The smug, hedonistic, and sadistic coyote Dag from Barnyard is the closest a children’s movie has to one. In addition to killing animals for food he collects their remains for sport as well, as shown by the keychain of chicken feet he carries with him.
Claudandus from Felidae personally kills a huge number of his fellow cats as part of his plan to create a Master Race.
Syndrome from The Incredibles is this, even if he is never called that (this being Pixar and all). He systematically murders the world's superheroes basically because he's jealous they're "special" and he's not.
10 Rillington Place is the horrifying Real Life story of John Christie, an apparently mild-mannered, polite and friendly man who really fatally gassed women, then buried them on his property. Worse, he helped get his innocent neighbor convicted and hanged for one of the murders before being caught and hanged himself.
21st Century Serial Killer: The film is about a man who aspires to be one taking lessons from an actual serial killer.
Dwayne is shown to torture, murder and rape women, which is implied to happen regularly, with his Cute and Psycho sister Liza providing victims for money.
Monica and her gang also regularly torture people before murdering them just for fun.
Done humorously with Debbie Jellinksi from Addams Family Values. She started with killing her parents because for Christmas they gave her a Malibu Barbie doll instead of the Ballerina Barbie doll she wanted, and then grew up to be a Black Widow primarily because her husbands wouldn't buy her everything she wanted. The Addamses, being the Addamses, actually sympathize with her.
The titular American Psycho of the film and book of the name, Patrick Bateman. Idle Rich businessman with a do nothing job by day, sadistic Serial Killer by night. Maybe.
In Big Driver, Tess finds the bodies of two of Lester's previous victims in the drainage pipe where she is Left for Dead. The photos she later finds in his lair indicate that Lester has been killing for some time, and that there many more bodies out there.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: After Sam witnesses the attack in the gallery, the police tell him the assailant is believed to be a serial killer who is killing young women across the city, and Sam is now an important witness.
The Black Phone: The film's antagonist is a man known only as "the Grabber", who abducts young boys and locks them in his basement for days, slowly starving them before playing mind games to lull them into a false sense of security. He then intentionally leaves the basement door unlocked so they'll try to escape, so that he then has an excuse to beat them. He eventually beats them to death and buries them in the basement of the other house he owns.
In The Black Room, Baron Gregor de Berghman has been murdering attractive young women in his barony, and judging from the amount of bones in the pit in the Black Room, he has been doing it for some time.
Jack in the movie Blacktop, who, as the title suggests, works driving a truck around the mid-West and uses the trailer's freezer to store the strung-up corpses of his victims. Best part is, he's played by Meat Loaf.
In The Butchers, a Tome of Eldritch Lore is used to raise six of history's most infamous serial killers from the dead: Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Albert Fish, the Zodiac Killer, and Jack the Ripper. JB implies that he is more prolific than any of them.
The protagonist of Cabin by the Lake is an obscure horror movie writer named Stanley, who murders women by kidnapping and drowning them, then writes his activities into his work.
The Cell deals 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.
Changeling features Gordon Stewart Northcott, who kidnapped and murdered more than 20 young boys on a small farm in California.
Child's Play: Charles Lee Ray, better known as Chucky the Killer Doll.
Citizen X is the story of a real one, Andrei Chikatilo, otherwise known as the Rostov Ripper.
The Clovehitch Killer features the title serial killer, loosely based on the "BTK Killer".
Yukio from Cold Fish is one of the Power/Control type.
Con Air: Garland Greene is a serial killer who killed dozens of people along the East Coast in what's implied to be unusually horrific ways (the only thing he says is he'd worn one victim as a Head Hat). Even many other hardened cons fear him, though he never harms so much as a fly in the film, even sweetly having tea with a young girl. At the end, it's implied he's cured of his homicidal impulses somehow.
In Cradle of Fear, Keller is a serial killer and rapist whose reign of terror stretched for more that 25 years before he was arrested by Inspector Neilson. At the start of the film, he is imprisoned in Fenham Asylum.
