Today we have another list of films, this time – bloodthirsty. Movies about serial killers have firmly established themselves on the shelves of film fans, they play the best and favorite actors, they are interesting to the filmmakers. In the majority it is chilling thrillers, which always keep in suspense until the very end. So, the best films about maniacs:
19 Maniac, 2012
Frank Zito is a disturbed young man who has taken over his family’s mannequin restoration business after the recent death of his mother. Frank was traumatized as a child by his mother, a prostitute who made him watch her have sex with her johns. As an adult, he murders and scalps women and attaches their hair onto his mannequins to recreate his one happy childhood memory: brushing his mother’s hair before she “went out” at night.
Directed by Franck Khalfoun
Cast: Elijah Wood, Nora Arnezeder, Sammi Rotibi
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18 Hannibal Rising, 2006
This is the story of the monster Hannibal Lecter’s formative years. These experiences as a child and young adult led to his remarkable contribution to the fields of medicine, music, painting and forensics. We begin in World War II at the medieval castle in Lithuania built by Dr. Lecter’s forebear, Hannibal the Grim. The child Hannibal survives the horrors of the Eastern Front and escapes the grim Soviet aftermath to find refuge in France with the widow of his uncle, mysterious and beautiful Japanese descended from Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Tale of Genji. Her kind and wise attentions help him understand his unbearable recollections of the war. Remembering, he finds the means to visit the outlaw predators that changed him forever as they battened on helpless during the collapse of the Eastern Front. Hannibal helps these war criminals toward self-knowledge even as we see his own nature become clear to him.
Directed by Peter Webber
Cast: Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li, Rhys Ifans
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17 Murder by Numbers, 2002
Two bored high school students, Justin Pendleton and Richard Haywood, decide to murder a random girl just for the challenge. They have planned everything ahead, and yet, a stiff homicide detective follows them much tighter then they have expected.
Directed by Barbet Schroeder
Cast: Sandra Bullock, Ben Chaplin, Ryan Gosling
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16 The Cell, 2000
An F.B.I. Agent persuades a social worker, who is adept with a new experimental technology, to enter the mind of a comatose serial killer in order to learn where he has hidden his latest kidnap victim.
Directed by Tarsem Singh
Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio
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15 American Psycho, 2000
A wealthy New York City investment banking executive, Patrick Bateman, hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he delves deeper into his violent, hedonistic fantasies.
Directed by Mary Harron
Cast: Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Josh Lucas
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14 Kiss the Girls, 1997
Alex Cross, a Washington D.C. cop and forensic psychologist learns that his niece who is going to college in North Carolina is missing. So he goes there and learns that the police think she’s among the victims of someone who kidnaps young girls and holds them captive and kills them who dubs himself Cassanova after the great lover. Later Kate, one of his victims, escapes and tries to help Cross find his niece.
Directed by Gary Fleder
Cast: Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd, Cary Elwes
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13 Copycat, 1995
An agoraphobic psychologist and a female detective must work together to take down a serial killer who copies serial killers from the past.
Directed by Jon Amiel
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Holly Hunter, Dermot Mulroney
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12 Frailty, 2001.
A man confesses to an FBI agent his family’s story of how his religious fanatic father’s visions led to a series of murders to destroy supposed “demons.”
Directed by Bill Paxton
Cast: Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, Powers Boothe
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11 Zodiac, 2007
Zodiac tells the story of the manhunt for the Zodiac Killer, a serial killer who called himself the “Zodiac” and killed in and around the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s and early 1970s, taunting police with letters, bloodstained clothing, and ciphers mailed to newspapers. The cases remain one of the United States’ most infamous unsolved crimes.
Directed by David Fincher
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr.
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10 Mr. Brooks, 2007
Earl Brooks is a highly respected businessman and was recently named Portland’s Man of the Year. He hides a terrible secret however: he is a serial killer known as the Thumbprint Killer. He has been attending AA meetings and has kept his addiction to killing under control for two years now but his alter ego, Marshall, has re-appeared and is pushing him to kill again. When he does kill a couple while they are making love, he is seen and photographed by someone who also has his own death and murder fetish. In a parallel story, the police detective investigating the murder is having problems of her own. She is going through a messy divorce and a violent criminal who had vowed revenge some years before has escaped from prison and is after her.
Directed by Bruce A. Evans
Cast: Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, Dane Cook
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9 Natural Born Killers, 1994
Two victims of traumatized childhoods become lovers and psychopathic serial murderers irresponsibly glorified by the mass media.
