The best serial killer movies of all time

What’s left to say about Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece that hasn’t already been said a dozen times over? It’s the movie that cut the ribbon – via a downward slashing motion – on 1960s filmmaking, breaking damn near every established taboo of the previous decades, from violence to sex, to plotting, to showing a toilet in use. It helped invent the slasher flick, anticipated the splatter film and elevated horror to high art. It’s spawned innumerable imitators and parodies, some subpar sequels, a TV spinoff, a biopic, a documentary and a shot-for-shot remake. If there’s anything ‘new’ to say about Psycho, perhaps it’s that the movie’s far-reaching impact has come to obscure the Anthony Perkins performance at the centre – it’s impossible to imagine anyone else as Norman Bates, and the film casting such a long shadow without him.     

Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winner isn’t the first screen appearance of the erudite cannibal Hannibal Lecter, but it’s the one that haunts the popular consciousness most, thanks to Anthony Hopkins’ brilliant turn as a psychiatrist-cum-psychopath who knows a nice Chianti pairs best with human liver. He’s not the only sicko in Silence of the Lambs – the other is Buffalo Bill, who prefers to skin his victims and wear them as a mask. But it’s a bit of a T-rex versus velociraptor situation. In this case, Lecter is the apex predator, even while (mostly) incarcerated. 

Hot tip: if you’re going to make just one movie in your lifetime, make it The Night of the Hunter. Actor Charles Laughton’s lone directorial credit is a singular achievement, quite unlike any other film of its era. Atmospherically, it feels like a hazy memory of childhood trauma, which fits the story of two farmkids pursued by a psychopath. Said psychopath is a serial killer disguised as a preacher and embodied in a legendarily chilling, out-of-character performance by Robert Mitchum. Acting with unnerving calm, and espousing a philosophical view of his own villainy, he’s something of a precursor to No Country For Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, while his iconic ‘Love/Hate’ knuckle tattoos have been referenced by everyone from Spike Lee to The Simpsons.

Even the most dour and gruesome slasher flicks end up, if not glorifying violent crime, then playing it for transgressive thrills. Not here. Inspired by the confessed killer Henry Lee Lucas, Henry indeed paints a portrait of psychopathy so brutal, unflinching and detached from the typical Hollywood portrayal that for years, no distributor would touch it. (It was initially saddled with an X rating from the MPAA.) Shot in an up-close and way-too-personal style, there’s nary a shred of cinematic artifice anywhere, least of all in the performances: Michael Rooker is meat-locker-cold in the title role, but he’s the moral compass compared to his buddy Otis (Tom Towles), who has to be physically restrained from defiling corpses and raping his sister. Why recommend it? Because it’ll make you feel something few films do – even if that feeling is nausea.

German auteur Fritz Lang’s first talkie invented the police procedural, the psychological thriller and the film noir, but its most enduring element might be its sense of moral ambiguity. Against the backdrop of an Expressionist nightmare vision of Berlin, a young girl is killed, a deed suggested only via shadows and a single untethered balloon. It sends shockwaves through the city and its criminal underworld, which would rather not have the heat a child murderer on the loose brings to their ranks. The audience already knows who did it – sad-eyed Peter Lorre – but as both the criminals and the police close in on him, Lang dares to ask: in a sick society, is a child killer really any worse than the lynch mob that convicts him?

In the ’80s, Wes Craven helped define the slasher genre with A Nightmare on Elm Street – and then, over the course of increasingly silly sequels, helped kill it off. A decade later, though, Craven managed to make killing teenagers fashionable again, largely by making fun of the tropes he promulgated back in his glory days. Scream might be an ace send-up of the horror films which, at the time it was made, had fallen well out of favour, but it also functions as a damn good slasher flick in its own right. Once again, the sequels have shown diminishing returns, but the original remains smart, sharp and scary. Don’t pretend like you still don’t get a little unnerved whenever someone shows up in the iconic ghost mask at a Halloween party.