In The Darwin Awards, Burrows is dismissed from the police force after his hematophobia causes him to faint and allows a serial killer he had just captured — the North Side Killer — to escape. After the killer strikes again, he becomes determined to bring him to justice.
Technically, Richard is a spree killer since all of his killings are implied to occur in under thirty days.
The serial killer in The Dead Zone focuses on killing women. He turns out to be a policeman who lived with his mother in a clown-patterned bedroom.
In Death Ring, it is strongly implied that the lawyer Temple is a serial killer with a large body count, who is moving into Hunting the Most Dangerous Game in search of a new challenge.
Scorpio, in Dirty Harry. Scorpio was based on the real life Zodiac Killer who was active in San Francisco in the late 1960's, but never caught.
The murderous truck driver from Steven Spielberg's Made-for-TV MovieDuel is strongly hinted to be one of these, with numerous license plates mounted on his vehicle, and notches carved in the headlight rims. Whilst the former has an innocent alternative explanation, in that big rig drivers often cross multiple state lines in their work, the sheer number of them, and the headlight rim notches, combined with his behavior, all adds up to a psycho killer.
Evilenko, also based on Chikatilo (though much more loosely). The serial killer main character has psychic powers now.
The Exorcist III: The Gemini Killer, a serial murderer so evil he became a body-hopping demon after his death.
Nathan from Ex Machina could be interpreted as one. He repeatedly creates artificially intelligent robots which he subsequently deactivates and/or destroys. Since he thinks they are just machines, he does not consider himself a murderer.
In Faster, one of Driver's targets, Old Guy, is indicated to have killed several people on camera.
Fear City: The one in this film is a martial arts expert who mainly goes after strippers, toying with his prey before killing them. He apparently sees it as part of a mission to purify the world of sinners.
The Flesh and the Fiends is based on the true case of Burke and Hare, who murdered at least 16 people in 1828 Edinburgh, Scotland and sold their bodies for anatomical research.
In Force of Nature: The Dry 2, the mountain wilderness where the hiking group gets lost used the be hunting grounds of a serial killer named Kovac. While lost, the women discover Kovac's hut, which the police have been searching for for decades.
The Blissfield Butcher in Freaky. Whether or not he's in his own body or Millie's, he continues to murder people simply for the fun of it, though his methods vary depending on the body.
Bob Rusk, in Frenzy. Another killer with female victims, although of a sexual predator, Jack the Ripoff variety.
The main antagonist in the time-travel movie, Frequency, specializes in killing nurses.
Manual "Mental Manny" Dyer, the former leader of a religious cult who convinced his whole flock to burn themselves alive, starting with Sheriff Kate's mother when Kate was a kid.
Eileen "The Stitch-Faced Killer", Manual Dyer's daughter who stitches the eyes and mouths of her murder victims shut.
Ghost in the Machine: Karl Hochman starts out as a mundane example who finds victims from address books, until a lightning strike overloading the MRI machine he is in ends up visualizing him. He then becomes a digital ghost who travels through computer networks, overloading electronic appliances, such as turning a hairdryer into a flamethrower.
Good Neighbors: The serial killer starts as a background detail, something that Louise is obsessed with. Then, someone close to Louise dies. Then, that gives her ideas. And ultimately, the serial killer is implied to be part of the cast.
Greta: It's strongly implied that Greta has previously lured in, imprisoned and eventually killed many other young woman, since the first time she meets Francis there is the same bumping noise that Francis later made trying to signal others to escape. What she did with the bodies is anyone's guess though.
Grindhouse's Stuntman Mike: He's a stuntman. Who horribly butchers women. With his car. Yeah. Tracy Thoms, Zoë Bell, and Rosario Dawson turn the tables on the redneck lunatic.
Halloween's Michael Myers: Just killing his sister wasn't enough for him.
