Theme: Serial Killer Thrillers

The serial killer thriller is a phenomenon that began in the 1990s. On screen prior to this, there had been plenty of psychos that would be characterised as serial killers – these are listed under Psychos and Serial Killers. Before the 1990s, depiction of movie psychos were dominated by Psycho (1960) and the gender-conflicted, split personality of Norman Bates where the psychology never became more complicated than that.

The term ‘serial killer’ did not enter cinematic language until it was popularised by the massive success of The Silence of the Lambs (1991). This created a new breed of thriller that placed a focus on detection using methods drawn from the FBI Behavioural Science Unit’s analysis of killers’ psychological patterns.

These were detective stories that showed law enforcement tracking killers deducing their psychological patterns in terms of forensic analysis and created the new detective character of the forensic profiler. This in turn led to a series of forensic detective tv series throughout the 2000s in the wake of the huge success of CSI: Crime Scene Investigators (2000-15).