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Best Series of murders Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of series of murders cinema — measured across 2,029 indexed frames from 29 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Series of murders films over-index on blood, trench coat and door — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Friday the 13th (1980)

    Sean S. CunninghamDP Barry AbramsIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    In 1957, a young boy named Jason drowns in a lake near Camp Crystal Lake. The next year, two counselors are murdered. In 1980, a descendant of the original owners reopens Camp Crystal Lake with some counselors' help. The counselors gets killed one by one by a mysterious person. Could it be Jason, out for revenge?

  2. 2

    Jason Goes To Hell (1993)

    Adam MarcusDP Bill DillIMDb 4.1TMDB 4.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    The secret of Jason's evil is revealed. It is up to the last remaining descendant of the Voorhees family to stop Jason before he becomes immortal and unstoppable. This is the final (?) battle to end Jason's reign of terror forever.

  3. 3

    Tenebre (1982)

    Dario ArgentoDP Luciano TovoliIMDb 7.0TMDB 6.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    With Argento's trademark visual style, linked with one of his more coherent plots, Tenebrae follows a writer who arrives to Rome only to find somebody is using his novels as the inspiration (and, occasionally, the means) of committing murder. As the death toll mounts the police are ever baffled, and the writer becomes more closely linked to the case than is comfortable.

  4. 4

    The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

    Jonathan LiebesmanDP Lukas EttlinIMDb 5.8TMDB 6.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    In August, 1939, a worker goes into labor while working in a slaughterhouse and dies after a complicated labor, though the deformed child survives. The possibly orphaned baby is dumped in a garbage container and found by a beggar later, who brings him home. Along the years, the mentally retarded and disturbed boy called Thomas is raised by the Hewitt family in spite of having psychological problems as well as suffering from an unnamed skin disorder, later working in a meat packing plant. In July, 1969, when the facility is closed, the inhabitants move to other places, but the deformed, mentally childlike Thomas flies into a rage after being insulted and kills the foreman. His deranged brother (considered his uncle due to their age difference) executes the sheriff that is going to arrest Thomas, and assumes his identity, wearing his clothes,driving his car though the roads in Texas and entitling himself as Sheriff Hoyt. Meanwhile, the brothers Eric and Dean are traveling in a Jeep with their girlfriends Christie and Bailey, Eric to serve in Vietnam and Dean escaping to Mexico. When the group has a car accident, Hoyt arrests Eric, Dean and Bailey and brings them to his house. Christie follows them trying to rescue the trio, trapped in the house of sadistic and insane cannibals, in a trip of horror and gore.

  5. 5

    Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)

    Don CoscarelliDP Adam JaneiroIMDb 6.9TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Based on the Bram Stoker Award nominee short story by cult author Joe R. Lansdale, Bubba Ho-tep tells the "true" story of what really did become of Elvis Presley. We find Elvis (Bruce Campbell) as an elderly resident in an East Texas rest home, who switched identities with an Elvis impersonator years before his "death", then missed his chance to switch back. Elvis teams up with Jack (Ossie Davis), a fellow nursing home resident who thinks that he is actually President John F. Kennedy, and the two valiant old codgers sally forth to battle an evil Egyptian entity who has chosen their long-term care facility as his happy hunting grounds.

  6. 6

    Longlegs (2024)

    Osgood PerkinsDP Andres ArochiIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    FBI Agent Lee Harker is a gifted new recruit assigned to the unsolved case of an elusive serial killer. As the case takes complex turns, unearthing evidence of the occult, Harker discovers a personal connection to the merciless killer and must race against time to stop him before he claims the lives of another innocent family.

  7. 7

    The Dead Zone (1983)

    David CronenbergDP Mark IrwinIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher with his whole life ahead of him but, after leaving his fiancee's home one night, is involved in a car crash which leaves him in a coma for 5 years. When he wakes, he discovers he has an ability to see into the past, present and future life of anyone with whom he comes into physical contact.

  8. 8

    The Exorcist 3 (1990)

    William Peter BlattyDP Gerry FisherIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    A seemingly endless series of grisly killings that bear the trademark of the mass murderer, the Gemini Killer, terrorise the district of Georgetown. To further complicate matters, even though it's been seventeen long years since the killer's execution and that fateful night of pure terror in The Exorcist (1973), the sceptical police officer, Lieutenant William F. Kinderman, is still obsessed with solving the baffling case, as the death toll keeps rising. In the meantime, in the city's high-security psychiatric institution, a cryptic inmate who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Father Damien Karras emerges from his deep catatonic state, claiming that he has all the answers Kinderman needs. But, who is the mysterious Patient X? Does the same unholy force that tormented Regan MacNeil have something to do with the brutal demonic murders?

  9. 9

    House of Wax (2005)

    Jaume Collet-SerraDP Stephen F. WindonIMDb 5.5TMDB 6.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    Six friends are on their way to a football game. They decide to camp out for the night and continue driving the next day. The next day the friends find that they're having car troubles, so two of the friends accept a stranger's ride into a small town named Ambrose. The main attraction in Ambrose is the House of Wax. Except something is not right in this town, the wax figures are so realistic and the whole town is deserted - except for two murderous twin brothers. The six friends must fight to survive and escape from being the next exhibits in the House of Wax.

  10. 10

    Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

    Shane BlackDP Michael BarrettIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    A petty thief posing as an actor is brought to Los Angeles for an unlikely audition and finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation along with his high school dream girl and a detective who's been training him for his upcoming role...

What series of murders films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a series of murders 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.

  • blood3.5×
  • trench coat2.6×
  • door2.3×
  • fedora2.0×
  • plaid shirt1.9×
  • collared shirt1.8×
  • tree1.5×

How series of murders 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 series of murders from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 54%low keyvs 39% baseline
  • 55%nightvs 42% baseline
  • 34%dayvs 43% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Jason X (2001) 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 2,029 frames from 29 films carrying the series of murders label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 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/series-of-murders

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