Victor Crowley from the Hatchet films. While not as iconic as most Slasher Movie villains, he's still in the Top 3 worst having killing or caused the deaths of sixty-four people.
Haunter: The villain of the movie is a serial killer who continued to kill people beyond his death and used his powers as a ghost to keep the spirits of his earlier victims trapped in the house.
Anne is responsible for killing the Dahl twins, and many others, including her own sister.
In the sequel, Silver Falls is being terrorized by a serial killer named Jack who is being haunted by and working with the ghost of Anne.
In Hellraiser: Inferno, the Engineer is an eyeless serial killer who is going after the people around Joseph and playing an extensive cat and mouse game with him.
Henry, the Villain Protagonist of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, is a brutal murderer who changes his M.O. for each kill, so the police don't know what he's up to. He eventually gets away with killing every other major character in the film, including his accomplice and his girlfriend. He's also so cold and unfeeling that he makes Dexter look like a warm, caring individual.
Highwaymen features a crippled serial killer named Fargo who uses his customized car to go on a killing spree of women through vehicular homicide.
Holidays: Reggie in New Year's Eve murders women who he dates. Then he dates another women who turns out to also be one, and murders him.
In Horrors of the Black Museum, horror writer Edmond Bancroft gains new inspiration by using antiques rigged as torture devices to commit murder so he can write about it in the tabloids.
Chao from Human Lanterns is a murderer with a passion for skinning women alive in order to turn their skins into lanterns.
In the Cut: The NYPD is seeking a brutal one loose in New York City who murders young women then cuts them apart. One woman's leg is found in Frannie's garden, and thus she gets connected with the detectives. She comes to suspect that Detective Giovanni Malloy is the killer, but also starts having sex with him. It turns out to be his partner though, Richard Rodriguez. Frannie's kidnapped and nearly murdered by him, but kills Rodriguez in self-defense near the end.
Mitch Leary from In the Line of Fire. He kills several people in pursuit of his main goal-assassinating the US President. Previously, Leary was a black ops CIA assassin too, and so had killed many before this.
Intruders: Anna and Conrad, prior to the events of the film, kidnapped numerous perverts and either drove them to suicide or strangled them.
Kyung-chul from I Saw the Devil is a particularly cruel one.
It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Henry Waters, the Angel Killer, is a ruthless businessman who murders the people who stand in the way of him buying up the town. Later he also had David kill for him as well, after breaking his mind by murdering David's son. It's stated he kills every couple weeks or so.
The eponymous John Doe: Vigilante, who spends his nights killing child molesters/abusers, rapists, and abusive husbands/boyfriends, culminating in the man who killed his wife and daughter (the very thing that spurred his killing spree).
In Julia X, The Stranger is a serial killer dubbed 'The Brand Killer' by the press, because he brands each of his victims with a letter.
Carl Panzram in Killer A Journal Of A Murder, memorably played by James Woods. Disturbing in its way since the story is based on an actual serial killer, although the film isn't nearly as gruesome as Panzram's real career.
Kiss of the Damned: Maia, in contrast to the Connecticut vampires, regularly drinks humans' blood lethally. She had to flee Amsterdam as she'd killed a man there and it was detected. Coming to the US doesn't stop her though.
In Knife for the Ladies, the Ripper is a serial killer picking off the prostitutes of the small Wild West town of Mescal.
The leprechaun from the Leprechaun movies. He has actually killed more people than Freddy Krueger.
The Avenger, in The Lodger; however, the killer himself never actually appears in the film, as the plot centers around an innocent man wrongly suspected of being said killer.
Butch Cavendish from The Lone Ranger, who's stated to be an Indian killer and has murdered and eaten people, is a Hedonistic version.
Lycan: Isabella turns out to be one, along with her adopted mother. Both of them kill people with some kind of metal claws, making it look like an animal did and furthering the werewolf idea.
