Gacy*
“To Catch a Killer”* (also Gacy)
Ted Bundy*
The Deliberate Stranger* (also Bundy)
“The Riverman” (Green River Killer, featuring Bundy as a main character)
Eating Raoul
Heathers*, and sort of ** depending on how one reads Winona Ryder’s character.
Summer of Sam would not fit the OP as SoS (David Berkowitz) is not a main character.
Don’t know why I didn’t think of this right away: Peeping Tom. Made in 1960, and considered frank and shocking at the time. If you’re familiar with Thomas Harris’ books, you can’t help but see them as being influenced by this movie. If you watch it, just listen to the last words you hear; truly chilling and sad. (Actually, one of the creepiest things about the movie is that its writer, Leo Marks, created a twisted killer named Mark Lewis.)
Two recent viewings for me:
the Korean Memories of Murder and the Spanish The Hours of the Day.
Michael is a mass murderer, or at best, a spree killer (albeit an extended spree), not a serial killer. Same goes for Natural Born Killers and Badlands.
That applies to Jason as well, but since you only listed the first movie, I’d have to agree.
And personally, I don’t believe Charles Manson fits the mold of a serial killer, as he didn’t actually do any of the killings. Thin line perhaps, but a line nonetheless.
Bit o’ trivia: Ed Gein was one of the models for Norman Bates as well as Leatherface.
It’s difficult to come up with many where the killer is more than the bad guy being hunted. They’re generally not a breed of people that most filmmakers prefer to have to make their audiences identify with, though several have done so fairly effectively. Here are my offerings (note the severe lack of * and **):
Dressed to Kill*
Jennifer 8
Cruising
The Cell
Basic Instinct*
Highwaymen
Cop
Frenzy
Kiss the Girls
Citizen X
Shadow of a Doubt
Bluebeard
10 Rillington Place
I thought of Shadow of a Doubt myself, but couldn’t remember whether Joe Cotten was a serial or just a one-time sex killer, so I didn’t mention it. Fine picture though.
Interesting how long it took people (me too) to think of Arsenic and Old Lace and Eating Raoul. Say, “serial killer movie” and the first genre people think of will not be comedy.
Forgot to mention – another good thing about The Boston Strangler is that the Attorney General is Blacula. That inspires confidence.
How about Fallen?
IMO, yes.
Would nearly all the many Dracula movies over the decades fit into this category?
There is a subtle but significant difference between serial killers and mass murderers.
Oh, I dunno…Michael’s first killing was his sister, at a tender young age, and then he didn’t kill again until he broke out of the asylum at, as I recall, age 21. That hardly seems "mass"ed together.
I feel Natural Born Killers fits, because there were days-long “cool down” periods between their killings, on occasion. Of course, they tended to kill lots of people at a time when they went off, so perhaps they were “Serial Mass-Murderers.”
A few for the list:
Knight Moves
Taking Lives (awful movie, by the way)
So I Married An Axe Murderer
Tenebrae
Intensity
Lisa
The Hitcher
True enough, but they would have been had he not been incarcerated. Once he was let out he went on a spree, killing anyone even remotely in his way.
It’s a debatable situation, but I tend to lean more towards “spree killer”, which is somewhere between a mass murderer and a serial killer. They demonstrated certain serial killer traits, like the “cool down” periods (though that depends on your definition of a “cool down” period. A gap between murders qualifies for some, but a true serial killer will typically be briefly sated by their murder[s] and return to their “normal” life, perhaps even feeling remorse or depression because of what they’ve done, until the desire to kill begins again and starts the cycle all over).
Spree killer is a term getting thrown around more and more often because there are more and more cases that fit neatly into neither the category of serial killer nor mass murderer. Recent examples would be the Beltway Snipers and Andrew Cunanan (the guy who killed Gianni Versace).
Whereas serial killers use their “cool down” period to reintegrate back into “normal” life until the urge to kill causes them to slip into the trolling phase again, the spree killers never return to normalcy. Like a mass murderer, they reach a snapping point and begin killing, but they spend their “cool down” periods focused on evading capture and living on the lam… perpetually cycling between the trolling and kill phases.
D’oh! Forgot all about The Hitcher. Good flick 