Dutch director George Sluizer’s psychological thriller is maybe the most bloodless modern entry on this list, but it might be the most purely terrifying. It’s certainly the most crazy-making. While on a road trip through the French countryside, a young man’s girlfriend disappears from a rest stop without a trace. The mystery is still gnawing at him years later. He’s consumed less by the hope of finding her alive than simply getting confirmation of what happened to her. Spoiling the answer is one of cinema’s unforgivable sins. Just prepare yourself.

John Carpenter didn’t invent the idea of murdering groups of horny teenagers; Black Christmas beat him to the punch by four years. His innovation was to give the killer a discernible identity – rather than a vague, anonymous apparition of evil, he gave audiences something they could visualise in their nightmares. Crucially, that’s not the same thing as a backstory. At the onset of the franchise, the only thing we really know about Michael Myers is that he stabbed his own sister to death as a child and that premarital sex upsets him. And yet, that’s enough to make him far more frightening than many of the other seemingly indestructible monster-men to follow in his lumbering footsteps. The basic tenets of the original Halloween have been aped so many times that it’s hard to watch with completely fresh eyes, but decades from now, seeing his masked visage emerge from the shadows behind Jamie Lee Curtis will still cause audiences to leap out of their seats.

A man who knows his way around a crime scene, David Fincher’s neo-noir invented a new visual shorthand for the crime flick. The darkness playing out on screen is reinforced by the rain-drenched, moody metropolis that detectives William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and David Mills (Brad Pitt) scour for clues in a byzantine, gory case that begins to eat away at them both. Everything here is anonymous, from the biblically-inspired killer, who goes by ‘John Doe’, to the unnamed city itself, allowing us to project all manner of horrors onto a movie that really isn’t short of them. 

Before A Christmas Story started airing on an endless loop on cable television every December, Bob Clark directed a different holiday story entirely. In this one, a group of sorority sisters on winter break are picked off one by one by an unseen killer. It sounds generic, but only because a million other low-budget slasher flicks – including Halloween, which didn’t arrive for four more years – borrowed its template. Even diluted by decades of imitation, Clark brings a tight efficiency to a simple story, and manages to include some shocks that still sneak up on you.

Some would argue that this knotty crime thriller is Bong Joon-ho’s best film to date – despite the exceptionally stiff competition. Many serial-killer films zero in on the gory murders themselves, bathing in the bloodshed and satisfying our less-than-noble instinct to rubberneck. Not Bong’s. Instead, he shows how ill-equipped Korea’s divided society is to deal with the chaos caused by the crimes. The flailing attempts to solve them by a doofus cop and his slicker big-city partner lay bare a deeper, and sadder, malaise to go with the expertly-handled shocks.

Is Ed Gein the most impactful murderous sociopath on modern cinema? His brutal crimes formed the basis of both Psycho and, a decade-plus later, an altogether different movie about a very disturbed mama’s boy. Tobe Hooper’s foundational cult classic codified the tropes for the tsunami of cheap, straight-to-video horror flicks that would arrive in the coming decade. But watching it now, the most striking thing about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is its restraint. It’s an odd thing to say about a movie centred around a chainsaw-wielding monster who wears a mask made out of a woman’s skin, but it’s really a triumph of the ‘less is more’ filmmaking philosophy.

Unlike Seven’s kills, which were spawned by nothing more concrete than screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker’s imagination, Zodiac takes inspiration from real events: specifically, San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer, now a notorious cold case, who kills his way around the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ’60s. That element of reconstruction, albeit stylishly rendered via David Fincher’s lens, makes the slayings all the more chilling (the Lake Berryessa Murders scene remains scream-emoji harrowing to sit through). You can still feel Zodiac’s fingerprints all over The Batman – among many other lesser films. 

Psycho gets more credit for creating the slasher genre, but director Michael Powell beat Hitchcock to many of the same themes, and nearly ruined his career in the process. His tale of a disturbed photographer who kills his victims – all women – with a knife attached to his tripod in order to capture their dying moments caused an uproar amongst critics and audiences. Decades on, Peeping Tom is now considered a trailblazing masterpiece of psychological horror. And while it’s not nearly as clever and artful as Psycho, Hitchcock probably has Powell to thank for acclimating audiences to new levels of onscreen transgressions, if only by a few months. 