M, starring Peter Lorre as the bizarrely sympathetic child killer Hans Beckert, is one of the first film portrayals of a serial killer. Since many of these tropes had not taken effect yet, the climax was actually about savinghim from a furious lynch mob. M was inspired by the case of Fritz Haarmann (aka "the Butcher of Hanover"), which also inspired two other movies: Tenderness of the Wolves in 1973, a fictionalized account of Haarmann's killing spree, and The Deathmaker in 1995, an account of Haarmann's psychological examination, based on the actual transcripts of his interrogation.
Man Bites Dog: Notorious Belgian Cult Classic about a documentary crew following a serial killer during his daily activities.
The focus of an amusing subplot in the Steve Martin comedy The Man with Two Brains, when Martin's character accidentally stumbles across the identity of The Elevator Killer:
Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr: You. You're the elevator killer. Merv Griffin. The Elevator Killer: Yeah. Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr: Why? The Elevator Killer: I don't know. I've always just loved to kill. I really enjoyed it. But then I got famous, and — it's just too hard for me. And so many witnesses. I mean, everybody recognized me. I couldn't even lurk anymore. I'd hear, "Who's that lurking over there? Isn't that Merv Griffin?" So I came to Europe to kill. And it's really worked out very well for me!
A very disturbing example from Memento. Leonard Shelby is one... but thanks to his memory condition, he has no idea. He's on a mission to kill the man that raped and killed his wife, but at the end, it's revealed that while his wife was raped, Leonard himself killed his wife by mistake, but convinced himself otherwise. So, he's dedicated himself to hunting down his wife's rapist and alleged murderer, with the help of his "friend" Teddy... but, as revealed at the end, Leonard already killed him years prior. But since he can't remember it, Teddy's been setting him up to kill other men, letting Leonard believe they're the man he's after, until he inevitably forgets again. Teddy finds a new victim, and the cycle starts over.
M.F.A.: Noelle becomes one after killing her own rapist by accident, killing others who went unpunished in various ways.
Monster, the one with Charlize Theron (but not Charlize Theron's eyebrows) as Aileen Wuornos.
Sam in The Mortuary Collection is the seemingly innocent, blonde protagonist of the film who is told a series of increasingly gruesome tales by a mysterious undertaker, culminating in one about a serial murderer who killed babies and took their teeth as a memento. Spoiler alert: Sam is the murderer!
A Murder of Crows: Professor Arthur Corvus, whose killings Lawson is suspected of committing due to a Frame-Up. He's killed a string of criminal defense attorneys before, beginning with the one who'd got off his family's killer.
In Night After Night After Night, a crazed moral crusader – dressed in black leather and a Beatles wig – is killing prostitutes, au pairs and assorted young dolly birds in London, Jack the Ripper style, after judging them “depraved”.
Hugo from The Night of a Thousand Cats stalks the women of Acapulco in his helicopter, seduces them, and then brutally murders them and feeds them to his cats.
Dr. Decker from Clive Barker's Nightbreed is a misanthropic serial killer who murders entire families and anyone else he comes across to 'cleanse' the world. He becomes an undead one at the end.
Before becoming a dream-stalking ghost via demons, Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street fame was a serial killer by the name of the "Springwood Slasher", who would prey on young children (and, if an old newspaper in the fifth film is any indication, he'd do more than just butcher them). The sixth film reveals that he had a secret room in his house filled with trophies of his kills (and various implements of torture), and the opening of Freddy vs. Jason also at one point had him flipping through a scrapbook of his victims while chuckling to himself.
Power Rangers (2017). Yes, really. There's a serial killer in a Power Rangers movie. And it's Rita Repulsa, definitely not the same raspy sounding, headache complaining, child-friendly villainous you remember her as.
Norman Bates, in Psycho, who kills girls who stay over at his inn. Because he has a split personality patterned after his abusive mother, who wants him to stay with her.
