Greatest Serial Killer Films and TV Episodes

The serial killer is one of fiction’s most difficult subjects because the obvious approach (sensationalism, gore, the aestheticization of violence) is also the least interesting and least honest approach. The works on this list are here because they resisted it. They asked the harder question: not what the killer does, but what kind of world produces someone capable of it, what it costs the people who hunt them, and what it means that we find these stories so convincing.

Most serial killer movies bore me, and the gory ones bore me fastest.

Once a film starts staging corpses like art installations, I can feel it asking me to be impressed by the killer, and I resent that. The entries here made the list by caring about the people left standing, the detectives and the neighbors nobody believed. That’s where the horror is for me, and it’s the part the cheap versions never bother with.

Red = Film. Purple = TV episode. Each entry identifies the craft achievement.

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1. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

► Read the full review of The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

“A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

The definitive serial killer film because it does two things at once that no other entry on this list matches: it presents a killer of real intelligence whose help is real and valuable, and it presents the investigator’s vulnerability as the thing that makes her effective. Clarice Starling’s background (her father, the lambs) is the psychological material that Lecter reads and that gives their exchange its real mutual investment. Lecter helps her because she interests him.

She interests him because she’s not afraid to be known.

Buffalo Bill is the film’s second achievement, a killer whose pathology is rendered with clinical precision. The pit, the lotion, the night-vision sequence: each element communicates his psychology. Demme understood that the horror of Buffalo Bill isn’t his violence but his relationship to identity and body, and the film is honest about that instead of using it for effect.

No film in this genre has topped it for me. Demme makes Clarice the center of gravity, and Lecter is drawn to her for the same reason I am: she keeps walking toward what scares her. Too many imitators kept the cannibal and forgot the woman on the other side of the glass.

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2. Se7en (1995)

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“What’s in the box?”

Andrew Kevin Walker’s screenplay and Fincher’s execution produce the genre’s most complete philosophical villain, a man whose crimes are an argument. John Doe isn’t insane by any clinical definition. His position, that the world’s indifference to its own moral rot deserves punishment, is coherent and even partially correct, and that’s the film’s most disturbing quality.

The audience has been watching a city that looks exactly like Doe describes it for the entire film. His diagnosis is accurate. His prescription is catastrophic.

The ending (which the studio attempted to change and which Pitt protected by contractual means) is the only honest ending available to this story. Mills does exactly what Doe predicted. Doe wins. Somerset’s final line (Hemingway’s “the world is a fine place and worth fighting for / I agree with the second part”) is the film’s refusal to resolve the argument it’s been making. The world Doe described still exists. Somerset will go back into it tomorrow.

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3. Zodiac (2007)

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“I need to look him in the eye and I need him to know that I know.”

Fincher’s most formally rigorous film is about what the unsolved case does to the men who can’t let it go: the cartoonist who becomes an obsessive researcher, the detective who retires haunted, the reporter who drinks himself out of relevance. The killer is almost peripheral to his own film, the correct formal choice, because the Zodiac’s specific power was the impossibility of resolution, and a film about him that resolved his identity would be dishonest to the case’s actual nature.

The Lake Berryessa sequence, a single scene of violence among two and a half hours of procedural investigation, is placed with deliberate shock. Fincher has kept the violence at a distance for an hour and then delivers it with full physical specificity, which communicates exactly what the investigation abstracts: there are real people at the end of every case file. The procedural distance that makes the work possible is also the distance that makes the work inhumane.

Zodiac takes more nerve than any other film here, because it has the discipline to leave its audience unsatisfied. Every commercial instinct in Hollywood pushes toward the arrest and the confession. Fincher refused both and made the frustration his subject. Two and a half hours of dead ends shouldn’t grip me the way this does, and I can’t look away from any of it.

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4. No Country for Old Men (2007)

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“What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?”

