For most of The Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins is stuck behind a pane of glass — and he still steals the entire film.
One image, and you’ve got the whole subgenre figured out. Whoever is doing the chasing barely matters. The frame belongs to the killer.
For decades now, serial killers have ranked among the most reliable villains in thriller cinema, showing up in horror, in action thrillers, and in the sort of grimly serious dramatic thriller that collects awards. Whatever the flavor, it’s the person doing the killing who stays with you on the drive home.
Hopkins is the proof. Throw the unhinged Buffalo Bill into the mix and it becomes obvious why The Silence of the Lambs cleaned up at the Oscars — even if Jodie Foster more than holds her own beside the pair of them. Every serial killer thriller since has been measured against that film. A fair few have come close.
Why the best filmmakers keep coming back
Michael Mann, David Fincher and Bong Joon-ho have all spent time in this genre. So have Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal and Sigourney Weaver, each of whom headlined one of these films.
The explanation isn’t complicated. A killer keeps an audience pinned to the edge of its seat, and these movies tend to become fast success stories.
Here’s the ranking, counting up.
10. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Stieg Larsson’s novel had already been filmed once — a Swedish production, the opening chapter of a trilogy — before Fincher took his own pass at it in 2011, making his the second adaptation. His version, though, closed the franchise out after a single release.
A pity, given that the film is critically acclaimed, with terrific performances, sharp direction and a score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Young hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) joins forces with journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to unravel a disappearance 40 years cold, which proves to be a murder and lays bare the rot inside a wealthy family. The culprit is Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgård), who had spent decades killing women. Mara picked up an Oscar nomination for it.
9. Copycat (1995)
Among the most underrated thrillers the 1990s produced. Sigourney Weaver stars as criminal psychologist Dr. Helen Hudson; Harry Connick Jr. is Daryll Lee Cullum, an incarcerated serial killer who had physically singled out and attacked Hudson prior to his arrest. She has lived isolated and agoraphobic ever since.
Then a fresh killer begins imitating the methods of murderers past, luring her into a grim and lethal game. He runs through the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, the Son of Sam and the fictional Cullum in turn. Holly Hunter co-stars as the detective working the case.
The closing twist, which reveals what Cullum had to do with the new killings, still connects.
8. I Saw the Devil (2010)
Kim Jee-woon’s South Korean revenge thriller approaches the subgenre from an entirely different angle. A secret agent goes after the serial killer who murdered his fiancée, so the killer remains the villain — but the pursuit of vengeance morally rots a man who began as the hero.
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. Rather than simply killing him, the agent plants a tracking device and turns him loose, then runs him down and tortures him. Again and again.
Critics embraced it, singling out the way trauma can, in time, turn even the finest of men into villains.
7. Kiss the Girls (1997)
James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels rank among the best-selling detective series ever written, and they’ve been adapted for film and television more than once. Director Gary Fleder’s 1997 entry is the strongest of the bunch.
Morgan Freeman takes the role of Cross, alongside Ashley Judd as Dr. Kate McTiernan. The investigation cuts close to home: Cross’s niece has been abducted, and he pairs up with McTiernan, herself an escapee of the killer, to track her down.
The reveal is that the serial killer is a police detective (Cary Elwes), and the film muddies the investigation further by adding a second serial killer. Clever writing — and it brought Alex Cross to the big screen.
6. Manhunter (1986)
Well before Hopkins made the role his own, the cannibalistic serial killer arrived on screen here, in one of Michael Mann’s earlier pictures. It adapts Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, a book that would be filmed again more than a decade later during the Hopkins era. Here it’s Brian Cox playing the imprisoned killer.
William Petersen (CSI) plays Will Graham, the FBI profiler responsible for putting Lecktor away (the spelling was altered for this film). Graham is racing to stop a murderer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan), which forces him back to Lecktor for assistance.
Between Mann’s neon-drenched imagery and Noonan’s unnerving turn, it stands as a high point of the entire franchise.
5. The Bone Collector (1999)
Denzel Washington never leaves his bed across the whole film, playing quadriplegic forensics expert Lincoln Rhyme. The actual lead is Angelina Jolie’s Amelia, a rookie patrol officer pursuing a killer who arranges each crime scene as an elaborate construction.
The Bone Collector snatches his victims using a taxi and designs gruesome deaths as puzzles that nod to an old crime book. Rhyme works out the riddles while Amelia hurries to locate him before she ends up next.
Here the puzzle-solving counts for more than either the killer or the detectives. It never earned critical acclaim. It’s a re-watchable favorite regardless.
4. Memories of Murder (2003)
Long before Parasite handed him an Oscar, Bong Joon-ho directed one of the finest serial killer films ever made. Its source is the real Hwaseong serial murders of 1986-1991, the work of the first serial killer recognized in South Korea. Song Kang-ho and Kim Sang-kyung portray the two detectives, and the local police simply cannot break the case.
Within the film, the killer is never caught. The actual perpetrator wasn’t identified until after the movie’s release, and the film played a part in drawing attention to the cold case.
No motive anyone could name, no arrest, only the grinding frustration of pursuing a man with no face. It endures as one of the great South Korean thrillers of the 21st century.
3. Zodiac (2007)
In 2007 Fincher returned to an unsolved case, this time the Zodiac Killer who operated across the 1960s and 1970s. The real murderer stalked victims around the San Francisco Bay Area, and his identity has never been established.
Cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) falls into obsession with the case, and Fincher’s film goes so far as to name a suspect.
Its source material is the pair of books Graysmith wrote about the murders, Zodiac (1986) and Zodiac Unmasked (2002). Ending on an open question was an intriguing choice, and the theory Fincher works in is catnip for true-crime obsessives.
2. Se7en (1995)
No qualifiers needed: the bleakest mainstream genre film of its decade.
Rookie detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) is teamed with William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a veteran on the verge of retirement. Someone going by John Doe is killing people and arranging their deaths around the Seven Deadly Sins.
Kevin Spacey makes for a deeply unsettling Doe, yet the film really belongs to Mills, his young wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Somerset — and to how the killer draws all three into his design. The ending is what makes it so difficult to revisit. It’s also a flawlessly scripted tale of terror.
1. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
No serial killer thriller has been more successful. Jonathan Demme dispatches FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) to interview cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), in hopes he might help break a case built around a man known as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine).
Hopkins is far and away the best thing in it, and he transformed the film into a franchise.
It took every major category at the Oscars, one of just three films in history to sweep all five.