The serial killer story is an investigation story, and its quality depends entirely on the investigator. This tag collects reviews of serial killer films and the craft of writing a hunt that stays credible.
1980sSeptember 11, 2026
The New York Ripper (1982) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lucio Fulci made a giallo about a killer who murders women and quacks like a duck on the telephone. It was seized in Britain, refused certification…
1980sSeptember 11, 2026
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Made for around a hundred thousand dollars, shelved for four years over its rating, and still the film that other films about this subject…
2010sSeptember 11, 2026
Mindhunter's pilot rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Fincher directs an hour about a hostage negotiation failing and a man discovering that the vocabulary he has been given is inadequate. Almost nothing happens, there is no killer…
1980sSeptember 10, 2026
American Psycho (2000) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Mary Harron read a novel everybody called unfilmable and found the comedy in it. Made for seven million dollars, mostly in Toronto, and it is far funnier and…
1990sSeptember 10, 2026
Se7en (1995) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The rain never stops, the city has no name, and the killer wins exactly as planned. Fincher's second film, made after a first one he has disowned.
AdaptationJune 3, 2026
FBI trainee Clarice Starling and the imprisoned cannibal Hannibal Lecter in a duel of intellect and exposure. Tense, intelligent, and genuinely frightening, with one of fiction's most magnetic monsters. A colder and more psychologically granular book than even its Oscar-sweeping…
Book ReviewsMay 29, 2026
Narrated by Patrick Bateman, who describes murders and designer labels in the same flat voice, this is a genuinely sharp satire of consumer emptiness and an extreme experiment in unreliable narration, also punishing and arguably self-defeating in its excess. Important…
1990sMay 19, 2026
An FBI trainee consults imprisoned cannibal Hannibal Lecter to catch a serial killer skinning his victims. The Silence of the Lambs is Jonathan Demme's 1991 American psychological-thriller film adapted from Thomas Harris's 1988 novel, depicting an FBI trainee who consults…
1930sMay 17, 2026
Fritz Lang's 1931 German film. Peter Lorre as a child murderer hunted by both police and the criminal underworld.
2000sMay 16, 2026
David Fincher's 2007 procedural on the SF Zodiac killer investigation. Three protagonists, no killer caught.
CrimeMarch 22, 2026
Twenty films and TV episodes that use the serial killer as a lens for examining the world rather than as spectacle — from Silence of the Lambs to Mindhunter. What separates the serious from the exploitative, and what fiction writers…
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