#Serial killers movies movie
#Serial killers movies serial
#Serial killers movies series

Moments like Kate’s escape sequence through the North Carolina wilderness are effectively filled with adrenaline, and Judd particularly gives the salacious piece conviction. It feels irresponsible to blame media for actual violence, but it’s still quite an indictment that Stone’s attempt to criticize media glorification became a favorite for many a disturbed individual with a gun.

#Serial killers movies movie

The movie came under controversy in the years after its release for inspiring alleged copycat killers as well as school shooters. Early sequences imagining Mallory’s abusive childhood like it’s a television sitcom, and later psychedelic visions of Robert Downey Jr.’s opportunistic news reporter as the Devil, do little to divorce the film from its shallow self-satisfaction in close-ups of heads being shot. But Stone’s sloppy and tanked vision lacks the discipline to achieve anything beyond its maliciousness. Technically the pair are supposed to be presented as victims of traumatic child abuse-and who are then wrongfully glorified by the media.

#Serial killers movies serial

The concept itself is a seemingly inevitable escalation of the “bad romance outlaws” archetype that’s been floating around Hollywood since at least 1950’s Gun Crazy, and which was then made iconic by Bonnie & Clyde (1967).īut whereas those films relied on bank robbers living fast, Natural Born Killers descends into a seeming final form with Mickey and Mallory ( Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) as giddy serial killers who are eventually out for maximum carnage. The movie that Quentin Tarantino disowned, Natural Born Killers is a seedy mess based on a Tarantino script that was heavily rewritten by Oliver Stone, David Veloz, and Richard Rutowski. Do yourself a favor and go your whole life without hearing Nick Nolte sing “This Old Man” while climbing onto a corpse.

#Serial killers movies series

But as a series of grisly prostitute murders pile up, Martin realizes he needs to figure out who the killer is-that or continue to be framed by the necrophiliac fiend who keeps coming by the morgue for one last liaison. McGregor plays medical student Martin here, a kid who gets an after school job by becoming the night watch security at the local morgue.

It feels a little mean to rag on Ewan McGregor back-to-back, but maybe serial killer movies just aren’t his genre? That could be at least one takeaway from an ill-advised double feature of Eye of the Beholder and Nightwatch, the latter of which is a remake of a 1994 Danish film that I’ve not seen… and probably won’t since both the original film and American remake are directed by the same man. As a muddied, impenetrable tale about an intelligence officer ( Ewan McGregor) who spies on and falls in love with a serial killer, Eye of the Beholder is a scattershot of bad ideas that run the gamut from ludicrous to misogynistic.īeauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but this movie will close the lids over your pupils inside of 30 minutes.

But any credit it deserves for deviation-including making Ashley Judd’s central femme fatale the killer-it loses in execution. Eye of the Beholder (1999)Įye of the Beholder is a tonal oddity that only passingly flirts with the conventions of ‘90s serial killer thrillers, all while it tries to pay homage to (read: rip-off) Alfred Hitchcock. (Also this list is strictly for the decade when the genre was at its height and it excludes slasher movies like Scream, which may feature serial killers but were not exactly adult-oriented thrillers.) 12. So grab your magnifying glass and fortify your stomach, because we’re about to revisit some of the best (and worst) of ‘90s serial killer thrillers. From our modern gaze, where the dominant studio conventions prefer reassuring morality tales and sunny lighting, these movies’ preference for shadows and discomfort in the mainstream is kind of startling. Yet they can also be bleak, hard-edged, and ambiguous. Granted that means there can be something formulaic about many of these movies. For a macabre minute or two, every Hollywood name appeared eager to play either the detective or the killer-the hunter or the obsessed, which often proved interchangeable for both characters. All the evidence points to only one conclusion: the serial killer thrillers of the ‘90s are back!

You can see it this weekend with the release of John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things, a throwback to the days when movie stars hung out at crime scenes instead of in spandex, and it’ll be more apparent next month with the launch of Clarice, a television spinoff of 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. Someone must have left the freezer door in the morgue open, because grisly reminders of the past are thawing before our eyes.