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Best Murderer Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of murderer cinema — measured across 1,200 indexed frames from 16 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Murderer films over-index on staircase, curtain and blood — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

    Alfred HitchcockDP Joseph A. ValentineIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Charlotte "Charlie" Newton is bored with her quiet life at home with her parents and younger sister. She wishes something exciting would happen and knows exactly what they need: a visit from her sophisticated, much-traveled Uncle Charlie Oakley, her mother's younger brother. Imagine her delight when, out of the blue, they receive a telegram from Uncle Charlie announcing that he is coming to visit them for awhile. Charlie Oakley creates quite a stir and charms the ladies' club, as well as the bank President where his brother-in-law works. Young Charlie begins to notice odd behavior on his part, such as cutting out a story in the local paper about a man who marries and then murders rich widows. When two strangers appear asking questions about him, she begins to imagine the worst about her beloved Uncle Charlie.

  2. 2

    Black Christmas (2006)

    Glen MorganDP Robert McLachlanIMDb 4.7TMDB 5.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    In the 70's, the boy Billy is born with yellow skin due to a liver disease and his dysfunctional mother rejects him. Later he witnesses his mother and her lover killing his beloved father and burying him in the basement of their house, and he is locked in the attic alone along his childhood. When he is a teenager, he is sexually abused by his mother and she has a baby girl called Agnes. During Christmas, the deranged Billy escapes from his imprisonment, kills his mother and stepfather and blinds one eye of Agnes. He is declared insane and his sister is sent to an orphanage. In the present days, Billy escapes from the Clark Sanatorium to spend Christmas with his family. Meanwhile, his former house is the Delta Alpha Kappa sorority house in the campus of the Clement University, and the housemother and the sisters Kelli Presley, Dana, Lauren Hannon, Megan, Heather, Megan Helms, Melissa and Eve Agnew are preparing the house for Christmas party in a stormy night while Clair Crosby is in her room writing a card to bury the hatchet with her sister. When three sisters vanish, the others receive weird phone calls and believe something is wrong, but they find that they are trapped in the location.

  3. 3

    Psycho

    Alfred HitchcockDP John L. RussellIMDb 8.5TMDB 8.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    Phoenix office worker Marion Crane is fed up with the way life has treated her. She has to meet her lover Sam in lunch breaks, and they cannot get married because Sam has to give most of his money away in alimony. One Friday, Marion is trusted to bank forty thousand dollars by her employer. Seeing the opportunity to take the money and start a new life, Marion leaves town and heads towards Sam's California store. Tired after the long drive and caught in a storm, she gets off the main highway and pulls into the Bates Motel. The motel is managed by a quiet young man called Norman who seems to be dominated by his mother.

  4. 4

    The House That Jack Built (2018)

    Lars von TrierDP Manuel Alberto ClaroIMDb 6.8TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    USA in the 1970s. We follow the highly intelligent Jack over a span of 12 years and are introduced to the murders that define Jack's development as a serial killer. We experience the story from Jack's point of view, while he postulates each murder is an artwork in itself. As the inevitable police intervention is drawing nearer, he is taking greater and greater risks in his attempt to create the ultimate artwork. Along the way we experience Jack's descriptions of his personal condition, problems and thoughts through a recurring conversation with the unknown Verge - a grotesque mixture of sophistry mixed with an almost childlike self-pity and psychopathic explanations. The House That Jack Built is a dark and sinister story, yet presented through a philosophical and occasional humorous tale.

  5. 5

    Coco (2017)

    Lee UnkrichDP Matt AspburyIMDb 8.4TMDB 8.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Despite his family's baffling generations-old ban on music, Miguel dreams of becoming an accomplished musician like his idol, Ernesto de la Cruz. Desperate to prove his talent, Miguel finds himself in the stunning and colorful Land of the Dead following a mysterious chain of events. Along the way, he meets charming trickster Hector, and together, they set off on an extraordinary journey to unlock the real story behind Miguel's family history.

  6. 6

    The French Dispatch (2021)

    Wes AndersonDP Robert D. YeomanIMDb 7.1TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    Faced with the impending dissolution of The French Dispatch, a factual weekly report on various subjects, old-school editor-in-chief Arthur Howitzer Jr. assembles the crème de la crème of the magazine's loyal expatriate journalists for one final issue. And against the backdrop of picturesque Ennui-sur-Blasé, Paris, France, three feature articles unfold. The vignettes pivot around tormented genius artists, statuesque prison officers, flamboyant critics, moody idealists, conflicted ace reporters, legendary chefs and, of course, the police.

  7. 7

    Halloween Kills (2021)

    David Gordon GreenDP Michael SimmondsIMDb 5.5TMDB 6.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    And the Halloween night when Michael Myers returned isn't over yet. Minutes after Laurie Strode (Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) left masked monster Michael Myers caged and burning in Laurie's basement, Laurie is rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries, believing she finally killed her lifelong tormentor. But when Michael manages to free himself from Laurie's trap, his ritual bloodbath resumes. As Laurie fights her pain and prepares to defend herself against him, she inspires all of Haddonfield to rise up against their unstoppable monster. The Strode women join a group of other survivors of Michael's first rampage who decide to take matters into their own hands, forming a vigilante mob that sets out to hunt Michael down, once and for all.

  8. 8

    Pearl (2022)

    Ti WestDP Eliot RockettIMDb 7.0TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Trapped on her family’s isolated farm, Pearl must tend to her ailing father under the bitter and overbearing watch of her devout mother. Lusting for a glamorous life like she’s seen in the movies, Pearl’s ambitions, temptations, and repressions collide.

  9. 9

    Super Dark Times (2017)

    Kevin PhillipsDP Eli BornIMDb 6.6TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Teenagers Zach and Josh have been best friends their whole lives, but when a gruesome accident leads to a cover-up, the secret drives a wedge between them and propels them down a rabbit hole of escalating paranoia and violence.

  10. 10

    Kill List

    Ben WheatleyDP Laurie RoseIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Nearly a year after a botched job, a hitman takes a new assignment with the promise of a big payoff for three killings. What starts off as an easy task soon unravels, sending the killer into the heart of darkness.

What murderer films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a murderer frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — staircase is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • staircase3.0×
  • curtain2.3×
  • blood2.1×
  • boy2.1×
  • door2.1×
  • fedora2.0×
  • snow2.0×
  • curtains1.9×

How murderer films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate murderer from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 31%naturalvs 43% baseline
  • 54%nightvs 43% baseline
  • 34%dayvs 42% baseline
  • 49%low keyvs 40% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Halloween 2 (2009) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,200 frames from 16 films carrying the murderer label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/murderer

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used