Directed by Oliver Stone
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr.
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8 The Bone Collector, 1999
Quadripeligic ex-cop Lincoln Rhyme was looking forward to his assisted suicide when he got the news: some sicko was abducting people in a taxi and leaving them to die in particularly sadistic ways. With time counting down between each abduction and possible death, Rhyme recruits rather-unwilling Amelia Donaghy, haunted by her cop father’s suicide and thinking she’s next, into working the crime scenes to track down the killer.
Directed by Phillip Noyce
Cast: Denzel Washington, Angelina Jolie, Queen Latifah
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7 Basic Instinct, 1992
Former rock star and San Francisco nightclub owner Johnny Boz is found murdered in his bed. Detective Nick Curran is assigned to the case; he has a history of alcoholism and drug abuse although he is clean now. The prime suspect is Catherine Tramell, an attractive and manipulative novelist who had been seeing Boz for a while. Police psychiatrist Beth Gardner (who happens to be Nick’s ex-girlfriend) is brought in on the case when it is discovered that Boz’s murder was copied directly from one of Catherine’s novels. Nick starts to get too involved and everyone seems to be a suspect.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza
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6 Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok), 2003
1986. In a rural district of South Korea, two women have been recently raped and murdered. Working on the case are detectives Park Doo-man and Cho Yong-koo. Their efforts are impeded by some sloppy crime scene procedure by the police. Their methods of solving cases are also quite basic, essentially amounting to beating confessions out of suspects. All this leads to nothing and the police chief brings in a more sophisticated and intelligent detective from Seoul, Seo Tae-yoon. With his arrival the methods improve but they still don’t have the killer. Then another woman is found murdered and a pattern emerges.
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
Cast: Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-gyeong, Kim Roi-ha
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5 Hannibal, 2001
Part three in the Hannibal Lecter Quadrilogy. Having escaped the asylum in “Silence of the Lambs,” Dr Lecter goes into hiding in Florence, Italy. Back in America, Mason Verger, an old victim of the doctor’s, seeks revenge. Disfigured and confined to a life-support system, he plans to draw Lecter out of his hiding place, using the one thing he truly cares for: Clarice Starling.
Directed by Ridley Scott
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman
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4 Saw, 2004
Waking up in a undisclosed location in a unknown room two men, adam and gordon are trapped into a single room with a dead body. Given random tools with riddles hidnen around the room. Wondering who could have done this there are clues to who might of done it; the jigsaw killer. The question is not just who but why would a serial killer leave two men in a room. Both adam and gordon hiding secrets they must trust and work together to get out or die…can they survive Jigsaw’s game or die trying?
Directed by James Wan
Cast: Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover
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3 Psycho, 1960
During a lunchtime tryst in a Phoenix, Arizona hotel, a real-estate secretary, Marion Crane, and her boyfriend, Sam Loomis, discuss how they cannot afford to get married because of Sam’s debts. After lunch, Marion returns to work, where a client leaves a $40,000 cash payment on a property. Marion’s boss asks her to deposit the money in the bank, and allows her to leave work early after she complains of a headache. Once home, she decides to steal the money and drive to Fairvale, California, where Sam lives.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin
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2 The Silence of the Lambs, 1990
Clarice Starling, a young intelligent FBI trainee, has been sent to the Baltimore state hospital for the criminally insane to interview an inmate, Dr. Hannibal “the cannibal” Lecter, a brilliant renowned psychiatrist turned infamous psychopathic serial killer. She must match wits with Lecter – who has the darkest of all minds – and trust him to give her clues in the search for “Buffalo Bill”, a nickname given to a loose, unknown, unstoppable psychopathic serial killer…
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Cast: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Brooke Smith
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1 Seven (Se7en), 1995
A film about two homicide detectives desperate hunt for a serial killer who justifies his crimes as absolution for the world’s ignorance of the Seven Deadly Sins. The movie takes us from the tortured remains of one victim to the next as the sociopathic “John Doe” sermonizes to Detectives Somerset and Mills – one sin at a time. The sin of Gluttony comes first and the murderer’s terrible capacity is graphically demonstrated in the dark and subdued tones characteristic of film noir. The seasoned and cultured but jaded Somerset researches the Seven Deadly Sins in an effort to understand the killer’s modus operandi while the bright but green and impulsive Detective Mills scoffs at his efforts to get inside the mind of a killer…
Directed by David Fincher
Cast: Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow
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