If you were to pick two major elements equally entrenched in the language of American cinema, “murder” and “wanting to win Oscars” take up a lot of cultural space. A voyeuristic, morbid fascination with the depravity of the human soul means our obsession with crime and horror evolves and regenerates from year to year; on the other hand, American cinematic craft has yet to extract itself from the pyramid of ambitions that enshrines those shiny gold trophies at the very top. But if we’re lucky, these polar opposite impulses converge, and actors fated to be blessed by the Academy channel their inner serial killers in much seedier, creepier performances than their prestigious Oscar-winning turn. As Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage marks a new turning point in his post-Mandy renaissance by playing a Pure Freak Energy killer in Oz Perkins’ Longlegs, we mapped out the full intersection of wickedness and winners.
Here are 20 movie serial killers ranked by how many Oscars their actor has:
16 – 20. Abby Brewster (Josephine Hull), Arsenic and Old Lace; The Alphabet Killer (Timothy Hutton), The Alphabet Killer; Georges (Jean Dujardin), Deerskin; Sully (Mark Rylance), Bones and All; Vilmer (Matthew McConaughey), The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre — 1 win each
We’re using this five-way tie to lay down some house rules. This list excludes biopics. The serial killers have to be fictional characters—yes, “the Alphabet killings” did take place in Rochester, but Richard Ledge, played by Timothy Hutton (Best Supporting Actor, Ordinary People), was not responsible or even real. It’s why Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning turn as Aileen Wuornos in Monster won’t be listed here—we want to highlight the unprestigious and pulpy only. In addition, because most Oscar-winning actors only have one or two trophies, other Oscar nominations are being used to distinguish between rankings—and Hutton, Josephine Hull (Best Supporting Actress, Harvey), Jean Dujardin (Best Actor, The Artist), Mark Rylance (Best Supporting Actor, Bridge of Spies), and Matthew McConaughey (Best Actor, Dallas Buyers Club) were only ever recognized for the film they won for. So far, none of these actors won an Oscar for their serial killer performance—for our money, the funniest of these is McConaughey in the Texas Chainsaw movie with the Illuminati.
15. Sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), The Killer Inside Me — 1 win, 1 nomination
Sandwiched between his first nomination and first win, Casey Affleck (Best Actor, Manchester by the Sea) played Lou Ford, a small-town Texas sheriff whose sexually sadistic crimes have til now been protected by a tight inner circle. Affleck’s reedy, cracking voice can pack a surprising menace and intensity, as we saw in that one Oppenheimer scene, but while he may have gotten Oscar gold for a visceral and vulnerable performance as a grieving widower, when it comes to pulling off Texan sleaze, he’s got nothing on the first actor to play Ford—character actor extraordinaire Stacy Keach.
14. Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), Longlegs — 1 win, 1 nomination
Nicolas Cage (Best Actor, Leaving Las Vegas) may have the same amount of wins and noms as Affleck, but we want to give extra credit to just how commanding his serial killer performance in Longlegs is. Clad in white powder and facial prosthetics, Longlegs has the presence of no identifiable human being, a patchwork corrupted entity that fuels a sickening mood central to Perkins’ film. Cage’s Oscar win bears mentioning whenever he taps into this type of energy—his turn as an alcoholic writer spiraling towards death in Las Vegas is a fairly good representation of the unconventional and swerving style of heightened performance that’s helped the actor make his name.
13. Christopher Gill (Rod Steiger), No Way to Treat a Lady — 1 win, 2 nominations
Rod Steiger (Best Actor, In the Heat of the Night) was one month away from winning his Oscar for his reaction to Mr Tibbs backhanding Endicott when he played a Broadway director who dons eclectic identities in order to kill older women who remind him of his mother in No Way to Treat a Lady. Maybe this strange and electric serial killer performance fueled Oscar votes, maybe it didn’t—all we know is that between wearing piss-yellow shades beside Sidney Poitier and doing blackly comic murders, it was a good time to be Rod Steiger.
12. Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain), Crimson Peak — 1 win, 2 nominations
Feeding off Gothic classics like Rebecca and Jane Eyre, but with none of their mannered literary restraint, Guillermo del Toro was on the money when he cast Jessica Chastain (Best Actress, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) as a conspiring and murderous baronetess with luscious gowns. Chastain won her Oscar some six years later for another heavily-costumed part, but in case you’ve spent the last couple years wondering what was missing from Michael Showalter’s competent televangelist biopic, it was a terrible Gothic secret like Chastain has in Crimson Peak.
11. Slade (Jack Palance), Man in the Attic — 1 win, 2 nominations
Do you know how many adaptations of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel The Lodger there are? Five. Do you know many of them have an Academy Award-winning actor play the titular serial killing tenant? Only this 1953 version, where Jack Palance (Best Supporting Actor, City Slickers) gets to swan his trademark suspicious villainy as a Jack the Ripper-style London butcher. Note to producers: If you want your Lodger adaptation to be associated with Oscar gold, change the title—or cast someone who once played second fiddle to Billy Crystal.
10. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), American Psycho — 1 win, 3 nominations
Potentially the definitive serial killer film of this century, Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ provocative depiction of the average Wall Street investment banker psyche is filled with abject and gruesome acts of murder, and jettisoned Christian Bale (Best Supporting Actor, The Fighter) towards Batman-related stardom. His commitment to Patrick Batemen’s entirely constructed persona and spurts of unfeeling violence is certainly more interesting than any of the performances he’d get Oscar fame for. Two David O. Russell and two Adam McKay films are a cursed combination.
9. Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones), Eyes of Laura Mars — 1 win, 3 nominations
Tommy Lee Jones (Best Supporting Actor, The Fugitive) sports an incredibly powerful monobrow as a police lieutenant serial killer whose perspective is uncontrollably hijacked by a fashion photographer, giving her POV visions of an unidentified killer. He’d later win an Oscar statuette for a far-more upright lawman chasing Richard Kimble. The lesson we can take from this is that Tommy Lee Jones’ Oscar nominations translate to wins in movies where he plays a cop and not movies named after an assassinated president (JFK, Lincoln). It’s unclear if having a monobrow or playing a serial killer got in the way of a Laura Mars nomination.
8. Claire Marrable (Geraldine Page), Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? — 1 win, 7 nominations
Geraldine Page (Best Actress, The Trip to Bountiful) racked up an impressive eight Oscar nominations across her career, only winning on the last one the year before she died. Some 15 years prior, she took a dip into the “psycho biddy” genre popularized by What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and played a con artist and murderer of housekeepers. The serial killer character Claire Marrable is much older than Page was at the time of filming (43) but it’s good to know that playing a demented older, female killer is more of a vibe-based thing than a strict numbers game.
7. Poetry Boy (Al Pacino), Righteous Kill — 1 win, 8 nominations
The only way Al Pacino (Best Actor, Scent of a Woman) could get onto this list was to star in one of the worst films of his career, which only exists because Pacino and De Niro didn’t think they’d share the screen in The Irishman some 10 years later. Spoilers for those who haven’t caught up with Righteous Kill, but the whole time the pair of detectives have been chasing a lyrical vigilante serial killer, Pacino’s cop has been the culprit. Just as this is the worst De Niro x Pacino collab, Pacino won a long overdue Oscar for the weakest film he’s been nominated for.
6. Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck), Deep Water — 2 wins
Ben Affleck (Best Original Screenplay, Good Will Hunting; Best Picture, Argo) had already won both of his Oscar trophies by the time he played a Patricia Highsmith husband who loves snails and murdering his wife’s hunky suitors. Maybe Deep Water could have used some of Affleck’s Oscar-winning talent, as this film is not well written, but we can’t deny that casting yourself and your current lover in an erotic thriller is big-brained producer stuff. Ben Affleck is the first of three serial killer actors on this list to have multiple Oscars, but none for acting. That’s right, we’re in the polymath zone.
