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Best Psychopath Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of psychopath cinema — measured across 6,943 indexed frames from 96 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Psychopath films over-index on blood, skin and streetlamp — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

    Danny SteinmannDP Stephen L. PoseyIMDb 4.8TMDB 5.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Five years after killing the goalie hockey-masked killer Jason Voorhees, Tommy Jarvis has grown up in various mental hospitals unable to get over the nightmares about Jason's return. When Tommy is sent to a rural halfway house in New Jersey for mentally disturbed teenagers, a series of grisly murders begin anew as another hockey-masked killer begins killing off all people at and around the residence. Has Jason returned from the dead to re-start his killing spree? Has Tommy decided to take over the reign of Jason, or has someone else?

  2. 2

    The Chaser (2008)

    Na Hong-jinDP Lee Seong-jeIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    Joong-ho is a dirty detective turned pimp, who's in financial trouble as several of his girls have recently disappeared without clearing their debts. While trying to track them down, he finds a clue that the vanished girls were all called up by the same client, whom one of his girls is meeting with right now.

  3. 3

    31 (2016)

    Rob ZombieDP David DanielIMDb 5.1TMDB 5.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    The day before Halloween, five carnival employees are kidnapped & held hostage in an isolated compound known as "Murderworld". On Halloween, they are thrown into a sadistic game called "31" where they must survive 12 hours against a gang of maniacs dressed like clowns. It's time to play 31.

  4. 4

    Hard Target (1993)

    John WooDP Russell CarpenterIMDb 6.2TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Natasha Binder comes to New Orleans looking for her father, who has gone missing. In doing so, she meets a very hard man called Chance. He helps her find out that her father was killed by an organisation who sell the opportunity to hunt human prey. They are taking advantage of a police strike in New Orleans. Will the Muscles from Brussels win through?

  5. 5

    I Saw The Devil (2010)

    Kim Jee-woonDP Lee Mo-gaeIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    SPOILER: Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik) is a dangerous psychopath serial killer. He has committed infernal serial murders in diabolic ways that one cannot even imagine and his victims range from young women to even children. The police have chased him for a long time, but were unable to catch him. One day, Joo-yeon, daughter of a retired police chief becomes his prey and is found dead in a horrific state. Her fiancé Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), a top secret agent, decides to track down the murderer himself. He promises himself that he will do everything in his power to take bloody vengeance against the killer, even if it means that he must become a monster himself to get this monstrous and inhumane killer.

  6. 6

    The Purge: Anarchy (2014)

    James DeMonacoDP Jacques JouffretIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    One night per year, the government sanctions a 12-hour period in which citizens can commit any crime they wish -- including murder -- without fear of punishment or imprisonment. Leo, a sergeant who lost his son, plans a vigilante mission of revenge during the mayhem. However, instead of a death-dealing avenger, he becomes the unexpected protector of four innocent strangers who desperately need his help if they are to survive the night.

  7. 7

    The Devil’s Rejects (2005)

    Rob ZombieDP Phil ParmetIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    In Ruggsville, Texas, the police under the command of Sheriff John Quincy Wydell attack the house of the sadistic serial killers Firefly family (a.k.a. The Devil's Reject) and they arrest mother Firefly, but Otis B. Driftwood and Baby Firefly escape from the siege. Tiny is wandering nearby the house and also escapes. Otis and Baby call their patriarch, the mad clown Captain Spaulding and they schedule to reunite at an isolated motel in the desert. When Otis and Baby arrive, they kidnap two families of singers, using sadism and violence against the harmless persons. Meanwhile, Sheriff Wydell promises to capture and kill the runaways, seeking revenge for the death of his brother, the Deputy George Wydell.

  8. 8

    A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

    Wes CravenDP Jacques HaitkinIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Teenagers in a small town are dropping like flies, apparently in the grip of mass hysteria causing their suicides. A cop's daughter, Nancy Thompson, traces the cause to child molester Fred Krueger, who was burned alive by angry parents many years before. Krueger has now come back in the dreams of his killers' children, claiming their lives as his revenge. Nancy and her boyfriend, Glen, must devise a plan to lure the monster out of the realm of nightmares and into the real world...

  9. 9

    Killer Joe (2011)

    William FriedkinDP Caleb DeschanelIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Finding himself in considerable debt, Chris, a Texan drug dealer, decides the only solution is to murder his mother to collect the insurance money. Getting together with his father, the ex-husband of Chris' mother, they decide to hire Joe Cooper (a contract killer) who also happens to be a police detective. The plan is that the money will go to Chris' sister Dottie. However due to the size of the contract fee, Chris agrees that Joe can take Dottie as a retainer until the insurance comes through.

  10. 10

    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.

What psychopath films are made of

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

  • blood3.0×
  • skin1.8×
  • streetlamp1.7×
  • neon sign1.6×
  • eyes1.6×
  • shadow1.6×
  • hair1.6×

How psychopath 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 psychopath from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 30%naturalvs 43% baseline
  • 31%dayvs 42% baseline
  • 54%low keyvs 40% baseline
  • 27%closeupvs 21% baseline
  • 56%nightvs 43% baseline

What breaks the pattern

White Heat (1949) 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 6,943 frames from 96 films carrying the psychopath 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/psychopath

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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