“The attitude of commonsense… is the one to have when one discusses de Sade. I am addressing the anxious man whose first reaction is to de Sade as his daughter’s potential murderer” (178-179). This writes Georges Bataille on the quintessential modern interpretation of sadism; to confuse the apparently transcendent sadist with the banal motions of the murderer is endemic to the evolution of the Sadean universe from a purely philosophical imperative to an integrated social phenomenon. While Pierre Klossowski’s deconstruction of the Marquis de Sade’s works identified the concept of sadism and the practice of linguistics as complementary, later studies by Roland Barthes extracted from Klossowski’s analysis the theoretical polemic that the Sadean universe resists representation. Since sadism is essentially rooted in its discursive expression, in its process of telling, then the active and physical components of the sadistic process remain secondary to the language which dually prefigures and generates the sadistic act or crime. The consequence of such analyses which privilege Sadean discourse over any given elucidated referent, is the reader’s comprehension that, “Sadean crime exists only in proportion to the quality of language invested in it, in no way because it is dreamt or even narrated, but because only language can construct it” (Barthes 1976 33). However, as a constituent of the vocabulary of popular culture, the term ‘sadism’ has experienced an extreme involution; far from its original conception within the works of the Marquis de Sade or the subsequent theoretical analyses imposed by Barthes and Klossowski, sadism has simply become synonymous with cruelty. It is therefore perhaps somewhat distressing to Sadean purists, as disparagingly noted by Andre Frassard, that the “dear old Marquis de Sade’s dear old manias inspire two out of three filmmakers” (Sciascia 104). Exemplified by the modern prevalence of the serial killer film, the current colloquial understanding of sadism inverts the linguistic polemic by identifying the Sadean universe as both a mimetic and an aesthetic possibility.