Four Serial Killer Films

The Silence of the Lambs, The Hitcher, Snowtown, 10 Rillington Place

Why serial killer movies?

In August last year, I realised that I would finish all my 2024 watch projects in about a month. That would have left the rest of the year without a project, so I decided to start a new one and based it on the podcast season I was listening to at the time - The Final Girls Podcast’s Serial Killers season.

Without a particular interest in the true crime genre or serial killers as a storytelling concept, I saw this as a good opportunity to explore some murkier corners of cinema that I don’t visit that often. I browsed my collection for serial killer movies, and found surprisingly many. Turns out serial killers might be one of the biggest tropes in genre movies. At least if you interpret “serial killer” as loosely as I did - that there is a character who feels compelled to commit multiple murders for whatever motivation.

I ended up with about 50 movies that featured serial killers, including some I happened to watch earlier in the year without having this project in mind. I only considered fiction movies, although some are based on real cases. A lot of them came from various exploitation film boxed sets that I had recently acquired - those of Pete Walker, Ray Dennis Steckler, Andy Milligan, H.G. Lewis, and The Lost Picture Show. Let’s say that for the most part the movies in those sets were not very good, but they might get a mention in a follow-up post.

Four recommendations from ~50 serial killer movies

Note: to my surprise, a lot of these movies are on YouTube. I don’t advocate watching them there, since the quality will not be comparable to a Blu-Ray, but if you don’t buy Blu-Rays or don’t even have a player, it’s still a way to watch them.

As with my other watch projects, I’m not necessarily giving you the best four serial killer movies, but recommending the ones that stood out to me from what I watched. In this case however, I’d say at least one of them is an all-timer, and that is…

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

I don’t know if I even need to recommend Silence of the Lambs - it’s almost a perfect masterpiece. Everyone knows Hannibal Lecter, and I think mostly thanks to this Best Picture Oscar winning movie. Actually it nabbed Oscars in all the main categories, including Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay.

I think Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) is remembered for being the main focus of some really gruesome and memorable scenes, and maybe the weak point of the movie is exactly that it makes people remember him more than the main character Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster. Structurally the movie is really her story more than anyone else’s.

And of course there is also the actual serial killer of the film, Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), who’s part in the storyline is considered somewhat problematic by some for adding to the association of the LGBTQ community with deviance and psychopathy in popular media. The director Jonathan Demme has argued against seeing Buffalo Bill as a gay character, though.

The film can be also seen as a feminist work, or at least a complex story of a woman’s self-actualisation in a male-dominated world. Jodie Foster once quipped that Demme is her favourite female director. I watched some more Demme movies recently, and I indeed found them to be quite good in portraying complex female protagonists and relationships between women. That could be said even about his early work like the Roger Corman-produced women-in-prison exploitation film Caged Heat, that still also has the shower scenes and other exploitative elements of the genre.

I watched the recent Arrow Video 4K UHD Blu-Ray release of Silence of the Lambs, and it looks amazing. The movie is also available to rent on Apple TV, and probably gets shown on TV every now and then.

The Hitcher (1986)

This was a movie that I had not seen before, but I remember being told about it as a scary night-time story when I was a teen without much access to these kind of movies. The buzz around this movie’s recent 4K UHD release made me add it to the list. My expectations were high, and were met - I was very impressed by The Hitcher.

It’s a visually stunning tense thriller. A brief but quite scary road encounter leads the psychopathic hitch-hiker John Ryder (the inimitable Rutger Hauer) to choose the young protagonist Jim (C. Thomas Howell) as a target for a drawn out cat and mouse game on the roads and small towns in the Texas deserts. His motivation is not entirely clear, but it seems that Ryder finally found a victim who challenges him and he is now trying to get the most thrills from haunting Jim.

It’s a really well paced horror-action-thriller and some of the shots of the desert roads look just fantastic. If you want to get some idea of the movie, there’s a short film China Lake by the director Robert Harmon, in a similar style. That short got him on the path towards making The Hitcher. It’s on YouTube, in rather low quality but you can see how amazing some of the visual composition is.

I watched The Hitcher on the long-awaited Second Sight 4K UHD Blu-Ray, and the picture quality was impressive. To my surprise the movie is also on YouTube.

Snowtown (2011)

Snowtown is a very bleak movie by Australian director Justin Kurzel, based on real events. It shows how the 16-year-old Jamie gradually and almost unwillingly becomes an accomplice in a series of murders organised by his mother’s psychopathic new boyfriend John, whose supposed aim is to clean up the neighbourhood.

John is charismatic and seems to be respected in his community even as he focuses all his attention and that of people around him on hunting down and punishing paedophiles in the area. Great performances make this a truly harrowing watch.

I watched the 101 Films Blu-Ray and the movie is also available on YouTube.

10 Rillington Place (1971)

Another pretty bleak film based on a real serial murder case. Directed by Richard Fleischer (Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Soylent Green), from whom I could have just as well picked another serial killer movie - The Boston Strangler - and who’s movies I’m trying to see more of lately. He is generally considered a journeyman director rather than a master, but he did make some really good films.

10 Rillington Place was not quite as harrowing as Snowtown to me, but it was still disquieting to watch Richard Attenborough portray a seemingly inept weakling who nevertheless murdered people in his own home while barely concealing it.

I watched the Powerhouse Films’ Indicator series Blu-Ray, which is based on a 4K restoration and looks very good. The movie should be also available to rent on Apple TV.

Coming up: more serial killers

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or The Boston Strangler are two movies I could have picked instead of 10 Rillington Place - they are just as good, and there are more films I can recommend seeing in the next post.