Anton Chigurh isn’t a serial killer in the clinical sense but belongs on this list as the genre’s most philosophically complete killer, a man who has organized violence into a system of thought that’s internally consistent and externally terrifying. The coin toss is Chigurh’s theology: fate, not the person holding the coin, determines outcomes. He’s the instrument of fate instead of its author, and that gives his violence the quality of inevitability. He’s not angry at his victims.

He simply finds them in the path of what was always going to happen.

Bardem’s physical stillness (the calm of a man for whom nothing is urgent because the outcome is already determined) is the performance’s central achievement. Chigurh is never hurried. He never raises his voice. He explains his position to people who are about to die because he believes they deserve to understand it. The courtesy is the horror.

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5. American Psycho (2000)

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“I have to return some videotapes.”

Harron’s film uses serial killing as a lens for examining a pathology of 1980s Wall Street masculinity, the complete substitution of performance for identity, the horror of a man who has no self beneath the surface. Patrick Bateman may or may not have killed anyone. The film sustains this ambiguity deliberately because the ambiguity is the argument: in a world organized entirely around image and performance, actual events are less real than the stories told about them.

Whether Bateman killed anyone is less interesting than what the killing fantasies reveal about the culture that produced him.

Bale’s performance (as a man performing humanity instead of experiencing it, whose emotions are all surface and calibration) is the film’s most essential element. The business card scene is the funniest and most disturbing scene in the film because the competitive anxiety it produces is identical to what real murderous rage produces. In Bateman’s world, the distinction may be irrelevant.

Bale is frightening and funny in the same breath, and the business card scene makes me laugh, and I’m not proud of it. My reservation is the last stretch. Harron leans so hard on the did-he-or-didn’t-he question that the film starts to feel more like an essay than a story, and I stop caring about Bateman’s answer before she stops asking.

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6. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

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“It’s always the same and it’s always different.”

The most uncomfortable film on this list because it refuses every available comfort.

Henry isn’t glamorized, not explained, not punished within the film’s world, and not presented as exceptional. He’s a banal person who kills people with the same quality of attention he brings to everything else. That’s almost none. McNaughton shot on 16mm with a tiny budget and produced a film that feels documentary in its refusal to aestheticize what it shows.

The home invasion sequence (shown on a television screen within the film, the killers watching their own footage) is the most disturbing sequence in this list because it refuses to make the violence cinematic.

Michael Rooker’s Henry is the definitive performance of the serial killer as ordinary person, a man with no visible inner life beyond immediate need, whose violence isn’t passionate or ideological but simply the most efficient solution available to him at any given moment. The banality is the horror. The film was shelved for years and received an X rating before eventually being released unrated.

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7. M (1931)

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“I can’t help what I do. I can’t help it. I can’t.”

Fritz Lang’s film is the genre’s origin and still its most formally sophisticated entry, a film that was made in 1931 about a child killer in Weimar Germany and that anticipated every later debate about the serial killer’s psychology, the criminal justice system’s relationship to those who can’t control their impulses, and the question of whether compulsion mitigates culpability.

Peter Lorre’s final speech (his breakdown before the criminal kangaroo court, his claim that he can’t help what he does) is the genre’s most honest and most disturbing moment because it asks the audience directly: does this change anything?

Lang’s formal innovation (the city as organism responding to threat, the police and the criminal underworld both mobilized against the same target) establishes the structural template that the entire genre has followed since. The film predates the clinical category “serial killer” by decades and understands the psychology more completely than most later work.

M is almost a century old and it still makes most modern thrillers look timid. Lorre’s speech is the moment I think about most. Lang puts a child killer on trial in front of other criminals, makes me feel sorry for him, and then refuses to tell me whether I should. Few directors would risk that today, and Lang did it in 1931.

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8. Man Bites Dog (1992)

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“You have to watch your weight when you do old ladies. There’s not much to them.”

The Belgian mockumentary in which a documentary crew follows a serial killer and gradually becomes complicit in his crimes is the most formally radical entry on this list and the most direct interrogation of the audience’s relationship to this genre. Ben is charming, funny, opinionated, cultured. And the film’s specific horror is that the documentary crew, and by extension the audience, finds him entertaining. The moment when the crew stops filming and participates is the film’s accusation: you were already participating. The camera was already complicity.

