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Nos. 19-1 of the 36 Best Serial Killers of Cinema.

If you missed 36-20, check it out first.

19. Vincent Price as Professor Henry Jarrod in House of Wax (1953)

Left horribly disfigured after his disgruntled business partner burned down their wax museum, Professor Jarrod rebuilds his own museum and becomes the monster he looks, murdering his former comrade and numerous visitors, then encasing their bodies in wax for display. Plus, Jarrod is played by Vincent Price—always a plus if you’re an on-screen human hunter.

18. Faye Dunaway as Bonnie and Warren Beatty as Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

I wish I could observe, unflinchingly, that playing a killer is an effortless task. But I can’t. And I’ve seen many a slasher pic in my day. But I can definitely tell you this: Playing a person who’s lived a whole life in reality takes special acting talent, and playing real-life spree gunners can’t be much easier. But Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway make it look like cake. They play the notorious outlaws/cold killers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, and despite the lure with which they attach themselves to their cinematic audience, they leave no question as to whether they were ruthless in their crimes.

17. Malcom McDowell as Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971)

What are your plans for the evening? Any evening? My guess is that though they may fluctuate between few and many pending the night, they probably don’t include rape and murder. Well those are always swell options in Alex’s mind, and viewers of Kubrick’s classic adaptation of Peter Sturgess’ essential novel A Clockwork Orange will be shown the very happenings of Alex’s evenings, the first of which he and his “droogs” deem “a bit of the old ‘ultra violence’”. If he were to cross you on the street (especially at night and if you were homeless), he’d set you on fire—and it wouldn’t be his first time doing that to someone.

16. Benoît Poelvoorde as Benoît in Man Bites Dog (1992)

Benoît is the type of person you would have no problem befriending or believing he’s a mass murderer. He’s a charming man, very gentle in tone and polite by demeanor; he loves his mother. But he’s also…well, soft-spoken, polite, and charming. And if movies have told us anything, they’ve told us to be weary of men like him. And in this case, movies have been right to do so. Benoît indulges in rampant killing binges, and even begins filming them for a documentary.

15. Johnny Depp as Benjamin Barker/Sweeney Todd in Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Once a gentle, happy, reputable family man and town barber, Benjamin Barker is falsely accused of wretched crimes and locked away for what was supposed to be the remainder of his life. And perhaps his sentence lasted Benjamin until the end of his days, but borne from despair and seeking vengeance on Judge Turpin, Barker’s new guise, Sweeney Todd, would have his revenge, whether he had to slice his way through a full plate of barbershop patrons before taking it.

14. Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho (1960)

While he may have only killed twice during Hitchcock’s Psycho, all evidence suggests that Norman Bates has done more than his fair share over the years. If he’s willing to dress up in his dead mother’s clothing, don a wig for the viewer’s sake, and stab a woman he’s sexually aroused by to death, believing that he has a skilled murdering hand and is fairly deemed psychotic, as the film’s title suggests, should be a synch. And it is.

13. John Carroll Lynch as prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen in Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher’s Zodiac was a scrupulous cinematic exhibit of fact-based and –checked thrills. And being as the true Zodiac case never named a killer, neither did Fincher’s movie. But both the documented evidence of the actual case, transposed cleanly by Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt, and John Carrol Lynch’s immensely chilling performance as suspect number one, Arthur Leigh Allen, are enough to bid Allen some chief recognition as one of motion pictures’ greatest killers of all time. Lynch is so compatible in his role, so pristinely uncomforting, that he’s the most prominent memory I have of Fincher’s breathtaking case file epic. And there were as many suspects as there were mistakes in the film, so the aforementioned note is a complement of skyscraping degree.

12. Kevin Spacey as John Doe in Seven (1995)

Veteran actor Kevin Spacey has roughly 8 minutes of actual screen time in Seven. And as if those eight unnerving minutes weren’t enough to realize the monster of “John Doe” (trust me, they are), detectives Somerset and Mills, and the movie watchers, spend the first 126 minutes rummaging through the proof: the five tortured corpses of Doe’s victims are so grotesquely disquieting that a barf-bucket is almost a required accessory for viewing. And after the notion of his work falling to more affecting depths has completely fled, he provides one last act of awe-inspiring malevolence in an ending that consequentially is considered one of the most diabolical and clever since the conception of moving pictures.

11. Francis Dollarhyde, as played by Tom Noonan in Manhunter (1986) and Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon (2002)

Dollarhyde is not only a fleeting killer by habit, he’s a biter, too—and the teeth marks he leaves in his prey’s flesh have allowed him a second notable nickname: the “Tooth Fairy” (his first being the self-appointed “Great Red Dragon”). He’s likely a schizophrenic (he refers to two separate selves), he’s certainly a sociopath, and he’s additionally a cunning, well-bodied, intensely strong hunter of man and woman. And his character has been undertaken by both Tom Noonan and Ralph Fiennes, two tremendous role players with a knack for the macabre.

