A lot of people have a physical type. That's normal. However, generally speaking, those types relate to Love Interests. This is when the trope applies to predators — usually Serial Killers, but sometimes rapists or similar — who prey on people (usually but not always women) who have distinctive physical characteristics.
Depending on the work, and the level of realism to which they aspire, these appearance-based criteria could be extremely broad or specific, but run the gamut between body type, eye color, and race to hair color, vague facial resemblance, and costume.
This has no overlap with Disposable Sex Worker, unless the sex workers in question are themselves united by a more specific physical feature. It will usually lead to some combination of All Psychology Is Freudian as the investigators trace back the killers' preference to a Freudian Excuse or a Chekhov's Gunman in their own lives.
The trope is useful for visual media and often works along the same lines as Colour-Coded for Your Convenience. If you've been told that the Villain of the Week preys on a specific type of person, you can be worried for them immediately. This is a good source of Dramatic Irony if the character themselves has no idea they're in danger for a Damsel in Distress or a Distressed Dude, and can wind up being invoked and turned on the bad guy(s) if a police officer protagonist is doing some Serial Killer Baiting.
Could overlap with Theme Serial Killer if the killer doesn't deviate from their type, but it's more common for the victims to be different in all ways except the physical similarities. As this trope is sometimes used as a twist, please expect unmarked spoilers.
Opinions vary to what extent this trope is Truth in Television. It is associated with Ted Bundy, who will often be name-checked alongside his apparent preference for young white women with dark hair parted in the middle (sometimes parts of this will even be copied in cases of a more overt Expy). Missing White Woman Syndrome is also often ingrained in these fictional portrayals. In real life, serial predators sometimes target ethnic minorities due to an understanding that these demographics are not always treated evenly by the police. White victims are still the most common variance of this trope in fiction, and ethnic minority victims will be treated as needing some further explanation.
However, Bundy himself always denied that he had a specific victim type, claiming that his only preference was for "attractive" women. A claim of seeking only attractive victims also doesn't fall under this trope due to Hollywood Beauty Standards. The characters must be united by a more specific feature than simply "beauty" due to the tendency in Hollywood to treat that as though it was ubiquitous and commonplace.
The Bundy issue shows how this trope is both controversial and oftentimes too neat in real life, where crimes rely more on opportunity. Therefore, no real-life examples, please!
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Diamond Is Unbreakable: Big Bad Yoshikage Kira targets women with pretty hands because he has a fetish for them, keeping the dismember parts until they decay and need to be replaced.
- Murciélago: One killer only targets little girls wearing raincoats. It turns out that years ago, while down on his luck, a little girl in a raincoat was kind to him, and ever since he's been trying to find her, accosting little girls... only to have a psychotic break and murder them when he realizes they're the wrong one (never realizing that it's been decades since he saw her). By the time they meet again, she's become a mother... whose daughter becomes his next target.
- Oshi no Ko: Serial killer Hikaru Kamiki targets rising idols with a certain star pattern in their eyes, perhaps due to being sexually assaulted by one in his youth. It is implied that he ordered the death of Ai Hoshino for this very reason.
- Sisters of Wellber: Prince Gernia Han of Sangratras is revealed to be a serial killer who collects women's eyes, and is particularly fond of blue eyes.
Comic Books
- Shadow Hawk: In the first volume, a copycat named Hawk's Shadow (a white man implied to have been raised in the Ku Klux Klan) only targets Black males: on-panel he attacks a Black reverend, his white wife and four Black churchgoers (who, by a news report, were killed); then, in another scene, attacks three young Black men who were just walking down the streets in a rainy night.
Fan Works
- In For You, I Will, Melanie, a Serial Rapist and Serial Killer (technically, most of the crimes are committed by her partner but he is completely brainwashed into obeying her whims), prefers young women with long brown hair as her targets.
- With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: The serial rapist sheriff tends to target skinny young inmates with red hair. While he sometimes targets other inmates, the other cops know he prefers a specific type. Hans is also a Serial Rapist who prefers redheads, though he sticks strictly to women.
Films — Live-Action
- The Green Hornet: After the Green Hornet starts to interfere with Chudnofsky's business, he orders his men to start looking for a man who wears green. This order is so vague that the mafia starts killing anyone they see wearing any form of green clothing. One such victim was just a regular joe wearing a Green Bay Packers sweater.
- Reconstructed and justified in The Night House. When Beth finds a picture of a tall, thin woman with long, straight brown hair, she assumes that her husband Owen has a standard physical type along the lines of Has a Type. Then it turns out that he's a Serial Killer who murdered multiple women with long dark hair, but the intended purpose was to keep the "Nothing", the malignant entity that stalked Beth, at bay by tricking it into believing it was her.
- The Roommate: Rebecca is a possible Psycho Lesbian stalker whose two shown victims (Sara and Maria) bear an uncanny resemblance to each other; both of them have brown eyes and long brunette hair.
- The Silence of the Lambs: All of the women kidnapped and later murdered by Buffalo Bill are of larger than normal size. He starves them for a while to loosen their skin, cuts off pieces of their skin in specific patterns, and sews the pieces together to make himself a "woman suit".
