It was Charlize Theron’s 2003 Oscar-winning turn as female serial killer and prostitute Aileen Wuornos, who brutally killed seven men in 1989 and 1990, that reignited an explosion in movies and TV shows about serial killers.
Hollywood has long known that terror sells, with fictional characters such as Frankenstein, Count Dracula, Nosferatu and the Phantom of the Opera frightening cinema goers since the early 1900s. However, these days fiction has been replaced with reality, with Hollywood now churning out movies and TV series based on real-life monsters – serial killers more perverse, ghoulish and depraved than even the most imaginative writer could conjure.
Names such as Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz and Wayne Gacy are the objects of today’s horror stories – real-life killers who intrigue and repulse, and are human riddles we struggle to comprehend.
“People might follow a serial killer because they are complex puzzles that they want to figure out,” explains Professor of Criminology David Wilson. “But I sense this is also driven by co-activation and the titillation of getting close to something frightening with the knowledge you won’t come to any harm.”
Wilson blames The Silence Of The Lambs and its villainous protagonist Hannibal Lecter for creating a cultural thirst for serial killers, turning them into modern-day anti-heroes, but others say it goes further back, to London’s infamous Jack the Ripper.
He was never caught, despite murdering and mutilating at least five prostitutes in the late 1800s, a crime spree that whet the public’s appetite for real-life horror and spawned hundreds of novels, poems, comics, TV shows and films.
But serial killers have never been more prevalent in pop culture as evidenced by the popularity of shows like Criminal Minds and American biographical crime drama anthology television series Monster, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan for Netflix.
Interestingly, it is women, not men, who are most likely to watch true crime according to a 2010 study, with Psychology Today declaring that it can be addictive to viewers.
“People receive a jolt of adrenaline as a reward for witnessing the terrible deeds of a serial killer,” the study found. “Adrenaline is a hormone that produces a powerful, stimulating and even addictive effect on the human brain. The euphoric effect of serial killers on human emotions is similar to that of rollercoasters or natural disasters.”
Movies and TV shows based off real serial killers
ED GEIN
Monster: The Ed Gein Story
The subject of Ryan Murphy’s latest Monster anthology series may be one of the most influential serial killers you’ve never heard of – but the gruesome events inspired Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now, Charlie Hunnam is bringing Ed Gein to the screen.
Also known as the Plainfield Ghoul, Ed Gein was found guilty of killing two women in rural Wisconsin in the 1950s.
While his kill list may not have been as long as other infamous names, it was the gruesome details that went on to inspire countless horror movies. After he was arrested, authorities entered his farm and found human remains repurposed as furniture.
Ed Gein was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1968. He spent the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals before dying in 1984 at the age of 77.
TED BUNDY
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
When cameras were allowed into the courtroom for the trial of Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer who brutally raped and murdered at least 30 women in the mid-1970s, the public was immediately riveted. It was the first time we saw an ordinary man who was actually a monster, bringing home the reality that evil can and does look like the nice guy next door.
Bundy, who decapitated at least 12 victims and kept some of the severed heads as mementos in his apartment, was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. Yet in death, he seemed to become even more notorious.
Today, Bundy still fascinates – and rates. Netflix’s four-part documentary series Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes was a hit in 2019, as was the film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile, with former Disney star Zac Efron playing the charismatic psychopath.
DAVID BERKOWITZ
Mindhunter, Son of Sam and Summer of Sam
David Berkowitz is the monster who sparked the Son of Sam reign of terror in New York in 1976. He shot people in parked cars before he was eventually arrested and charged with the murder of six people the following year.
Berkowitz, who taunted police with mocking letters, claimed he was obeying the orders of a demon manifested in the form of a dog belonging to his neighbour, “Sam,” after he was arrested. He later admitted the dog and devil story was a hoax.
His crimes inspired the New York State Legislature to enact the “Son of Sam laws” to keep criminals from profiting from the publicity created by their crimes, which were brought to the big screen in Ulli Lommel’s Son Of Sam and Spike Lee’s Summer Of Sam.
