He mimicked American Psycho - he wanted to be a star

ELLIOT Rodger was trying to act out the role of a film star when he went on his killing spree – to make up for the fact he felt like a failure in real life. Clearly he did not feel he had the status he deserved.

In his last YouTube video, which he explicitly filmed to leave a legacy, he casts himself as a movie star.

In another of his clips he appears to reference the film American Psycho, and it might be that he has taken the main character, Patrick Bateman, as a role model. Bateman, played by Christian Bale, is a successful Wall Street banker who picks up women and then butchers them after sex. The irony is that Bale’s character is both sexually successful and a killer.

But for Rodger, his sexual frustration was the driving force behind the anger. However, both share deep feelings of sexual desire for women and aggression towards them.

There are parallels between Rodger and the Columbine High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who fantasised about the idea that Steven Spielberg would make a movie about their lives.

Some might think that because his father worked as an assistant director on The Hunger Games, which involves teens killing teens, that could have planted a seed in him to go on the rampage.

But I think his father’s success in Hollywood is more relevant, as it may have heightened his own feelings of inadequacy.

Rodger is the classic rampage killer: young, male, isolated and sexually frustrated. And he appeared to have a pronounced victim mentality.

In his video he says things such as: ‘You forced me to suffer all my life and now I’ll make you all suffer.’ He blamed his suffering on others, and therefore felt his violence was righteous. It was a disturbed reality.

He felt he was a victim of all of humanity. I think he was suicidal, and intended to kill himself after the shooting. If you feel as if the whole world is against you, it makes it easier to start attacking random individuals – and then kill yourself.

l Dr Lankford is professor of criminal justice studies at the University of Alabama.