- Undefeatable: Deranged fighter Stingray kills and steals the eyes of any woman he sees who wears a floral pattern and bears a superficial resemblance to his wife who recently left him.
Literature
- The Collector (John Fowles): At first, Frederick seems to be genuinely in love/obsessed with Miranda. After her death in captivity, though, he plots to kidnap another woman who looks a lot like her. She is noted to be blonde too (like Miranda).
- The Mad Scientist in Dean Koontz's Night Chills has a thing for frail blonde women. A very sadistic thing.
- I Hunt Killers: Taken to extremes throughout the series. Billy has over one hundred victims, both male and female, and is the most prolific Serial Killer in U.S. history. Despite this, neither he or his co-conspirator/wife Janice has ever killed a black girl. All their victims are white, and both have an issue with Jazz having a black girlfriend, Connie.
- Living Dead Girl: Alice notes that Ray's violently and sexually abusive mother had dark hair, like her own. Downplayed in that Ray was prepared to kidnap Lucy, who's described as having brownish-blonde hair.
- Tenderness: All of Eric's victims are tanned (sometimes Hispanic) girls/women with long dark hair. It's heavily implied that they are chosen to resemble his Ambiguously Brown mother, who is suggested to have molested him and got him on his Start of Darkness. For added Dramatic Irony, the only murder Eric gets arrested and convicted for is that of Lori, whose death was accidental and whom he was developing feelings for "despite" her being a well-developed blonde girl.
- A Tony Hill and Carol Jordan staple:
- In Wire in the Blood and The Retribution, Jacko Vance is obsessed with teenage girls who have straight dark hair, resembling his first girlfriend, Jilly, who he seduces, crushes their arms, rapes, and leaves to die.
- The killer of Cross and Burn kidnaps, tortures, and ultimately kills women who have blonde hair and resemble his wife. While she fled from him after years of Domestic Abuse, she was killed in a car accident along with his children; he was filled with rage directed at her due to this. He also fetishizes whiteness after raping his Thai stepmother as a teenager as he believed the ethnic difference marked his father out as "inadequate." He's also a racist who brutally murdered one of the women for being Polish, as she had an accent that marked her out as "different" from his preferred type. This plot point brings Tony back into the fold, as the women happen to resemble Carol, too.
Live-Action TV
- Based on a True Story: Matt, the Westside Ripper, only kills young white women with dark hair. Ava is incensed when she learns that Matt didn't find her "attractive enough to kill."
- Blue Bloods: Exploited in "Lonely Hearts Club". Danny and Jackie get onto the trail of a Serial Killer who has been murdering High Class Call Girls in hotel rooms. Jackie realizes that all the victims are olive-skinned brunettes like her own Spicy Latina self, and hatches a plan to run a sting operation with herself as bait in order to catch them.
- Cold Case:
- In "One Night", John is mistaken for being a predator due to kidnapping and apparently murdering two teenage boys of the same age. It's actually revealed that the victims aren't chosen for sexual reasons, but to represent himself.
- In "It Takes A Village", Malik kills young black boys (aged between children to tweens) as they represent him around the time of the sadistic physical torture he suffered.
- Castle (2009): 3XK aka Jerry Tyson tends to kill blonde women in threes since his mother was blonde. He broke this pattern twice — once a brunette woman to frame Castle for murder and once a red-haired woman to make Castle think he'd killed Beckett.
- Criminal Minds:
- In "Riding the Lightning", Dawes has a thing for blonde women (like his wife, Sarah Jean). His obsessive fans even dye their hair blonde in shows of devotion to him.
- In "The Perfect Storm", all the shown victims are blonde. It's implied Amber chooses them either for their resemblance to her or her mother, as she was brutally raped and beaten by her father and brother, and her mother covered it up.
- In "Doubt", Nathan Tubbs targets and kills brunette college students for their resemblance to his ex-wife, Cheryl. His Monster Fangirl, Anna, even dyes her hair brunette in an attempt to get him to kill her (due to her passive suicidal ideation).
- In "Masterpiece", although he abducts several children too, Rothschild/Grace is explicitly stated to only kill "beautiful" brunette women who resemble his ex-fiancee, who broke up with him when his brother was revealed to be a Serial Killer.
- In "Cold Comfort", the embalmer kills blonde women due to their resemblance to someone he recently lost.
- In "The Big Wheel", the killer's victims that he purposefully seeks out (he also massacres a gang in self-defence) are blonde women who resemble his mother, whose murder he witnessed as a child.
- In "The Uncanny Valley", the killer, Samantha, is a Psychopathic Womanchild who is abducting women and turning them into life-sized dolls for her tea parties. When the BAU finds two of her now-dead victims (they eventually starve), they realize that Samantha is recreating a line of dolls that she had as a little girl—her father, who sexually abused her and then used electroshock therapy to force her to forget what he was doing, stole the toys to give to his other victims. Since Samantha Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality, she genuinely thinks that women who look like the dolls are those dolls come to life.