Belgian film students made the film on a tiny budget, and it generated enormous controversy on its festival circuit release. No later work has made its argument (that the act of watching and documenting violence isn’t neutral, that the audience purchases its entertainment at the cost of the film’s victims) more directly or more honestly.

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9. Prisoners (2013)

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“He’s not a person anymore.”

Villeneuve’s film is the genre’s most complete examination of what a crime does to the people adjacent to it: not the killer’s psychology but the father’s, the detective’s, the family’s. Hugh Jackman’s Keller Dover is one of the great performances of a man’s psychological disintegration under impossible pressure: a devoutly religious man who tortures a suspect because the alternative is inaction, who crosses lines he can’t uncross because the alternative is his daughter’s death, who becomes something he wouldn’t have recognized in himself before the film began.

The film’s specific achievement is moral complexity without resolution. Keller is wrong in what he does, the film is honest about this, and the film also makes the audience understand exactly why he does it and feel the pull of the choice themselves. The answer to “would you do the same?” isn’t comfortable, and Villeneuve doesn’t make it comfortable.

Prisoners devastates me. I understand Keller and I can’t defend him, and Villeneuve won’t let me off that hook for a single scene. My one small complaint is the middle stretch, which could lose a few minutes without losing anything the last act needs.

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10. The Killer (2023)

“Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage.”

Fincher’s Netflix adaptation of the French graphic novel is the serial killer film as workplace procedural, a hitman who applies the language of productivity culture and self-optimization to the act of killing people for money. The Smiths on the soundtrack while he waits for a target. The meditation mantras while he kills.

The comedy of professional language applied to professional murder. Fassbender’s narration is the film’s central joke and central argument: this is what the optimization mindset looks like at its logical extreme.

The film received mixed reviews from audiences expecting conventional action and strong reviews from critics who understood what Fincher was doing, and that’s the response Fincher built the film to produce. It’s one of his most formally controlled works, and its chief pleasure is watching a filmmaker execute his vision with complete precision in a film about a man who executes his targets with complete precision. The form mirrors the content.

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11. Mindhunter – “Episode 1” (S1E1, 2017)

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“How do we get ahead of crazy if we don’t know how crazy thinks?”

Fincher’s opening episode establishes the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in its earliest form, two agents who aren’t sure they have permission to do what they’re doing, interviewing serial killers in prison because no systematic body of knowledge about the psychology of serial killers exists yet. The episode’s achievement is the procedural authenticity of the uncertainty: these men are inventing the methodology in real time, making mistakes, discovering that their assumptions about how to talk to these men are wrong.

The Richard Speck interview, which begins the series’ pattern of agents sitting across from killers in fluorescent prison light, establishes the show’s central formal quality: the killers are interesting, the conversations are changing the agents, and the camera maintains an uncomfortable distance that refuses to make the conversations feel safe or contained. The show is about what happens to the people who must understand killers to prevent killers. The agents pay the cost episode by episode.

Mindhunter is the kind of television I wish there were more of. Two agents try to invent a science across a table from men who’ve killed, and Fincher shoots it without a drop of glamour. Those interview scenes frighten me more than any chase in the genre.

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12. True Detective – “The Long Bright Dark” (S1E1, 2014)

► Read the full review of True Detective – “The Long Bright Dark” (S1E1, 2014)

“Time is a flat circle.”

Nic Pizzolatto’s opening episode establishes the dual timeline structure, two detectives interviewed separately in 2012 about a 1995 murder, and introduces Rust Cohle as the genre’s most philosophically developed investigator: a man whose nihilistic view of human consciousness and pessimistic cosmology isn’t a pose but a real worldview that he holds with complete conviction and deploys in every conversation. The first episode’s specific achievement is making Cohle’s philosophy feel like his own.

McConaughey delivers the philosophical monologues as a man who has thought these thoughts to their conclusion and found no comfort in any of them.

