The 12 Best Serial Killer Movies Ever Made, Ranked

Yahoo

11-05-2025

Here are the 12 best serial killer movies we've ever seen, ranked in order from least to most great.
Mathew Bright's Freeway is as over the top as Henry is grounded: It's a reworking of Little Red Riding Hood with Kiefer Sutherland as Big Bad Wolf Bob Wolverton as Reese Witherspoon as our heroine, who in this case is an illiterate runaway named Vanessa.
In a clever, very '90s update of the fairy tale, no one believes Vanessa, even when she shoots Bob to end his reign of terror up and down California's freeways.
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It's a perfect movie for the era of trash TV and televised murder trials, as lines blurred between death and entertainment.
Based on an excellent graphic novel by Derf Backderf, who really did grow up with Jeffrey Dahmer, this utterly chilling, pitch-dark coming of age film by Mark Meyers is stomach-churning not because of anything exploitative — it is very restrained — but because it captures a moment in time when a horrendous serial killer could have been stopped, if only anyone could have anticipated the pain he would go on to cause.
The film draws a clear line between Dahmer's lack of empathy for both animals and fellow kids and his eventual murders, without being heavy-handed. (His impersonation of someone with a disability is an early sign of his casual, stupid cruelty.)
The entire cast is excellent — especially Ross Lynch as Dahmer and Alex Wolff as Derf — and it will make you think a lot about early warning signs.
Released a year before Freeway to far more acclaim, Seven is the quintessential serial-killer-as-mad-genius movie, and takes maybe a little too much delight in all the ways John Doe (Kevin Spacey) dispenses of his victims.
Like all great villains, he thinks he has a high-minded purpose — killing practitioners of the seven deadly sins — but it's hard to take the movie as anything but pulp.
Still, what well-made pulp. Credit goes to the undeniable craft of director David Fincher and excellent acting all around. Besides great turns by Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Spacey, it was Gwyneth Paltrow's breakout role.
Based on the graphic novel From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, the Hughes brothers' stellar adaptation offers what no one thought possible: a fresh take on Jack the Ripper.
Starring Johnny Depp as a Victorian-era crime solver and Heather Graham as a sex worker whose circle is targeted by Whitechapel's most infamous killer, From Hell will stop at nothing to draw your lurid fascination: There's even a cameo by the Elephant Man.
It also offers a guess at Jack's identity that is grimly believable and narratively satisfying.
Patty Jenkins' portrait of real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos is daring and ambitious in a way few films are: It manages to make us understand and even sympathize with its female serial-killer subject before ultimately turning against her.
Charlize Theron underwent an astonishing transformation that won her the Best Actress Oscar, and her astonishing character arc takes time to show, in a way few serial killers movies do, that monsters aren't born, they're made.
By far the funniest serial killer movie ever made, American Psycho follows Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale in his star-making role), a yuppie who either kills people or vividly imagines killing them, depending on your read of the film.
Our read: He killed all those people. Which makes it even more deeply, darkly funny when everyone assumes he didn't, on account of his good hair, designer clothes, great physique, and adequate business card.
Perhaps funniest of all is the subversion of the hero-detective trope: Willem Dafoe's Donald Kimball is as much a clout-chasing, phony yuppie as Bateman. The script, by director Mary Harron and co-star Guinevere Turner, does a masterful job of mining many of the funniest parts of Bret Easton Ellis' brilliant novel while excising the parts that would make the film too extreme for most audiences.
If you're reading this you might also enjoy our Oral History of American Psycho. And we're very interested in Luca Guadagnino's upcoming adaptation of Ellis' novel, though we can't imagine anyone improving on Harron's version.
David Fincher's Zodiac, which we prefer to his Seven, is almost the opposite of a typical serial-killer story: The crimes are never solved. No one receives catharsis. The killer doesn't just destroy the lives of his direct victims.
The film captures Bay Area gloom and melancholy like no other, as a small band of men, desperate to find one of the most elusive killers of all, dedicate their lives to unpacking his crimes.
Interestingly, a podcast by the aforementioned Bret Easton Ellis offered some ideas about who the Zodiac might have been.
Spike Lee's movie about the Son of Sam murders is barely about the Son of Sam murders — though it does feature a truly great, horrifying moment in which real-life serial killer David Berkowitz gets some murderin' orders from a talking dog.
What Summer of Sam is really about is how fear turns neighbors, friends and lovers against each other.
It's a deeply New York story no one could tell better than Spike Lee. It feels like both a more fiery, passionate, East Coast version of the chilly Zodiac, and like an Americanized version of a German classic that's coming up after the next serial killer movie on our list.
The first movie to feature Dr. Hannibal Lecter — masterfully played by a pre-Succession Brian Cox, above — Manhunter has a simple and brilliant setup: FBI profiler Will Graham can only solve murders by making himself think like the killer.
That may sound old-hat today, but that's only because so many films and TV shows have ripped off Manhunter and the Thomas Harris novel upon which it is based, Red Dragon.
Directed by Michael Mann had the peak of his Miami Vice fame, Manhunter is a magnificent movie in that it is both a very '80s time capsule and ageless. It perfectly captures a moment in time, but that time has aged impressively: The film combines grit and '80s slickness in a way that feels knowing and irresistible.
Speaking of aging well: Fritz Lang's German mystery thriller gets many points for basically inventing the serial killer movie. But almost 100 years after its release, it is also utterly, chillingly terrifying in a way most serial killer movies just aren't.
The black and white atmospheric and the time it takes to show us the killer's routine — including whistling "In the Hall of the Mountain King" — give M a sense of verisimilitude that few films match.
And Lang's innovative tracking shots have informed almost as many films as the script he wrote with wife Thea von Harbou. What the film does most impressivlely isn't even tell a serial killer story: It also delves into how suspicion and fear around the killings plunge a community into scapegoating and dehumanization, two things that would soon became a tragic, horrific part of Germany's history.
Alfred Hitchcock's serial killer movie is filled with twists, starting with the shower death of its ostensibly lead (Janet Leigh) and culiminating in the shocking reveal of the killer. It's an almost perfect movie, with just one flaw: an annoying bit of exposition at the end explaining the basis of Norman Bates' depravity, and what a "psycho" is.
Maybe audiences in 1960 didn't know, but audiences after sure did, thanks to Psycho.
Psycho also contains at least one — and perhaps two — of the greatest movie plot twists ever.
Are we really putting Silence of the Lambs above Psycho? Yes. Its your humble correspondent's favorite movie of all time, in large part because it isn't just a serial killer movie: It's about empathy, and the catastrophic consequences of its absence.
Based on Thomas Harris' follow-up novel to Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs has almost the opposite approach to crime-solving, though it takes some time and reflection to see it. While Will Graham solves saves people by seeing the world through the eyes of the killer, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) saves them by looking through the eyes of the victim.
After sharp, captivating talks with Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) about the motivations of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), Clarice finally saves Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith) by visiting the home of one of Bill's earlier victims — and finds a clue countless male investigators have missed.
Lecter has endless knowledge but little empathy, while Clarice has endless empathy but — at first — little knowledge. She gains knowledge fast, but empathy wins the day.
You may also like this list of Silence of the Lambs Details Most People Missed.
Main image: Main image: Reese Witherspoon in Freeway, Republic Pictures; Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, Orion; Heather Graham in From Hell, 20th Century Fox.
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