The Charles Starkweather murders loom large in the American mythos – Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about them, and Oliver Stone used them as the basis for his hyper-violent spectacle Natural Born Killers. Terrence Malick’s first movie is also loosely based on the killing spree the teenage Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, embarked upon in 1958, splattering blood across the American heartland. But, in true Malick fashion, he takes a far more hypnotic approach than Stone’s loud and aggressively stylised vision two decades later – but it’s no less unsettling.  

Richard Fleischer’s account of real-life serial killer John Christie, who terrorised London in the ’40s and ’50s, is often overlooked on list of great true crime movies, but it’s a truly gripping forgotten gem, anchored by a tremendously unnerving performance from Richard Attenborough as the quintessential ‘quiet neighbour with a dark secret’.

Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ satirical novel is thought of as a quintessential ‘film-bro’ flick, but it’s really a feminist sendup of male vanity. No matter how you choose to read it, though, Christian Bale is pretty much perfect as Patrick Bateman, a narcissistic, emotionless, Huey Lewis-loving yuppie who blows off steam from his vapid Wall Street job by killing and mutilating strangers and colleagues alike.

An unusual genre mash – part-police procedural, part-horror film, all mindfuck – Kim Jee-woon’s Korean psychofest takes that traditionally blurry line between cop and criminal, erases it altogether and just sets the two on a rampage of revenge, fury and the odd surprise guillotining. Bloodlust is the order of the day as Lee Byung-hun’s detective locates and tortures the serial killer who killed his pregnant fiancée, but lets him live to prolong the payback. That killer is played with suitable iciness by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who, of course, has previous experience in this kind murky terrain. He’s not swallowing any live octopuses this time, but he does cop a fire extinguisher in the face. 

Arriving long before the proliferation of reality television and the true crime renaissance, this unique Belgian production interrogated audience voyeurism and desensitisation via a mockumentary about a charming serial killer named Ben. He allows a film crew to follow him as he commits unspeakable acts of violence against women, children and immigrants. As he draws the crew out from behind the cameras, they become increasingly complicit in his crimes – and so does everyone watching.  

Alfred Hitchcock officially arrived with his fourth silent film, based on the search for Jack the Ripper. Matinee idol Ivor Novello plays the titular London boarding house resident, who, through bad timing and worse luck, is fingered as the perpetrator in a series of recent murders. Many Hitchcock staples originated here. A wrongly accused man? Check. A bunch of dead blonde women? Check. A cameo from the man himself? Check. But The Lodger isn’t just a prologue to a career that would grow more storied in the decades to come, but a truly thrilling entry within it.

A dramatised account of a murder spree that originated in a poor Australian suburb in the 1990s, Snowtown exists alongside Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as a movie that successfully tear downs the fourth wall of audience passivity toward unspeakable violence. Given palpable realism by first-time director Justin Kurzel, it spares no details in recounting the real story of an abused teenager ‘mentored’ by a maniac after helping scare his mother’s paedophile boyfriend out of the neighbourhood. It’s not ‘entertaining’ per se – some critics referred to it as a glorified snuff film - but it is undeniably compelling… if you can stomach it. 

A deviation from Frank Capra’s wholesome heartwarmers, this classic adaptation of the Joseph Kesselring jet-black comedy about two kindly old sisters who enjoy poisoning bachelors is nonetheless among his best. Shot quick and cheap before Capra deployed to serve in World War II, it’s charged by manic performances from Raymond Massey as the sisters’ nephew with a homicidal streak of his own, John Alexander as another family member who believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt, and especially Cary Grant as a drama critic gradually realising that his family might be nuts.