The Louisiana landscape (flat, humid, heat-hazy, a place that’s been absorbing human suffering for centuries) is established in the first episode with Fukunaga’s visual grammar: wide shots, shallow focus, the horizon always visible, the sky enormous. The landscape is the show’s argument about scale made visible: human drama occurring in a universe that’s indifferent to it.

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13. Hannibal – “Apéritif” (S1E1, 2013)

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“I don’t find you interesting enough to lie to.”

Bryan Fuller’s series opening establishes Will Graham’s specific gift (the ability to reconstruct a killer’s perspective from crime scene evidence, to think in their logic) as a psychological vulnerability instead of a superpower.

The empathy that makes him useful is also the thing that’s destroying him. Fuller visualizes this as a sequence in the pilot that’s no equivalent in the source novels: Will at a crime scene, reconstructing the murder from the inside, experiencing the killer’s satisfaction as his own. The technique is elegant and completely honest about what the gift costs.

Mads Mikkelsen’s Lecter is the series’ departure from Hopkins. More elegant, more interested in Will as a person, more aesthetically complete in his own right. The first episode establishes their relationship as a real intellectual and psychological bond before the horror of its nature is fully disclosed, the correct order. The friendship must be real before its betrayal can land.

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14. Dexter – “Dexter” (S1E1, 2006)

► Read the full review of Dexter – “Dexter” (S1E1, 2006)

“Tonight’s the night. And it’s going to happen again and again.”

The pilot’s formal achievement is the establishment of Dexter’s specific double life (forensic blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police by day, serial killer of serial killers by night) as something the audience immediately accepts and roots for.

Daniel Cerone and the pilot’s direction accomplish this through voiceover narration that’s specific, self-aware, and darkly funny: Dexter knows exactly what he is, has a clear and organized relationship to it, and communicates it to the audience like a man letting you in on something private. The identification is immediate and the moral compromise is immediate alongside it.

The pilot episode works because it establishes the “code”, the rules Harry Morgan instilled in Dexter that limit his killing to murderers who evaded justice, as a real moral structure instead of a rationalization. The audience accepts the code as legitimate and then must contend with having accepted it. The series is at its best when it interrogates that acceptance. It’s at its worst when it forgets to.

I enjoy this pilot a lot, and Hall’s narration is a sly piece of work. My reservation is how easy it makes things. Dexter’s victims are so plainly deserving that the show answers the moral question for me before I’ve had a chance to wrestle with it, and I think the show is weakest whenever it lets that answer stand.

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15. Killing Eve – “Nice Face” (S1E1, 2018)

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“I have a feeling about you.”

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s pilot introduces Villanelle by showing the audience her delight before her danger: the ice cream, the deliberate destruction of the small girl’s sundae, the pleasure of someone who finds the reactions of people around them more interesting than the people themselves. By the time the murder arrives, Villanelle has already entertained the audience, the pilot’s achievement: making the killer charming before making her terrifying, so that the charm and the terror become inseparable.

Jodie Comer’s performance (as a woman for whom everything is a performance and who’s delighted by her own performances) is what drives the series. Villanelle isn’t psychopathic in the clinical sense of being incapable of feeling. She feels intensely; she simply doesn’t feel what other people feel when other people feel it. Her relationship with Eve is real. Its reality is the horror.

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16. The X-Files – “Squeeze” (S1E3, 1993)

► Read the full review of The X-Files – “Squeeze” (S1E3, 1993)

“Eugene Tooms. I will be waiting for you.”

The episode that established the Monster-of-the-Week format as a viable vehicle for real horror in network television. Eugene Tooms (a mutant killer who hibernates for thirty years between killing cycles, who can compress his body to enter through any opening, who needs five human livers per cycle to survive) is the X-Files’ first completely successful villain and one of television’s most effectively realized horror characters.

Glen Morgan and James Wong’s script is precise in its mythology and in its character: Tooms is ordinary in appearance, and that’s the episode’s specific horror. He looks like an ordinary young man.

