If you’re wondering what are the best serial killer movies? Look no further. These 12 movies may not all be blockbuster hits but they are based on real-life serial killers. So, if you want to research one of these serial killers but don’t want to listen to a narrated documentary, then watching a movie based on their life is much better! With that scary introduction and with the scariest people on Earth as inspiration, let’s get started on these serial killer movies. 

12 Serial Killer Movies That Are Better Than Documentaries! 

1. AKA Serial Killer (1975)

Norio Nagayama killed 4 people with a pistol between October 11 and November 5, 1968. He stole 16,420 Yen (124 €) from his last 2 victims. He was arrested on April 7, 1969 at the age of 19, so he was a minor under Japanese law.

2. Born Killers (1994)

Charles Starkweather murdered eleven people in the states of Nebraska and Wyoming while on a road trip with his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate.

3. The Stepfather (2009)

On November 9, 1971, John List killed his wife, mother, and three children in their home in Westfield, New Jersey, then disappeared. He had planned the murders so well that it was almost a month before it was noticed that there was a problem. Escaping justice for nearly 18 years, John List forged a new identity and remarried before being finally apprehended on June 1, 1989, after the story of his murders was featured on the American television show America’s Most Wanted which was broadcasted to viewers in order to solve criminal cases.

4. The Manson Family (1997)

Based on Charles Manson, this movie is about the leader of a community called “the family” in the midst of the hippie period in the late 1960s, he rose to fame with a series of assassinations in the Los Angeles area in 1969.

5. BTK (2008)

This movie is based on Dennis Rader, aka the BTK killer which stands for Bind Torture Kill. He murdered ten people between 1974 and 1991 in the vicinity of Wichita. BTK, which stands for bind, torture and kill, is the nickname Rader gave himself in his dealings with the police and the press. He loved to play cat and mouse with the cops and with his victims. 

6. Corpses with a Shovel (2010)

This is based on the murders of Burke and Hare. This is a series of murders committed in Edinburgh between November 1827 and October 31, 1828. They were attributed to two Irish immigrants William Burke (1792-1829) and William Hare (1792 or 1804 -?), who sold the corpses of their 17 victims for dissection and anatomical study to Dr Robert Knox, a freelance professor of anatomy whose students were from Edinburgh Medical College.

7. Deep Carmine (1996)

Based on Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, this movie is about these two who are famous as the Lonely Hearts Killers following their trial for a series of murders committed in 1949. It is estimated that they killed up to 20 women between 1947 and 1949, pretending to be a brother-sister duo just so that they could live in the house of the victims. 

8. Citizen X (1995)

After studying languages, literature, and mechanical engineering at the University of Rostov, Andrei Chikatilo, also known as The Monster of Rostov became a teacher. Despite being a father of two children, he murdered women and many children. He was helpless and could only achieve sexual satisfaction by torturing and murdering children. He mutilated them and then consumed the flesh of his victims, especially the breasts and sexual organs, in addition he removed the genitals and eyes of his victims. It is possible that he also felt sexual pleasure while eating his victims. Tchikatilo claimed to be disgusted by what he called the “relaxed morals” of his victims. 

Arrested in 1990, at the age of 54, he is ranked among the greatest criminals of the century: killer, rapist, cannibalistic, he credits himself with 55 assassinations while justice, for lack of evidence, retained 52: 21 boys from 8 to 16 years old, 14 girls belonging to the same age group and 17 adult women. His older brother Stepan was kidnapped and eaten (cannibalized) during the Great Famine in Ukraine in the 1930s.

9. The Countess (2009)

Next on our list of serial killer movies is The Countess which is based on Élisabeth Báthory.

Legend has made Élisabeth Báthory one of the most famous murderers in Hungarian and Slovak history. After the death of her husband, she and four alleged accomplices are accused of torture and murder of girls and young women, the number of which remains uncertain. The charges are, however, sometimes disputed by historians, as there is no evidence apart from testimonies obtained under torture. His noble origin spared him a lawsuit and execution. In 1610, she was imprisoned in Čachtice Castle, where she spent the rest of her life until her death.

10. The Crimes of Snowtown (2011)

Daniel Henshall and Lucas Pittaway tortured their victims, mostly pedophiles or homosexuals, before mutilating them and disposing of the bodies in barrels stored in the safe of an abandoned bank in Snowtown, a suburb of Adelaide. The stench of eight decomposing corpses led to their discovery by the police on May 20, 1999. A few days later, two other bodies were found in a backyard in Adelaide, then two more. The two assassins used numerous tricks to make believe that their victims were still alive, in order to appropriate A $ 95,000 in various allowances for eight of them.

11. Gacy (2003)

John Wayne Gacy, aka the killer clown, was responsible for one of the scariest serial killer movies of all time. 

26 bodies were found buried tied up, tissue stuck in the mouth, in the crawl space under his home in Chicago, three more buried on his property, and lastly, the bodies of his last four victims were recovered in the Des Plaines River which was conveniently near his home. The neighbors complained of smells coming from the basements of the Gacy’s house, which he had tried to mitigate with lime and on the pretext of having problems with blocked sewers. He then had them covered with concrete. Indicted for the murder of 33 young men, Gacy was a convicted criminal despite his selfless appearance.

He committed his first murder on January 1, 1972, and began recruiting his main victims from his entourage when he offered odd jobs to young people in his neighborhood. Moreover, most of his victims were among his employees. His modus operandi was mainly to handcuff and rape them before disposing of the bodies.

12. Ted Bundy (2002)

Ted Bundy assaulted and murdered many young women and girls during the 1970s, and possibly before. In addition to kidnapping and raping his victims, the infamous law dropout performed necrophilic acts on their remains. In prison, after more than a decade of denying the facts and shortly before his execution, he admitted to having committed 30 homicides in seven different states between the years 1974 and 1978. The number of victims remains unknown, as he was always dangling the truth in order to get out of his life sentence.