentrated in the circulation area of the publication. That result has held up better than almost anything in media-effects research; it is the reason virtually every country now has reporting guidelines for suicide, and evaluations of those guidelines show reductions. The mechanism generalizes. Towers and colleagues (2015) fitted a contagion model to US mass shootings and school shootings and found significant short-term excess — an elevated hazard lasting on the order of thirteen days after a high-profile event — and the pattern turns up in riots, in prison disorder and in bomb threats. What transmits in each case is not a motive but a method and a script: the availability of a recognizable way to act, with a known effect, attached to a known figure.

// The subjectThe copycat as the cleanest possible demonstration

Roy Burns is useful because he isolates the variable. Every other entry in the series can be explained by the killer's own biography — the drowning, the mother, the unkillable body. Part V removes all of it and keeps only the form: mask, weapon, setting, silence, and a sequence of victims chosen the same way. And it still reads as the same event to everyone inside the story and everyone watching, which is the demonstration. Contagion does not require a shared motive, a shared psychology or any contact between the original and the imitator. It requires a script that is legible, repeatable and publicly attributed. His personal motive — a murdered son — is real and is almost irrelevant to the form his response takes, and that gap between why and how is where the copycat literature actually lives.

This also explains a pattern that troubles investigators in real cases: the imitator often has a grievance that bears no relation to the original event. The script supplies the method and the meaning, and the person supplies the reason. Which is why reporting guidelines target the method and the perpetrator's name rather than the existence of the story — you cannot suppress the grievance, but you can decline to publish the template.

// The crackSmall, short, and constantly over-claimed

Three corrections are needed and they cut in different directions. First, size and duration: contagion effects in the best studies are real but modest and short-lived — the excess hazard after a high-profile event is measured in days, not years, and it operates on people already at risk rather than creating new ones. A model that fits an epidemic curve does not establish that the media caused any particular death. Second, unfalsifiability: “copycat” is applied after the fact to almost any similarity, and since violent scripts are culturally ubiquitous, resemblance is cheap evidence. The wider media-effects field is a caution here rather than a support: the violent-video-game literature produced two decades of confident claims that meta-analyses by Christopher Ferguson and others largely dissolved once publication bias was modeled, and the American Psychological Association substantially narrowed its own position in 2020. Suicide contagion is the strong case, not the typical one. Third, fear of crime is badly measured. The standard survey item — how safe would you feel walking alone in this area after dark — is asked of people who never walk alone after dark, conflates risk judgment with emotion, and produces the paradoxes that the literature then explains. Work by Jonathan Jackson and Emily Gray separating frequent situational worry from diffuse anxiety found that most of the population reports the second and very little of the first, which means decades of “fear of crime” findings were partly an artefact of the question. And the whole territory has a political history worth naming: contagion has been the standing argument for censorship since the video nasties panic, and moral panic about slasher films outlived every empirical claim made for it.