This fall, nobody’s more in touch with their inner Lisbeth Salander than the women of Brooklyn, terrorized by more than 20 sex attacks in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington over the past eight months. “Fear is weird,” said one female commenter on Gothamist.com. “I don’t feel scared. For me it’s more like fantasizing about being the girl who knifes him. Not that we can carry knives, but if we could . . . ”
Her revenge fantasy is very much in line with that of Lisbeth, the female anti-hero of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the Swedish thriller soon to be released as a David Fincher movie. Played by Rooney Mara, she’s a Goth, bisexual, semi-autistic hacker with a serious vengeance fetish. Sexually abused by her legal guardian, she enacts gut-churningly violent payback, then goes on to help a journalist (Daniel Craig) hunt a serial killer of women.
PHOTOS: H&M’S ‘DRAGON TATTOO’ CLOTHING LINE
The extended trailer, out last month, showed a mohawked, pierced Mara punching a thug on a subway escalator, making out with a woman in a nightclub and menacingly straddling a tormentor who’s tied to a bed.
Take Fincher’s fan base, the popularity of the Stieg Larsson books the film is based on, multiply all that by current societal anger and it adds up to: Tiny Lisbeth Salander is about to be big. (Is vigilantism the new black?)
Style-wise, the androgynous Swedish pixie has already arrived.
Mara is on the cover of this month’s Vogue, sporting those uber-short bangs and a dragon-emblazoned black dress. And now, in an appropriately Swedish turn, regular women can channel their outer Lisbeth, too. H&M’s 30-piece
Dragon Tattoo line was created by Trish Summerville, the Fincher film’s costume designer, and distills the essence of her character into slightly less S&M-y threads.
“I tried to pick pieces from the film and adapt them to make them a little more fashionable for real-life women,” says Summerville.
The line is out Dec. 14, just in time for Christmas and a week before the film’s Dec. 21 premiere — which begs the question of what the misanthropic Salander would make of all this commercialism.
Well, says Summerville, “she’s a character from books. So she doesn’t really have a voice in it.”
But the designer did get Mara’s stamp of approval. “She was really excited about them,” she says.
Leslie Simon, author of “Geek Girls Unite: How Fangirls, Bookworms, Indie Chicks, and Other Misfits Are Taking Over the World,” is into the line.
“It looks tough but comfortable,” she says, thrilled to see Lisbeth become a household name.
“Being an outsider and a misfit and a loner, usually those are things people don’t want to be,” she says, “but she kind of makes it cool. Being the norm, and being the mainstream, isn’t what us girls always need to aspire to.”
Simon says the girl-hacker archetype goes back to Angelina Jolie’s underrated, butch character in the 1995 movie “Hackers.”
“I think Lisbeth is a modern version of that, like an outlaw vigilante who takes it upon herself to kick ass and take names. And hack. All those things that are antithetical to being feminine, or a lady, she’s not. And she’s OK with that.”
That earlier movie landed with a resounding thud in US theaters, but now America just might be ready for the avenging punk girl-geek archetype. “Hopefully,” Simon says, “girls will see [Lisbeth] as a superhero of sorts.”
Melissa Silverstein, editor of the blog Women and Hollywood, says Lisbeth is a perfect antidote to the preponderance of imperiled women we see on-screen (see: every female character in this summer’s blockbusters) and an intellectual breath of fresh air.
“I think people are tired of seeing the same cookie-cutter women on the screen,” she says.
“This is a character that fights back. She’s smart, and she really doesn’t give a s – - t what people think of her. It’s really refreshing. And she comes from a book that resonated with people all over the world.”
More broadly, Silverstein says, Lisbeth is in line with the protest energy sweeping the nation and the globe. “People are ready to say no and fight back,” she says.
“I don’t think Lisbeth is particularly a political figure, but I think that kind of sentiment — ‘I’m not taking it anymore’ — is kind of what people are thinking and feeling.”
Lisbeth, a member of an elite hacking group in the novels, would fit right in with the notorious protest-minded hacker collective Anonymous. Their credo sums up the Salander worldview: “We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”
sstewart@nypost.com