The murderer from Psycho Beach Party went around killing people they consider imperfect, eg. the disabled girl, a man with an extra toe, etc.
The Rawhide Killer, who is picking off citizens of Red Dog one by one, and leaving behind a strip of rawhide as a Calling Card, in The Rawhide Terror.
In Relative Fear, Adam's biological parents turn out to be Garrett and Connie Madison, who are confirmed to have tortured 16 people to death and claim to have killed more than 40.
Replicant: Edward "The Torch" Garotte is named such because he beats single mothers to death, then sets their houses on fire and leaves the child inside.
Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt is based on the crimes of Manuel Blanco Romasanta: Spain's first documented serial killer.
Running Scared (2006): Dez and Edele, a couple who kidnap children to molest them before murdering them and disposing of their bodies. When Terese arrives to rescue Oleg from them, she can barely resist throwing up when she sees that the couple has dozens of videotapes in their collection, all with the names of various children marked on them. Being a fairytale-inspired story, they're an analogue for the witch from Hansel and Gretel.
In The Sadist, Charlie and Judy have spent the past several days heading west from Arizona, leaving a trail of corpses behind them.
Jigsaw of the Saw movies arguably fits here, though he is fairly sporting — he gives his victims a (very slim) chance to escape, and apparently wants them to escape, on the hope that their life will be improved by the experience. He claims that he is not a murderer and in fact despises murderers, and some people agree with him.
As for his apprentices Amanda Young and (eventual successor) Mark Hoffman, well... Not so much.
The Scream series each featured a Serial Killer in costume who hunted down all the friends and family of Sidney Prescott (or the cast of the Film Within a Film in the third one). The various people who have donned the Ghostface mask are: Billy Loomis and Stu Macher in Scream (1996), Nancy Loomis and Mickey Altieri in Scream 2, Roman Bridger in Scream 3, Jill Roberts and Charlie Walker in Scream 4, Richie Kirsch and Amber Freeman in Scream (2022), and Wayne Bailey, Quinn Bailey, and Ethan Bailey in Scream VI. Jason Carvey also briefly donned the mask before he and his partner Greg Brockner get killed by the actual Ghostface in VI.
Johnathan Doe from Se7en is possibly the most disturbing one on this list. He is a serial killer who is obsessed with sin and punishment, and models his unimaginably cruel murders after the Seven Deadly Sins. The most disturbing thing about him is not only his intelligence and sadism, but that everything goes according to his plan and he is victorious in the end.
Serial Killing 4 Dummys: Casey starts by jokingly writing a paper saying he wants to be a serial killer. After getting in trouble for this, he starts seriously researching becoming one: encouraged and aided by Sasha. Meanwhile, an actual serial killer is at work in the town.
Serial Mom is a humorous example of a Revenge Killer, in that she kills people over extremely small transgressions, like not rewinding rental videos (this was made back in the pre-DVD age), not recycling, or wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
The Silence of the Lambs, and its prequel Red Dragon (previously adapted as Manhunter) present maybe some of the most famous fictional serial killers on film, as well as pioneering the Consulting a Convicted Killer trope. In Lambs, newly graduated FBI profiler Clarise Sterling has to consult notorious cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in order to find "Buffalo Bill",a serial killer who is skinning women to make a full-body woman suit, and in Red Dragon, Will Graham, FBI agent who caught, but was also gravely injured by Lecter, has to consult him to find "The Tooth Fairy", or Red Dragon as he personally likes to be called, a Family Annihilator who strikes at geographically distant locations with no discernible connecting pattern.
The Slashers in Slashers, who do it professionally. Also Matthew, who is a wanted serial killer known as 'the Bible Doll Killer'.
Angela Baker is a mission-based one. In the original Sleepaway Camp, she killed people who had wronged her in some way, while in the next two films (Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers and Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland), she's developed an extreme set of morals, and is a puritanical killer, murdering people who personally offend her (so, the usual slasher film stereotypes). In the fifth film, she murders Alan's main tormentors.