- In "Remembrance of Things Past", Mullens raped and murdered multiple young blonde women, a type that his son has continued bringing women home for him to murder.
- In "Divining Rod", both Rodney Garret and his copycat kill young women with long blonde hair.
- Downplayed in "Broken". Despite purportedly being gay, the Serial Killer tries to have sex with and then murders blonde women. His male victims don't have any commonalities, but it's implied that his female victims all resemble Isabella Grant, due to his intense trauma around the fact that she raped him in a conversion camp.
- Desperate Housewives: Played with. At first, Eddie the Fairview Strangler seems to kill dark-haired women (both Julie, his attempted victim, and Emily Portsmith fit this description). However, it turns out that he merely prefers dark-haired women that look like his extremely neglectful mother. After he kills the blonde Irina, it's revealed that he lashes out violently at women who reject him and, specifically, laugh at him. He wasn't even trying to kill Julie; he thought she was Susan (who laughed off his proposal gently, not realizing he was serious, and didn't intend to reject him). However, Susan, Julie, Emily, and Eddie's mother Barbara do all have dark hair.
- Dexter: The Barrel Girl Gang targets white blonde women to torture, rape, and kill. It's not clear if this is a pattern set by their first victim (Emily Birch, who they gang-raped, but who survived) or if she was merely an extension of this preexisting impulse.
- The Fall: Paul only kills career-focused women with dark hair, who are implied to look like his mother (or, in the case of Katie, girls — he gets close to killing her but doesn't actually get there). For added Dramatic Irony, his wife is blonde.
- Hannibal: The Minnesota Shrike, aka Garrett Jacob Hobbs, kills college-aged girls with long, straight dark hair that resemble his daughter Abigail. Will theorizes that he intended her to be another victim, and he slashes her throat (along with his wife's) when the police comes for them, but Abigail survives. That time, anyway.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: In "Mac is a Serial Killer", there is a murderer on the loose that is targeting women with long, blonde hair. As the title suggests, the Gang suspects Mac because of his recent streak of secretive behavior. At the end of the episode, though, it's revealed that the real criminal is Dee's neighbor Gary, as the Gang discovers that his freezer is full of the victims' heads. It's also heavily implied that Dee herself is the reason Gary's a serial killer—she also has long blonde hair and is taking advantage of his crush on her, prompting him to attack anyone who looks like her.
- Kamen Rider Wizard: Sora Takigawa was a Serial Killer who targeted women with white dresses and black hair as they resembled his girlfriend. He started to kill these women after his girlfriend dumped him and started with her. Even when Sora was reborn as the Phantom Gremlin, he wanted to continue his love for killing women who looked similar.
- Supernatural: One episode features a demon that is deliberately preying on fat women. Unfortunately, Hollywood Pudgy is firmly in effect here, as the two victims we get to see aren't fat by any stretch of the imagination.
- Wire in the Blood:
- "Shadows Rising", an adaptation of the "Wire In The Blood" book, keeps in that Jacko murders teenage girls with long dark hair who resemble his first girlfriend (here wife, Jilly). He doesn't mutilate their arms but everything else remains the same.
- In "The Name Of Angels", the unseen and unnamed Serial Killer targets blonde women in corporate positions of power. For added Dramatic Irony, his wife is a brunette homemaker.
Video Games
- The Rainman: The titular serial killer targets young, brown-haired women because they remind him of his abusive mother. The protagonist Suzie just so happens to fit that description.
Websites
- SCP Foundation: SCP-3256
is an anomalous modus operandi of a serial killer, and its victims are turned into murderers; people who know about it and fit a certain demographic profile (white males with dark hair living in New England) are compelled to carry out copycat crimes if they learn the killer's M.O.
Western Animation
- Big Mouth: The Ponytail Killer targets men and women for their hairstyle. No points for guessing which one.
- Dexter's Laboratory has a non-murderous version in “Accent You Hate”, a trio of bullies who each go after a particular kind of victim conveniently indicated by their T-shirts. Dexter himself is terrorized by a bully who hates kids with funny accents.
- Family Guy:
- In "The Fat Guy Strangler," Lois discovers that she has a brother named Patrick who's been locked away in an asylum for years after experiencing a terrifying trauma — their mother Barbra performing oral sex on Jackie Gleason — as a little boy. As such, Patrick has developed a murderous hatred of fat men...and it just so happens that Peter has recently started an organization for fat guys like himself. Cue Patrick going on the rampage as the titular Fat Guy Strangler.
- Patrick returns in "Killer Queen." Fat children are being brutally strangled—but he's innocent in this case, and the police consult him for help in tracking down the real murderer (an angry teenager who lost to Chris in a hot dog eating contest and wants revenge).
- The Owl House has an exaggerated version of this, in that Emperor Belos has essentially murdered a copy of the same person tens, if not a few hundreds, of times. Using a spell, Belos created magical clones called "grimwalkers" in the image of his brother Caleb Wittebane to act as his Golden Guard. Every Golden Guard inevitably finds out the truth and turn on him, and Belos disposes of them. On top of this, he also killed the original Caleb after he fell in love, and had a child with, a witch.
