Celluloid Serial Killers

The Golden Age

In 1980 in Cruising, chameleon detective Al Pacino went deep undercover looking for a serial killer who picks up gay men in the most sordid bars imaginable and then slices them up. It was widely panned by the critics and strongly criticized by the gay community for its sordid content and the depiction of homosexual men as sexual deviants.

Book cover:
Red Dragon

It was 1986 that gave us Manhunter, the first serial killer (though they never use the term) movie to give an insight into how the modern FBI builds a psychological profile on these killers and how they track them down with modern technology. Manhunter is the screen adaptation of Thomas Harris's international best seller Red Dragon, (the forerunner to The Silence of The Lambs) and is the macabre tale of a "psychotic killer" who specialises in slaughtering entire families and how FBI agents Will Graham and Jack Crawford track him down before he kills again.

But as yet the term "serial killer" had never been used in a movie and from all of my research I believe that the first time it was ever actually spoken on screen was in 1987 — a few years after FBI agent and world-renowned serial killer profiler Robert Ressler coined the phrase — in the almost un-noticed yet enthralling serial killer thriller Cop, starring James Wood as a strung-out detective who stumbles across a series of murders that follow a similar pattern.

Also in 1987 two top quality serial killer movies in Black Widow and the spine-tingling Al Pacino thriller Sea of Love were released, though neither referred to their villain as a serial killer. Black Widow, featuring Debra Winger and Dennis Hopper is unique in that the murderer is a woman, a very rare breed indeed in the annals of serial murder, even in the fantasy world of celluloid.

Movie Poster: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Then in 1990 came the dark, depressing and grizzly (yet highly acclaimed) Henry; Portrait of a Serial Killer, about the life and times of America's most prolific serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. This was followed in 1991 by To Catch a Killer, the TV movie that went to video about Illinois serial killer John Wayne Gacy who murdered 33 teenage boys and buried their bodies beneath his house. Curiously, Gacy was never referred to as a serial killer in this movie so the name hadn't quite stuck yet.

Movie Poster: The Silence of The Lambs

But it was only a matter of time before the serial killer phenomenon would hit and it is undisputable that it was director Jonathan Demme's 1991 screen adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel The Silence of The Lambs, that deep-etched the term "serial killer" into the vernacular forever.

The impact of The Silence of The Lambs was extraordinary and Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter and the term "serial killer" became household words overnight. The Silence of The Lambs went further than any serial killer movie had gone before and took up where Manhunter left off, using some of the same villainous and heroic characters, though portrayed by different actors.

The serial killer craze had well and truly arrived and in The Silence of The Lambs the now legions of salivating serial killer movie fans even got to hear the beast himself, Dr Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter, boast of his exploits as he told terrified FBI agent Starling that he once ate a census taker's liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. They lapped it up ... so to speak.