Celluloid Serial Killers

Paul B. Kidd's Top 15 Serial Killer Movies Continued...

8. Dirty Harry (1972) C-102m

Movie Poster: Dirty Harry

Who can ever forget Dirty Harry Callaghan looking down the barrel of the biggest handgun in the world and begging the crook at the end of it to "go ahead, make my day" by making a move. Prior to this Harry had walked out of a deli and gunned down a team of bank robbers as he munched on a hot dog.

This was the world's introduction to cool Harry and to a serial killer named Scorpio who Harry pursues with relentless vigor to the death through the streets of San Francisco. The character of Scorpio (Andy Robinson) was purportedly modeled on a series of real life murders in California in 1968/69 when a serial killer calling himself Zodiac killed five people and wounded two more over a period of a year and followed up the killings with letters to San Francisco newspapers giving gruesome details that only the killer could have known and also giving cryptic clues as to where and when the next killings would be. Each letter was signed by a symbol of the Zodiac: a cross superimposed on a circle.

And so Dirty Harry's Scorpio torments the city of San Francisco with demands of money or he will kill members of the community chosen at random. A lot of you will most likely not even be aware that Dirty Harry is a serial killer movie as it's genre is more about the Dirty Harry Callaghan character, his mammoth gun and cool dialogue.

But a serial killer movie it definitely is. And a good one at that. Good plot, a really hateful villain and that oh, so cool dialogue. And even after all this time it isn't dated.

9. Frenzy (1972) C-116m

Movie Poster: Frenzy

It was twelve years since Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho and he had obviously been waiting for the right idea before he embarked on another psychopathic killer thriller. Frenzy was it. And it was something ghastly that happened in those twelve years that was the inspiration for what would eventually become Frenzy.

In Boston, USA, from 1962 to 1964 a heinous fiend named Albert De Salvo raped and strangled thirteen women in their homes. He became known as The Boston Strangler and was the first of a kind in that on each of his victims, who ranged from young students to elderly women, the killer left an identifying "signature" in that after he had strangled his victims with their own stockings or underwear, the Boston Strangler tied the garment in a neat bow beneath the victim's chin.

In the same fashion as the Boston Strangler the evil killer in Frenzy also left a calling card in that he murdered his victims by strangling them with a necktie and became known as The Necktie Killer after a succession of naked bodies of young women are found all over London.

An innocent man is accused of the murders and the hunt is on. But it is the Hitchcock brand of black humour that gives Frenzy its class. The dialogue at dinner between the ever-so-proper police inspector and his wife is priceless as he explains the day-to-day developments of the grisly Necktie Murders and she dishes him up equally gruesome meals she has learnt in her home cooking classes. Not to be missed.