Doug Hutchison’s performance (as a being who has observed human behavior for a century and learned to mimic it without feeling it) anticipates the clinical serial killer portrait that would become the genre’s dominant mode in the decade that followed. The episode works in 45 minutes and required no follow-up to be complete, though the follow-up episode “Tooms” is equally strong.

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17. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)

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“I’m the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.”

Berlinger’s film is told from Liz Kloepfer’s perspective (Bundy’s longtime girlfriend who refused to believe he was guilty until the evidence became impossible to deny) which is the correct formal choice and the reason the film works better than most Bundy treatments. The audience experiences exactly what Liz experienced: a charming, attentive, apparently normal man who’s impossible to reconcile with what the evidence eventually forces you to accept. Zac Efron’s casting, a conventionally attractive actor playing a conventionally attractive killer, isn’t exploitation but the point.

Bundy’s specific danger was that he looked like the boyfriend.

The film deliberately withholds depictions of the crimes throughout and then delivers a single moment of acknowledgment at the end, Bundy’s face when Liz finally asks him directly, that communicates everything the film has been building toward without showing anything. The restraint is the film’s formal argument about how these stories should be told.

The frame is right, and I still came away disappointed. The film has the correct idea and then plays it so safe that Liz’s doubt never cuts deep, and Efron’s charm ends up doing work the script should have done. A movie this careful about Bundy has no business feeling this hollow.

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18. Monster (2003)

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“I always wanted to be in the movies.”

Patty Jenkins’s film about Aileen Wuornos is the genre’s most complete account of the conditions that produce a killer: not as an excuse but as an honest examination of what a life of abuse, poverty, and systematic exploitation produces at its extreme. Wuornos isn’t presented as a hero or a monster but as an individual whose history is accounted for with the same quality of attention that Jenkins brings to her crimes. The film doesn’t ask you to forgive Wuornos.

It asks you to understand the complete context from which she emerged.

Charlize Theron’s transformation (physical and psychological, and complete) is the film’s primary achievement. Theron doesn’t play a performance of Wuornos. She inhabits a woman who has been treated as disposable her entire life and has internalized that treatment in visible ways. Theron deserved the Oscar, and she won it for that embodiment, not for the transformation itself.

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19. Nightcrawler (2014)

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“I’m a quick learner and I don’t have a lot of other options.”

Lou Bloom isn’t a serial killer by any clinical definition. Nightcrawler belongs on this list because Gyllenhaal’s portrait of a man whose specific pathology, complete absence of empathy combined with complete dedication to self-improvement language, produces predatory behavior that escalates across the film is the most accurate portrait of the sociopathic personality in contemporary American cinema. The film is also a media critique: Lou’s footage sells because the market for crime footage rewards exactly the behavior Lou provides. That implicates the media industry in the production of his escalating crimes.

Gyllenhaal lost 30 pounds for the role and developed Lou’s specific physical quality (the wide eyes, the stillness, the complete absence of ordinary social nervousness) as a portrait of a man who experiences social interaction as a set of tactical problems. Every conversation is a negotiation. Every relationship is a resource. The performance is complete and disturbing.

Lou Bloom scares me more than anyone else on this list, because he talks like a motivational seminar and almost nobody around him flinches. Gyllenhaal makes that eager smile unbearable. I’d put this film in front of every newsroom that ever ran footage because it would rate.

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20. Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, “The Man in Apt. 213” (E1, 2022)

► Read the full review of Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, “The Man in Apt. 213” (E1, 2022)

“Nobody ever checks on anybody.”

Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s first episode is on this list for its formal choice: the opening is told from the perspective of Dahmer’s neighbor Glenda Cleveland, Niecy Nash, who calls the police repeatedly about the smell from Apartment 213, about the sounds, about her accumulating certainty that something is wrong. The police dismiss her. The episode’s argument isn’t about Dahmer’s psychology but about the institutional failures (racial indifference, bureaucratic routine) that allowed him to continue for as long as he did.