5. John Doe (Kevin Spacey), Se7en — 2 wins
A big sigh of relief that Kevin Spacey (Best Supporting Actor, The Usual Suspects; Best Actor, American Beauty) did not place at the top of this list. Before he was accused of numerous counts of sexual assault and then inevitably embarked on a disingenuously wounded comeback trail, Kevin Spacey won Oscars for classic ‘90s movies that amass more detractors with each passing year. What has remained critically impervious is his turn as a depraved serial killer in David Fincher’s 1995 horror procedural, a film that took Silence of the Lambs’ ball and ran with it, giving a methodical and psychological thriller that none of the Lecter imitators could hold a candle to.
4. Mr. Brooks (Kevin Costner), Mr. Brooks — 2 wins, 1 nomination
Kevin Costner (Best Director and Best Picture, Dances with Wolves) may be on everybody’s mind these days thanks to Horizon, but back in 2007, everybody was on Kevin Costner’s mind! In Mr. Brooks, Costner played a respected businessman who is driven to homicide by Marshall, a malignant, Mr. Hyde-esque voice tormenting him, represented here by the late William Hurt. As Hurt has an Oscar himself (Best Actor, Kiss of the Spider Woman), he technically qualifies for this list too, but then we’d have to get into the messy technicalities of which of them is actually responsible for the murders, and no criminal psychologists were willing to lend their insight to this article once they heard the headline.
3. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), The Silence of the Lambs — 2 wins, 4 nominations
The only serial killer performance on this list that actually won an Oscar, the most iconic (but neither the first nor last) version of intellectual, cannibal and sadist Hannibal Lecter shot Anthony Hopkins (Best Actor, The Silence of the Lambs; Best Actor, The Father) to the horror hall of fame. His performance feels like the blueprint for how Hollywood would imagine psychopathy on film for the following decades, but few imitators could match just how unnerving that smooth drawl and unblinking stare is on the viewer—in no small part due to how director Jonathan Demme’s camera is so warily drawn to Lecter whenever he’s on screen.
2. Early Grayce (Brad Pitt), Kalifornia — 2 wins, 5 nominations
Yes, Brad Pitt (Best Picture, 12 Years a Slave; Best Supporting Actor, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) won his acting Oscar for a character who killed many people, including certified Stars of Tomorrow Austin Butler, Mikey Madison and Maya Hawke, but those don’t fit under the remit of a predatory night hunter, and are rather a queasily exaggerated and historically revisionist case of self-defense. But after the game-changing success of The Silence of the Lambs, the ‘90s went crazy for serial killer movies, and cast one of their rising talents as a hitchhiker with a nefarious hobby. It’s good to see that Brad Pitt was subverting his arresting on-screen charm with pulsating danger this early in his career, but it’s safe to say nobody has thought about Kalifornia since it made back a quarter of its budget at the box office.
1. Henri Verdoux (Charlie Chaplin), Monsieur Verdoux — 3 wins, 7 nominations
Charlie Chaplin (Honorary Award, The Circus; Best Music, Limelight; Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award) coming out of nowhere with the triple statuettes! As non-competitive Oscars still count as Oscars, we’re letting Chaplin take top place—you may have known he had a lot of Oscars, but I bet you didn’t know he’s also played a serial killer. His 1947 black comedy Monsieur Verdoux (with a story by Orson Welles?!) cast him as a bigamist wife killer based on the infamous “Bluebeard of Gambais” murderer in WWI-era France, and Chaplin’s character makes clear the hypocrisy of warmongering empires being permitted to carry out mass murder while his comparatively paltry number of victims lands him an execution. I mean, sure, but we still gotta convict people of murder, buddy.
Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.
