People are rightly terrified by serial killers, but they sure are fascinated by them. Let’s face it, savagery interests people. Unlike gangsters, serial killers such as Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the BTK killer seemed disturbingly recognizable—human in every outward respect. Early serial-killer pictures like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931) created a blueprint for the films that followed, a genre that exploded in popularity alongside the true-crime boom. These are my selections for the 10 best.
10. The Girl with the Needle (2024, dir. Magnus von Horn)
This Danish-language thriller is based on the grotesque real-life story of Dagmar Overbye, who is believed to have murdered as many as 25 children for whom she was a caregiver between 1913 and 1920. The film’s protagonist, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), is a destitute factory worker recently evicted by her landlord and discarded by the boss whose baby she is carrying. At her most despondent, she is about to attempt an abortion with a needle when she meets Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) and learns of the woman’s unusual side service of finding homes for unwanted children. Karoline delivers the child and hands it over to Dagmar, developing a friendship with the woman and her 7-year-old daughter, unaware of what happens to the infants entrusted in Dagmar’s care. Stomach-turning revelations ensue. Filmed in gorgeous black and white by Michael Dymek and featuring standout performances by Sonne and Dyrholm, Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle is handsomely crafted and utterly harrowing. You’ve been warned.
9. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986, dir. John McNaughton)
Don’t be deceived by the title. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is less “portrait” than an invitation to spend time with a homicidal maniac. This defiantly scuzzy picture has no interest in delving into why Henry must murder. In Keepers: The Greatest Films—and Personal Favorites—of a Moviegoing Lifetime, critic Richard Schickel argues that the movie must be seen “for the perfection of its sullen statement of something ugly that has always been present in our lives.” The script by writer-director John McNaughton and co-writer Richard Fire is based loosely on the case of Henry Lee Lucas, a convicted killer who later claimed, falsely, responsibility for hundreds of murders. As the eponymous drifter with insatiable bloodlust, Michael Rooker is riveting in his movie debut. After bouncing around the country, he settles in Chicago with his friend Otis (Tom Towles) and Otis’ sister (Tracy Arnold). The banality of evil has become a cliché, but few stories of serial killers have approached their subject with so little sensationalism or psychological exploration. Although the picture, shot in 16mm on a shoestring budget, was completed by 1986, a lengthy battle over an initial NC-17 rating delayed its theatrical release until 1990. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is an unadorned, thoroughly chilling window on the life of a sociopath.
8. Vengeance Is Mine (1979, dir. Shōhei Imamura)
Whose vengeance? The murder victims in Shōhei Imamura’s engrossing film are innocents whose only mistake was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter. Vengeance Is Mine is based on Ryūzō Saki’s nonfiction book detailing the true-life case of Akira Nishiguchi, a Japanese serial killer who murdered five people in 1963 and 1964 until his eventual capture, conviction and execution. The Nishiguchi stand-in here is Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata), an affable but unremarkable salesman whose killing spree prompts a 78-day nationwide manhunt. Beyond a childhood incident of his father’s public humiliation, the film stays at arm’s length from what motivates Iwao. He can be charming, but his friendliness does not appear to be an act to lull victims; Iwao just has an impulse to kill. Vengeance Is Mine encompasses a wide swath of interesting characters as Iwao makes his way across Japan while posing as a Tokyo college professor. He takes on several lovers, most notably the lonely owner of a modest inn, while the wife he abandoned, Kazuko (Mitsuko Baisho), falls in love with her father-in-law (Rentarō Mikuni). The film’s excursions into melodrama and black comedy make it difficult to pin down, much like the enigmatic monster at its center.
7. Memories of Murder (2003, dir. Bong Joon Ho)
It is 1986, and a rural province in South Korea is in the throes of what many believed to be the country’s first known serial killer case. The body of the latest victim, a young woman, is discovered in a drainage ditch in the middle of nowhere. Two local police investigators appear to be woefully inept. Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) claims he can determine a suspect’s culpability by looking into their eyes, while his partner Cho Yong-koo (Kim Roi-ha) prefers beating suspects until they confess or pass out. CSI: South Korea, it ain’t. Park and Cho look for the low-hanging fruit of suspects, including a mentally challenged man (Park Noh-shik) who followed around one of the victims. They are soon joined by a hotshot detective from Seoul, Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), who is rightly disgusted by the locals’ methods. Equal parts police procedural and black comedy, Memories of Murder is a masterpiece of ever-shifting tone. Bong Joon Ho continually subverts expectations in this fictionalized account of law enforcement’s efforts in the late 1980s to track down a serial killer responsible for 10 rapes and murders around the town of Hwaseong south of Seoul. Bong’s international breakthrough film renewed interest in the case, which remained unsolved until DNA evidence identified Lee Choon-jae in 2019.