In Split Second (1992), Cowboy Cop Harley Stone is pursuing a serial killer who cuts out his victims' hearts to eat them and has a personal vendetta with Stone. Subverted in that it turns out it is actually a giant monster with unexplained motives for killing people, although presumably intelligent.
Star Wars: General Grievous of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, who first appears in Revenge of the Sith, takes a special pleasure in killing Jedi Knights, and takes their lightsabers as trophies. The expanded universe (both Disney canon and Legends), this is explained as revenge for the Jedi/Republic intervention in the Kaleesh-Huk conflict, in which they judged Grievous's people the Kaleesh to be at fault and penalized them severely in the peace settlement. Grievous then had his brain tampered with by the Sith.
The Stepfather series of films involves an unnamed serial killer (he only ever uses aliases) obsessed with finding the perfect family to become a part of. Things are all smiles and sunshine for a while, but if the family doesn't reach expectations and becomes too hard to handle, he moves on to another, murdering his current one (and anyone else in the way) in a vicious cycle, being incapable of believing that there is no such thing as "the perfect family". One of the most memorable scenes in the original is of the killer losing his composure in the basement, thrashing around and muttering nearly incomprehensibly, unknowingly in front of his stepdaughter. Also, the "Family Killer", as he's called in the third film was apparently based on real life killer John List.
Summer of '84 features the Cape May Slayer, known for kidnapping young boys around Ipswich, Oregon. A group of teenager believes him to be their neighbor police officer Wayne Mackey and spend the movie trying to find proof against him. To everyone's surprise, they turn out to be completely right.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, who murdered his customers and sent them down the chute, where his partner Mrs. Lovett baked them into pies. His initial motive is revenge for what happened to him and his wife at the hands of the corrupt Judge Turpin, and his first killing is a man who recognized him from his days as Benjamin Barker and tried to blackmail him, but after "Epiphany", he starts committing the murders that would make him infamous.
Ted Bundy is a film about the infamous Real Life serial killer and rapist from the Seventies.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Leatherface. Several of his relatives also count, but in general, the dirty work is left to him.
The Theatre Bizarre: "Vision Stains" is about a writer/serial killer who cannot dream. She extracts fluid from her victims' eyes as they die and injects it into her own eye so she can experience the others' lives as they flash by in their dying moments.
Tragedy Girls has two of these as our protagonists. Over the course of the movie, Sadie and McKayla kill lots of people in the name of getting media attention for their true crime website. By the story's end, their body count is in the hundreds. There's also Lowell, who killed four people in the film's backstory before being captured by Sadie and McKayla.
The murderer in Untraceable abducted and killed people in gruesome ways while broadcasting over the internet that he would spare the victim only if it didn't meet the number of viewers that he attracted; as it turns out, the people he was killing were people connected to his father's suicide.
In Vampire Diary, Vicki starts murdering men to satisfy her Blood Lust: shooting them with a bolt gun and then drinking their blood. The police dub her 'the Vampire Killer'. She's arrested toward the end of the film.
Vicious Fun is about a horror movie fan who stumbles (literally) into a support group for serial killers.
What Keeps You Alive: Jackie is one. She attempts to murder Jules, and murdered her previous wives already. Later she also casually murders Daniel and Sarah.
In While the City Sleeps, a serial killer is on the loose in New York City. Dubbed "The Lipstick Killer," he has also strangely become the center of a power struggle between three division chiefs in a media empire.
Mick Taylor from Wolf Creek is a particularly terrifying example.
Graham Young in The Young Poisoner's Handbook is a serial poisoner who keeps a detailed diary noting the doses he has administered, their effects, and whether he is going to allow each person to live or die. Based on the Real Life serial killer Graham Young.
Zodiac is about the hunt for the real-life Zodiac Killer.
, although the film isn't nearly as gruesome as Panzram's real career.