Anthony Hopkins spends most of The Silence of the Lambs behind glass, and he still walks off with the movie.
That’s the whole trick of this subgenre in one image. It doesn’t matter who’s chasing the killer. The killer owns the frame.
Serial killers have been one of the most popular villains in thriller movies for years, turning up in horror, in action thrillers, in the kind of dead-serious dramatic thriller that wins awards. And in every case, the person taking lives is the one you remember on the drive home.
Hopkins proves it. Add the unhinged Buffalo Bill and you understand why The Silence of the Lambs cleaned up at the Oscars, though Jodie Foster holds her own standing next to two of them. Every other serial killer thriller gets measured against that movie. Plenty have come close.
Why the best filmmakers keep coming back
Michael Mann, David Fincher and Bong Joon-ho have all worked in this genre. So have Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal and Sigourney Weaver, all of whom took lead roles in these films.
The reason is simple. The killer keeps viewers on the edge of their seats, and these movies turn into quick success stories.
Here’s the ranking, counting up.
10. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Fincher adapted Stieg Larsson’s novel in 2011, making it the second adaptation of the story. The original was a Swedish film and the first part of a trilogy. Fincher’s version ended the franchise after one release.
That’s a shame, because the movie is critically acclaimed, with fantastic acting, direction and a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a young hacker, works with journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to solve a 40-year-old disappearance that turns out to be a murder, exposing corruption inside a wealthy family. The killer is Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgård), a man who had been killing women for decades. Mara earned an Oscar nomination.
9. Copycat (1995)
One of the most underrated thrillers of the 1990s. Sigourney Weaver plays criminal psychologist Dr. Helen Hudson, and Harry Connick Jr. plays imprisoned serial killer Daryll Lee Cullum, a man who physically targeted and attacked Hudson before his arrest. She’s been isolated and agoraphobic ever since.
Then a new killer starts copying the styles of past killers to draw her out for a dark, deadly game. He works his way through the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, the Son of Sam and the fictional Cullum. Holly Hunter co-stars as the detective on the case.
The twist at the end, revealing Cullum’s role in the new murders, still lands.
8. I Saw the Devil (2010)
Kim Jee-woon’s South Korean revenge thriller comes at the subgenre from a completely different direction. A secret agent hunts the serial killer who murdered his fiancée, so the killer is the villain, but chasing vengeance morally corrupts the once-heroic agent.
Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun) loses his fiancée to a deranged psychopath, Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), who brutally murders and dismembers her. Instead of killing him, the agent implants a tracking device and lets him go, then hunts him down and tortures him. Repeatedly.
Critics praised it, pointing to how trauma can turn even the best of men into villains over time.
7. Kiss the Girls (1997)
James Patterson’s Alex Cross books are one of the best-selling detective novel series of all time, adapted several times for movies and TV. This 1997 entry from director Gary Fleder is the best of them.
Morgan Freeman plays Cross, with Ashley Judd as Dr. Kate McTiernan. The case is personal: Cross’s niece has been abducted, and he teams with McTiernan, who escaped the killer herself, to find her.
The twist is that the serial killer is a police detective (Cary Elwes), and the film throws in a second serial killer to muddy the investigation. Smart stuff, and it put Alex Cross on the big screen.
6. Manhunter (1986)
Long before Hopkins perfected the part, the cannibalistic serial killer showed up on screen here, in one of Michael Mann’s earlier films. It’s an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, which got adapted again more than a decade later during Hopkins’ run. This one stars Brian Cox as the imprisoned killer.
William Petersen (CSI) is Will Graham, the FBI profiler who helped bring down Lecktor (the spelling changed for this movie). He’s trying to stop a killer known as the Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan), and he has to go back to Lecktor for help.
Mann’s neon-soaked visuals and Noonan’s eerie performance keep it a highlight of the whole franchise.
5. The Bone Collector (1999)
Denzel Washington spends the entire movie off his feet as Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic forensics expert. The real lead is Angelina Jolie as Amelia, a rookie patrol officer chasing a killer who stages every scene as an elaborate setup.
The Bone Collector abducts victims in a taxi and builds grisly deaths as puzzles referencing an old crime book. Rhyme cracks the puzzles while Amelia races to find him before she becomes the next target.
Puzzle-solving matters more here than the killer or the detectives. It wasn’t critically acclaimed. It’s still a re-watchable favorite.
4. Memories of Murder (2003)
Years before Parasite won him an Oscar, Bong Joon-ho made one of the best serial killer movies ever. It’s based on the real Hwaseong serial murders of 1986-1991, committed by the first recognized serial killer in South Korea. Song Kang-ho and Kim Sang-kyung play the two detectives, and the local police can’t crack it.
The killer is never caught in the film. The real one wasn’t captured until after the movie came out, and the film helped raise awareness of the cold case.
No known motive, no arrest, just the grinding frustration of chasing a faceless man. It remains one of the best South Korean thrillers of the 21st century.
3. Zodiac (2007)
Fincher went back to an unsolved case in 2007, this time the Zodiac Killer of the 1960s and 1970s. The real killer hunted victims in the San Francisco Bay Area, and nobody knows who he was.
Cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) becomes obsessed with the case, and Fincher’s film goes ahead and names a suspect.
It’s based on two books Graysmith wrote about the killings, Zodiac (1986) and Zodiac Unmasked (2002). Leaving the case open-ended was an interesting way to end it, and the theory Fincher folds in is catnip for true-crime obsessives.
2. Se7en (1995)
The darkest mainstream genre film of the decade, full stop.
Young detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) gets partnered with William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a veteran nearing retirement. A man calling himself John Doe is murdering people and staging their deaths around the Seven Deadly Sins.
Kevin Spacey is unsettling as Doe, but the film belongs to Mills, his young wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Somerset, and the way the killer pulls all three of them into his plans. That ending makes it a hard movie to rewatch. It’s also a perfectly scripted tale of terror.
1. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The most successful serial killer thriller ever made. Jonathan Demme sends FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) to interview cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), hoping he can help crack a case involving a man known as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine).
Hopkins is the best thing in it by a wide margin, and he turned the movie into a franchise.
It swept all the major categories at the Oscars, one of only three films in history to win all five.