(See more in The 15 best neo-noir films.)
6. 10 Rillington Place (1971, dir. Richard Fleischer)
This downbeat, meticulously researched thriller tells the true-life story of John Reginald Christie (Richard Attenborough), who murdered at least eight people in England before his execution in 1953. The case was not only tabloid fodder; it also underscored the fallibility of capital punishment and was instrumental in Great Britain’s elimination of the death penalty. Tim Evans (John Hurt), a neighbor of Christie’s, had been convicted and hanged for murdering his 20-year-old wife and their infant daughter. Later police learned that Christie was the actual killer, having lured Beryl Evans (Judy Geeson) into his confidence by telling the pregnant woman that he could perform an abortion. Attenborough makes for a terrifyingly unassuming monster—a timid, bespectacled fellow always ready with a spot of tea when he isn’t gassing and raping his female victims. John Hurt is nearly as memorable in one of his earliest film roles as the simple-minded, painfully gullible Tim. Director Richard Fleischer, who had made another serial-killer picture three years earlier with The Boston Strangler, envelops 10 Rillington Place in the morbid atmosphere of perpetually overcast postwar London.
5. M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang)
One cannot overestimate the influence of Fritz Lang’s first sound masterpiece, its nocturnal atmospherics evident in film noir, police procedurals and, of course, serial-killer movies. M made a star of Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert, a murderer of children in an unnamed German city. His reign of terror has thrown the city into chaos. Police are cracking down on the criminal underworld, whose leaders are motivated to mete out justice themselves in hopes of resuming their normal thievery. Beckert is tracked down—given away by his habit of whistling Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”—and hauled before a kangaroo court where the thieves and assorted crooks reject his plea to be handed over to the authorities. “So you can plead insanity and spend the rest of your life being cared for by the state?” says “the Safecracker” (Gustaf Gründgens) who presides over the sham court. “You must be taken out of action! You must go!” Writer-director Lang and co-writer Thea von Harbou (Lang’s wife at the time) were partly inspired by the story of the then-recent case of Düsseldorf serial murderer Peter Kürten, who had been convicted of his crimes only a month before M’s release. Lorre’s madman is very much a singular creation, a short, chubby man with bulging eyes and a nervous manner that gives the impression of someone terrified of himself.
4. Shadow of a Doubt (1943, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Of all Alfred Hitchcock’s forays into the macabre world of the serial killer, and there were many, this thriller is his most quietly devastating. With all due respect to the landmark Psycho (1960) and the underrated Frenzy (1972), Shadow of a Doubt is nearly flawless. Joseph Cotten is Charlie, visiting his sister and her family in idyllic Santa Rosa, California. Charlie is dapper, worldly and absolutely adored by his teenaged niece and namesake, Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright). The two Charlies are no accident, as Hitch and screenwriters Thornton Wilder (he of Our Town fame), Sally Benson, and Alma Reville (Mrs. Hitchcock) make duality a central theme. Despite the pair’s close bond, young Charlie begins to suspect her beloved uncle has a darker side and might just be the “Merry Widow” killer whose specialty is murdering wealthy, middle-aged widows. Rants like this from Uncle Charlie start to crack her adoration: “Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine? The world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?” Yet Hitchcock also urges audiences to identify with Uncle Charlie. “What it boils down to is that villains are not all black and heroes are not all white; there are grays everywhere,” he later told fellow director François Truffaut. “Uncle Charlie loved his niece, but not as much as she loved him.”
