Paste's 50 Best Serial Killer Movies

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"As recently as 2017, it was estimated by one nonprofit organization studying unsolved murders in the FBI database that there may be as many as 2,000 serial killers active in the United States at any given time.

Suffice it to say, they’re not all the stuff of classic horror movie plotting. Few are cannibals. Few live in rambling old mansions with secret passages and a private dungeon in the basement. Even fewer leave behind fiendishly complex cryptographs for a harried, chainsmoking detective and his partner to debate over plates of greasy diner eggs and black coffee. The more frightening reality is that many of them pass as the “average” people we interact with every day. That’s how these stories seem to go: A serial killer is not the sinister-looking stranger who just rolled into town; it’s that quiet next door neighbor who “kept to himself, mostly.”

Perhaps that’s why cinema has such a fascination with the more grandiose, manic version of the serial killer—these stories thrill us even as they’re distracting us from the more pressing danger and mundanity of everyday evil. Regardless, the concept of “a killer on the loose” has been rich cinematic soil for almost as long as film has existed. Go all the way back to 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and what you basically have is a serial killer story—albeit, one in which the murders are being carried out by a hypnotized somnambulist. But the point stands.

Below, we’ve gathered the 50 greatest films about serial killers: a nightmare gallery of murderers both fantastical and disturbingly everyday. Granted, there are a lot of films about people getting killed serially—too many to take into consideration and compare without some basic parameters. So, here’s how we’re operating:

The killers in these films must be human. Vampires, werewolves and giant sharks all kill serially, but they’re not “serial killers” per se.

The killers can’t possess any overt supernatural powers or abilities. They can’t be ghosts, or undead revenants. This means, for example, that Michael Myers of Halloween is still able to qualify, as he is definitely a human being, whereas Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th or Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street do not, given that one is (typically) an undead golem and the other is a supernatural dream monster.

Ultimately, these are all stories about genuine human beings killing other human beings. Got it?
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