The monster is the context as much as the man.

Evan Peters deliberately underplays Dahmer as a man who has organized his pathology into a routine, who moves through his days with the blankness of someone who completely hides his inner life from everyone around him. The contrast between Dahmer’s surface normalcy and Glenda’s accurate perception of the wrongness next door is the episode’s central formal argument: the systems designed to protect people from this kind of threat failed because they existed to protect certain kinds of people and not others.

Glenda’s thread is the best idea in the episode, and Niecy Nash gives it the anger it deserves. The rest leaves me torn. The Dahmer scenes linger longer than the argument needs, and I’m never sure whether the camera is examining him or enjoying him. I come away with a smart frame around a queasy center.

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21. CSI: Miami / CSI: NY – The Henry Darius Crossover (2005)

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“Henry Darius. I saw you in the paper, you killed those nurses!”

The first time the CSI franchise used a serial killer as a structural device to bridge two separate shows. And it works because the killer’s mobility is the premise instead of a contrivance. Henry Darius, being transferred from New York to Miami to locate a body he buried years earlier, sabotages his own transport plane, kills four Miami college students, and abducts a hostage back to New York.

The geography is the story: a killer whose crimes span jurisdictions forces two investigative teams to collaborate, and the handoff between episodes mirrors the handoff of the case itself.

James Badge Dale’s Darius is the crossover’s underrated achievement, a killer smart enough to exploit the bureaucratic seams between jurisdictions, who understands that the gap between Miami and New York is itself a weapon. The two-parter aired on consecutive nights and pulled off the structural trick of ending the first episode with the killer still at large. That was unusual for network procedural television in 2005. Network crime procedurals resolved their cases within the hour. Darius didn’t resolve until he was in a different city on a different show.

I like the ambition here more than the execution. The jurisdiction idea is clever, and Dale gives Darius a cold intelligence the franchise rarely bothered with. Around him, though, it’s still a network procedural, and the dialogue keeps flattening into the usual lab-talk exposition. I enjoy it as a piece of plumbing more than as drama.

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22. The CSI Trilogy (2009)

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“This case is much bigger than they imagined.”

The only crossover in television history to run a single continuing criminal investigation across three separately produced network shows on consecutive nights. And it did it four years before the Marvel Cinematic Universe made the shared universe a cultural norm. Ray Langston follows a human trafficking network called the Zetas from Miami to New York to Las Vegas across three episodes, each produced by a different show’s team, each maintaining its own visual grammar while advancing the same case.

The structural achievement is underappreciated: coordinating three separate production units, three separate casts, and three separate episode formats into a coherent three-act story is difficult television production, and it worked.

The Trilogy is on this list not because it’s the best television in this category (it’s network procedural television of its era, polished and competent instead of groundbreaking) but because its structural ambition was new for broadcast television and directly influenced the multi-show crossover events that became standard practice in the Arrowverse and the One Chicago universe in the years that followed. The CSI Trilogy did the shared universe before the shared universe had a name.

What Separates the Great from the Exploitative

Every work on this list makes the same fundamental choice: it’s more interested in what the killer reveals about the world than in the killer as spectacle.

The Zodiac is barely present in his own film. Chigurh is a philosophical argument. Lou Bloom is a cultural product. Even the most killer-centered entries (Silence, Se7en, Hannibal) are primarily about the investigators and what the killers cost them.

The exploitative entry in this genre asks: how can we make the killing absorbing? The serious entry asks: what does the killing reveal? The answer to the second question is always more disturbing and more honest than any answer to the first.

I’ve got no use for the branch of this genre that turns killers into celebrities and lets the camera linger on the bodies. The work that deserves your time treats the dead as people and the killer as a problem to be understood, and every entry here manages at least that. A crime story that leaves you admiring the murderer has failed you, however slick it looks.

What serial killer film is missing from this list?

Manhunter, Memories of Murder, I Saw the Devil, Sharp Objects, and The Fall all have strong claims. Drop your nominations in the comments.