3. American Psycho (2000, dir. Mary Harron)
American Psycho is the blackest of black comedies while losing none of its horror. Adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel, it stars Christian Bale as New York investment banker/serial killer Patrick Bateman, a role the actor took after Leonardo DiCaprio dropped out (reportedly at the urging of Gloria Steinem). No knock on DiCaprio or others who had been considered (including Ewan McGregor and Billy Crudup), but it’s difficult to imagine anyone but Bale as the status-obsessed, narcissistic psychopath whose interests range from Valentino suits to the watermark of a business card. The cast includes strong work from Reese Witherspoon, Chloë Sevigny and Willem Dafoe, among others, but this is squarely Bale’s movie. Speaking of “squarely,” Bateman’s hatcheting of rival Paul Allen (Jared Leto) while delivering an unsolicited dissertation on Huey Lewis and the News’ song “It’s Hip to Be Square” is a particular highlight. Many had deemed the book unfilmable, but writer-director Mary Harron and co-writer Guinevere Turner didn’t want to make torture porn, interested instead in mining the comic possibilities of a homicidal psycho in 1980s Wall Street. A cutthroat mindset turns literal. Like the source material, their film preserves Ellis’ queasy ambiguity about how much of Bateman’s violence exists outside his twisted imagination.
(See more in The 10 best black comedies.)
2. The Silence of the Lambs (1991, dir. Jonathan Demme)
It’s uncommon for a genre picture to receive much acclaim from the Academy Awards, much less one that sweeps the big five of Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Adapted Screenplay—but The Silence of the Lambs is that rarity. Jonathan Demme’s impeccably crafted adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel is suspenseful, unsettling, and razor-sharp. It earns its bona fides as a serial-killer masterpiece while also transcending the genre. Scripted by Ted Tally, it concerns the FBI in the midst of trying to track down a murderer who calls himself Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) and is harvesting the skin of women to make himself a suit. A rookie agent, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), is given the unenviable job of trying to elicit insights from an incarcerated serial killer. That inmate, Dr. Hannibal Lecter—brilliant, conniving, cannibalistic—is soon locked in a psychological duel with Starling. Foster and Hopkins have an electric chemistry, but the picture has superb acting throughout, and Levine’s Buffalo Bill is the stuff of nightmares. The Silence of the Lambs’ impact on popular culture remains seismic—Lecter is a pop-culture touchstone all by himself—but shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow the elegant filmmaking that made it a critical and commercial blockbuster.
1. Zodiac (2007, dir. David Fincher)
In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area, murdering at least five people and frequently taunting authorities with cryptic letters to news outlets. At the time, David Fincher was growing up in Marin County, where news of the Zodiac routinely filled television broadcasts and newspaper headlines. Law enforcement never identified the murderer, whose correspondence ended by 1974, but that horrific period remained with Fincher into adulthood. He revisits that unresolved saga in Zodiac from the vantage point of three men close to the case. James Vanderbilt’s script is based on two books authored by Robert Graysmith, played in the film by Jake Gyllenhaal, a San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist whose fascination with the Zodiac case gradually comes to dominate his life. He is joined in his efforts by Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery (an excellent Robert Downey Jr.) and San Francisco police detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). Fincher’s attention to detail permeates every frame of the movie, which makes a compelling argument that Zodiac was a one-time teacher and mechanic named Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), although nothing was conclusively proven. The Zodiac killer appears in only a handful of scenes, but each one is terrifying. The film opens in July 1969, when Zodiac attacks David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen at a lovers’ lane, accompanied by the flower-child psychedelia of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” Fincher was no stranger to the serial-killer genre; his 1995 thriller Se7en is one of the best. This time, however, the director’s focus is on the investigative process and the eventual slide into obsession. In a way, the investigators become victims of the Zodiac, too—only they live to tell the tale.
(See more in The 15 best neo-noir films.)
Honorable mention: Cure (1997, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa), Frenzy (1972, dir. Alfred Hitchcock), The House That Jack Built (2018, dir. Lars von Trier), I Saw the Devil (2010, dir. Kim Jee-woon), Manhunter (1986, dir. Michael Mann), Monster (2003, dir. Patty Jenkins), The Night of the Hunter (1955, dir. Charles Laughton), Peeping Tom (1960, dir. Michael Powell), Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock), Se7en (1995, dir. David Fincher)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 