The Boston Strangler movie poster

In 1968 came The Boston Strangler the first movie/documentary of the activities of a serial killer. From 1962 to 1964 Albert De Salvo terrorised Boston, raping and strangling 13 women in their homes, each time leaving his calling card in that he strangled his victims with their own stockings which he tied in the same knot every time. Unfortunately it was grossly inaccurate in the facts of the killings and to cast Tony Curtis as a multiple strangler when the world was still laughing at his hilarious antics in Some Like it Hot and The Great Race would have to be one of the worst bits of casting in the history of the movies.

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Also in 1968 came the much acclaimed No Way To Treat a Lady, a romantic black comedy with Rod Steiger as the serial killer strangler and George Segal as the cop on his trail.

It was the chilling 10 Rillington Place, the true story of the horrors perpetrated by the fiendish serial killer and necrophiliac John Christie in London in the early 50s, that had audiences fainting in the aisles in 1971. In 1972 it was Alfred Hitchcock again who thrilled us with Frenzy, the edge-of-the-seat drama about a man wrongly accused of the serial murders of young women in London. This time Alfred got right into serial killer mode and had the naked bodies turning up with a man's necktie wrapped around their necks, the signature of the Necktie Murderer. It is believed that Hitchcock got the necktie idea from the Boston Strangler case.

Also in 1972 Clint Eastwood was magnificent as Dirty Harry who was hot on the trail of a serial killer named Scorpio. This was the first in a string of excellent Dirty Harry Callahan serial killer movies such as Magnum Force, Sudden Impact, The Dead Pool and the thrilling Tightrope in which Eastwood breaks the Harry Callahan mould and plays the part of a New Orleans cop in search of a sex murderer. All of these films were action-packed and carried plausible story lines but none of them stood in the shadow of the original.

Badlands movie poster

It is worth noting here that while the 1974 movie Badlands is listed in some movie guides as a serial killer movie I would like to point out that in fact it is not. Admittedly the main character, Charlie Starkweather (Martin Sheen) and his girlfriend Caril Fugate, did kill 10 people in Nebraksa and Wyomng in 1959, but they were what is known as "spree killings" in that after he murdered his girlfriend's father he killed his other victims while he was on the run from the police. That is not serial murder.

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