Charlize Theron didn’t just ‘glam down’ to play real-life prostitute turned killer Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’ unnerving psychological drama – she almost seems to have crawled inside Wuornos’s skin. Driven by financial desperation, unspeakable personal trauma and loathing for her clients, Wuornos killed and robbed seven men in Florida in the early ’90s; she was executed by lethal injection in 2002. Without excusing her deeds, Jenkins’s film displays a genuine understanding of the socioeconomic conditions that led to them. And Theron is truly masterful in the lead role. Going far beyond a surface-level transformation, she inhabits Wuornos as a fully realised, deeply troubled person, presenting her as an actual human being rather than a sensationalised tabloid figure. She deserved every award she won for the performance, including her Oscar for Best Actress.

Less a psychological thriller than an example of philosophical horror, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s slow-burner follows a detective puzzled by a string of odd, seemingly disconnected murders. In each instance, the culprit is apprehended at the scene of crime, but has no memory of committing the act, nor any obvious motive. Admittedly, it’s a movie that might try some viewers’ patience: Kurosawa is more concerned with atmosphere and big questions than linear storytelling and easy answers. But stick with it, and it’s a film you’ll find yourself pondering long after it’s over.

Controversial upon arrival, William Friedkin’s thriller starring Al Pacino as a cop hunting a killer preying on New York’s S&M underground was met with protest from gay rights groups and critics alike. But, hey, that’s Friedkin for you. He’s a provocateur par excellence, and while it’s hard to argue that time has softened its presentation of the queer community at all, its hallucinatory tone, along with Pacino’s coming-undone performance, make it undeniably captivating. 

A serial killer movie in the Zodiac vein, this Spike Lee joint uses the Son of Sam murders as a backdrop to show how a shared trauma impacts a city and its citizens. An ensemble cast, including Adrien Brody, John Leguizamo, Mira Sorvino and Jennifer Esposito, portray neighbours in an Italian-American section of Brooklyn in the late 1970s during the summer David Berkowitz paralyzed New York with a string of gruesome murders. As fear spreads and heat rises, tensions flare among the residents, making this something of an odd, unofficial sequel to Do the Right Thing.  

An American novelist promoting his new book in Rome is taunted by an obsessed killer who seems to be using his work as a guide. That fairly standard murder mystery setup is a springboard for giallo godhead Dario Argento to stage some shockingly brutal deaths that are nonetheless stunning in their execution, most notably one in which a woman’s arm is hacked off with an axe, painting the walls of her stark-white kitchen red with an almost comical amount of arterial spray.

In this brilliantly twisted take on the ‘swapped bodies’ comedy, Vince Vaughn plays a mass murderer whose deranged consciousness magically gets transferred to a teenage girl (Kathryn Newton) – and vice versa. It’s hard to believe it took so long for someone to come up with this idea, and director Christopher Landon makes good on the premise, delivering a movie as hilarious as it is bloody.

What’s scarier than Brian Cox playing an amoral media magnate on Succession? How about Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter? Although overshadowed by Anthony Hopkins’ later turn, Cox brings his own kind of slithering menace to the role of cinema’s most famous ultra-intelligent cannibal. Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel bombed at the box office, but after the success of Silence of the Lambs, it’s been reappraised as a taut and stylish thriller, as well as a fine introduction to one of the movies’ best villains. Fifteen years later, Manhunter was remade with Hopkins, using the original title of Harris’s book, Red Dragon.

Late-period Hitchcock is a mixed bag, but the director’s second-to-last film finds the master of suspense firmly back in his wheelhouse. (And also back in Britain for the first time in a decade.) After his wife falls victim to a serial killer known as the Necktie Murderer, a former Royal Air Force officer is implicated in the crime and forced to go on the run while trying to clear his name, and avoid the real killer, who might be closer to him than he expects. 

A sort of olfactory twist on Soylent Green, Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) fashioned this beautifully weird costume thriller about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a genius perfumer in 18th century France, from Patrick Süskind’s bestselling novel. Consumed by the notion of bottling the female scent, he resorts to murdering young women in order to distill their essence. However shaky the story, Tykwer makes up for with astoundingly sumptuous cinematography and some truly eye-popping moments, including a climatic scene in which Grenouille is overwhelmed by a crowd that believes him to be an angel. Told you it’s weird.