More recently, he was given fresh notoriety in the TV series Mindhunter and in 2025 Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes was released on Netflix. Berkowitz, now 72, is serving six life sentences at New York’s Shawangunk Correctional Facility.
JEFFREY DAHMER
My Friend Dahmer
This infamous cannibal serial killer was beaten to death in prison in 1994, but it hasn’t stopped Hollywood from exploring Jeffrey Dahmer’s macabre crimes on several occasions, including 2017 film My Friend Dahmer, which traced his teenage years.
Dahmer, who was also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, killed and ate 17 men and boys from 1978 to 1991, and many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism and the preservation of his victims’ body parts.
He was sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment in 1992, but was bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate just two years later.
The psychopath, who was also a convicted child molester, has had his gruesome crimes immortalised in countless films, TV series and documentaries including 1993’s The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer, Dahmer (2002), Raising Jeffrey Dahmer (2006) and The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012). In 2022, Evan Peters took on the role in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s first Monster installment.
CHARLES MANSON
Mindhunter, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
The world’s most notorious serial killer may have died in 2017, but Charles Manson’s evil deeds continue to haunt us. Fifty years ago, on August 8, 1969, members of the Manson Family brutally murdered several people, including actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant with director husband Roman Polanski’s child.
Hollywood recently released three movies about the infamous killing spree. The first, Charlie Says, starred British actor Matt Smith (who played Prince Phillip in The Crown) as Manson, while The Haunting Of Sharon Tate featured Hilary Duff as the beautiful starlet.
But the biggest – and most controversial – film was Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, starring Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. Aussies Margot Robbie and Damon Herriman played Sharon and Manson. Award-winning actor Damon also starred as the cult leader in the second season of Mindhunter.
The former musician has long been a favourite of movie and documentary makers with a slew of celluloid offerings, including Helter Skelter, Charles Manson Superstar and The Manson Family to name but a few, released in the past 50 years.
And the morbid fascination continues, with CHAOS: The Manson Murders documentary released in 2025 and more Manson films slated for the near future.
JOHN WAYNE GACY
To Catch A Killer, It and Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy
Manson is easily the most studied serial killer in Hollywood, but his kill count was meagre compared to that of John Wayne Gacy who raped, tortured and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in the US state of Illinois.
Known as the “Killer Clown” because he dressed up as Pogo or Patches the Clown at children’s parties, Gacy is credited for inspiring the demonic Pennywise in Stephen King’s It and the creepy clown in American Horror Story.
Once again, Hollywood tapped in to the public’s Gacy fascination, with the TV film To Catch A Killer in 1992, Gacy (2003) and two movies in 2010 – Dear Mr Gacy (2010) and horror flick 8213: Gacy House (2010). There have also been numerous books and TV documentaries about the serial killer.
In 2025 another true crime adaptation of one of the world’s most infamous killers is set to hit our screens with Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, premiering on Binge.
He spent 14 years on death row before the 52-year-old was executed by lethal injection in 1994.
RICHARD KUKLINSKI
The Iceman
On the surface Richard Kuklinski appeared to be a loving husband and father-of-five, but in reality he was leading a secret life and working as a ruthless killer for US mafia families.
He was charged with six murders but claims to have murdered anywhere from 100 to 250 men, including mob bosses Paul Castellano and Carmine Galante and controversial union leader Jimmy Hoffa.
Dubbed The Iceman because he froze some of his victims to mask their time of death, he was convicted of killing two members of his burglary gang and three other associates in 1988, before receiving an additional 30-year sentence for the murder of a police officer in 2003.
The public’s fascination with the 196cm tall, 135kg monster also known as “the one-man army” or “the devil himself”, has not dimmed since his death in 2006 with The Iceman, starring Michael Shannon and Winona Ryder, released in 2012 and a chilling video entitled The Iceman Tapes: Richard Kuklinski Inside The Mind Of A Mafia Hitman.
