Even though we know better than to root for the bad guy, sometimes the villain is the more interesting character than the hero. Sometimes, being scared is more fun than feeling safe. Sometimes, you want Hannibal Lecter to escape his confinement and unleash his twisted potential, and that might just be because villains often are the real main characters of the movies we love, even though we are meant to root for the hero. On this top ten list, we’re ranking the best on-screen-killers in cinema history and I promise I don’t need to hold anyone’s hand or close my eyes at all. I’m fine, really.

10. Patrick Bateman – American Psycho

American Psycho isn’t the most pleasant movie-watching experience on this list, as it not only contains just as much slasher violence as any other entry, but it requires you to suspend your disbelief and not take what you see at face value. Who’s to say whether or not Patrick Bateman really is the killer that he wants to appear as, or if he’s just a repressed investment banker confined by his Wall Street status? Either way, truly horrifying.

9. Vincent – Collateral

This is primarily a horror movie list, and it is a real stretch to claim Collateral belongs to the same class as American Psycho or any of our other entries yet to come, but Tom Cruise’s brooding and intimidating Vincent is without a doubt one of the most significant killers in cinema history. Harkening back to a trick Sergio Leone employed in the sixties with Henry Fonda and Once Upon a Time in the West, Tom Cruise playing a relentless and unsympathetic killer was a shocking twist on the relationship audiences had with Cruise going in. It’s difficult to picture Jerry Maguire, Ethan Hunt, or any one of Cruise’s iconic pleasant roles while watching him in Collateral, and that’s the beauty of it.

8. The Xenomorph – Alien

Monsters have been the most iconic symbols of “scare” and “fright” since the days of Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein, but sometime in the sixties, mainstream horror movies got away from using the fictional creature in favor of real-life horror (possibly due to an entry we’ll see later on in the list). However, this is not the case for Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien, which introduced possibly the most frightening creature since Nosferatu. The scare factor of the Xenomorph has died just a little bit over the last few decades, but this year’s Alien: Romulus recaptured that feeling quite well with its take.

7. Jack Torrance – The Shining

If you have any friends who refuse to watch horror movies, there is a shortlist that us here at The Voice approve of as the “Well-You-Should-At-Least-Try…” films. The frontrunner of that list is undoubtedly The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece and the most essential cabin fever movie. Jack Nicholson’s performance is one that continues to haunt cinema more than forty years after its release, and if any modern film tries to sell me on being trapped in a hotel with an axe-wielding maniac, I will think of The Shining.

6. The Joker – The Dark Knight

It may seem pretty unserious to consider the Joker scary enough for this list, but if you feel that way then I must ask you: why so serious? The Joker had appeared on the big screen more than a couple of times before Heath Ledger took the role in 2008, but it’s been his and his alone ever since. There is not a single superhero action movie on the scale of The Dark Knight that has a more memorable villain performance, and even though plenty of Batman movies have given it a shot, no one will ever terrify us as much as Ledger. Rest in peace.

5. Harry Powell – The Night of the Hunter

In the nearly seventy years since Charles Laughton’s solo directorial effort, the seldom remembered horror classic The Night of the Hunter reigns supreme in the subgenre of widow-marrying-serial-killer epics. The incomparable Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a murderer masquerading as a preaching man on a mission from God who infiltrates a small town on the Ohio River with one true goal: to find the hidden fortune his cellmate was hanged for stealing. It’s a slow-paced black-and-white film, and is more than deserving of a slot remembering the most impactful killers on screen.

4. John Doe – Se7en

Despite the moral tugging at my leg to exclude Se7en’s infamous serial killer from this list, it would be a dishonest journal entry without Kevin Spacey’s John Doe. As far as police procedural movies go, it almost (almost) doesn’t get any better than David Fincher’s first outing into the original story sphere, and the killer at the center of it is truly one of the most harrowing figures in scary movie history. From the first time you see the silhouette of the trench-coated John Doe to the legendary chase scene and all the way to when you meet him face to face, it is an unforgettable murderer performance.

3. Anton Chigurh – No Country For Old Men

While Heath Ledger’s Joker is one of the most memorable unhinged agents of chaos who ever appeared on screen, he is taking a page out of the same book Javier Bardem did the year before in No Country For Old Men’s antagonist: Anton Chigurh. Chigurh doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t exclude, and doesn’t put on the brakes throughout every murdering second that he haunts the screen during No Country. He is just about as cold and unfeeling as movie killers go, and we’ve been scared of anyone with that haircut ever since.

2. Hannibal Lecter/ Lecktor – Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs

Hannibal, the famed cannibalistic psychiatrist, has appeared in reincarnated on-screen performances almost as many times as our no. 6 spot. But, for the purposes of this list, just the first two count. In Michael Mann’s 1986 cult classic Manhunter, Lecktor is a detained serial killer who is visited by the film’s protagonist, a detective hunting down another serial killer before they strike again. In the 1991 smash hit The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter is a detained serial killer who is visited by the film’s protagonist, a detective hunting down another serial killer before they strike again. Interesting that Mann’s initial adaptation of a Hannibal story made nothing at the box office while the reincarnation made 14 times its budget. Brian Cox’s take and the 90’s performance by Anthony Hopkins are both chilling psychological explorations of a criminally insane mastermind, and both films live on in the canon of movies that will keep you up all night. This pairing is the most obvious double feature on this list, but for your own sake, maybe watch a Disney movie third before going to bed.

Honorary mention: Longlegs – Longlegs

While it is yet to be determined whether or not the 2024 sleeper hit Longlegs will endure the test of horror movie longevity, the film delivers a successfully frightening serial killer and a hook-you-in premise of who is being targeted and why. The real strength of Longlegs is in its dismissal of serial killer-mania and presents you as a truly pathetic non-genius as its bad guy, and that is something we’ve been in need of since Hannibal (with all respect to Silence of the Lambs). P.S. – If you don’t know the actor who portrays Longlegs, we strongly urge you to watch the movie before looking it up!

1. Norman Bates – Psycho

Psycho sits at the top of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconography for the famous shower scene all by itself. Norman Bates, the movie’s central figure (or one of them per se) stands out in Hitchcock’s canon as someone who could’ve been pulled out of 2024 and dropped in the 60’s. He is both cinema’s most essential murderer and an odd pick to front-run a list like this. For one, he isn’t a serial killer per se; he doesn’t kill for fun, he doesn’t do it for work, and he isn’t some villainous mastermind. He is just a troubled young man running a small motel with his mother. Secondly, he’s a prototype of sorts for the psychopaths that would come to overrun similar films for the next 60 years – a prototype in that the studio felt compelled to over-explain Norman’s emotional condition in its final scene, which was dangerously close to ruining the impact of everything preceding it. But as much as they tried, the studio couldn’t mar Hitchcock’s masterwork as it endures as the essential killer thriller.

Did you know that Osgood Perkins, the director of Longlegs, is the son of Anthony Perkins, star of Psycho?