10. Michael Rooker as Henry in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986/1990)

The first ten minutes of John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer set in play the sinister atmosphere that only builds with each passing minute until its final frame: we see a man (Michael Rooker), immediately depicted as ill-mannered, pile food down his throat and subsequently stalk patrons at a local shopping center while blunt images of naked murder victims cut in frame times over. It is nothing short of heart-sinking, especially after considering that the film has just started and it won’t likely end happily. And it doesn’t. But it doesn’t need or want to. Henry is a movie about one’s psychological appetite for violence and death—and both McNaughton and Rooker make it an emphatic example of such.

9. Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000)

Patrick Bateman is a killer with a fortunate advantage over others in cinema: he’s the focal study in a socio-economical satire—and a damn good one, too. One of the more universally perverse individuals of ’90s pop entertainment, Bateman is obsessive-compulsive, very successful professionally, and hungry for all things sex and blood—and, in many cases, both simultaneously. Sure, that’s not unlike a few other characters from the ’90s, but only Bateman was played by Christian Bale.

8. Rutger Hauer as John Ryder in The Hitcher (1986)

It’s easier to think of a successful criminal—of any kind—as being a cunning, witty fellow or lady, for once his or her intentions are known, much more can go against his or her favor. John Ryder likely never considered this. And even if he had, he’d probably have discarded the information with apathy. While hitching a ride from a youthful twentysomething named Jim, Ryder frankly states that he plans to kill him. And though Jim manages to survive the hitcher, several other characters, including a pretty waiter named Nash, don’t (Nash is the victim of the infamous truck stop scene).

7. Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter (1955)

While in prison for boosting a car, Harry Powell, a misogynistic, road-jockeying preacher, shares a cell with a convicted bank robber named Ben, who refuses to tell Harry where he’d hidden the stolen money. After Ben’s execution and Harry’s release, the latter finds Ben’s family and eventually marries his widower—all for the sake of a prize. But that prize was entrusted only to Ben’s children, neither of whom divulges its whereabouts to Harry—and that doesn’t make him very happy. Powell, who’s impeccably portrayed by resonant creeper Robert Mitchum, is a paradoxical contradiction of life, love, and faith; and it’s evidenced in any number of visual symbols (the most notable being the words “Love” and “Hate” tattooed to the knuckles of each of Powell’s hands) in Charles Laughton’s masterful Night of the Hunter.

6. Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street series (1984-2003)

There’s nothing more terrifying than a child-eating murderer who lives and kills in one’s own nightmares. That’s why Freddy Krueger is a historic figure of fear in world cinema, because that’s his modus operandi.

5. Will Sandin as Michael Myers in Halloween (1978)

Michael Myers was born with a killer’s mind, a black soul. And after he murders his older teenage sister on Halloween night, at the regularly guiltless age of 6, his psychosis is realized as something severe and dangerous, and he’s institutionalized. But when he’s deemed evil by nature and behaviorally unchangeable, he’s set for transfer to a penitentiary. The vehicle never made it there.

Myers is iconic for many reasons, many of which are more a result of the genre themes that Halloween helped create, some of which have only to do with him—such as the fact that he’s virtually invincible and never runs. But despite all that, he is a stout killing machine. And the sum of both Michael’s murders and the Halloween films’ domestic grosses qualify him as a contender for Best Serial Killer in Cinematic History.

4. Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008)

The Joker is a terrorist of the scariest kind: one that actually seeks terror and chaos as opposed to ones who really seek profit or civic advancement. No laws bound him, and, to the great misfortune of all of Gotham, neither can their enforcers match wits with him.

3. Hannibal Lector, as played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal (2001), and Red Dragon (2002)

Hannibal the Cannibal is the only recurrent predator I’ve ever seen avert a specific pre-categorized psychological profile in film. And apparently he’s the only such killer the characters in the Lector film series have known of as well. Though Brian Cox was the first actor to test-drive Lector (he did so in ’86’s Manhunter), the character America and nations otherwise have come to acknowledge as iconically villainous is the version depicted by Sir Anthony Hopkins, whose performance as the maniac in The Silence of the Lambs earned him an Oscar and Lector the top spot on AFI’s list of movie history’s most memorable baddies.

2. Carl Boehm as Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom (1960)

Mark Lewis enjoys the act of killing. So much, in fact, that he videotapes his victims as they breathe their final breaths. And then he watches his recordings. His perversity is all-encompassing, too; not only subjected to murder, but also sexual abuse. Whether unfortunate or the consequence of Mark Lewis’ iconic status in film, Carl Boehm never had a better role.

1. Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert in M (1931)

There is perhaps no killer viler than one who hunts children. The Joker (#4), for example, has the audacity to blow up a hospital and threaten the lives of men, women, and children together on a ferry, but he seldom is physically present at the scenes of his murders. Hans Beckert, by comparison, is a serial pedophile that personally preys on the lives of children. He’s one of the ultimate despicable profiles in all of motion picture’s existence, and though it feels heretical to call him the “best” of anything, no other repeat killer in cinematic history has garnered such an emotional response.

Look for the next List feature on the week of September 7th. And if you keep your eyes open from now until then, I’ll throw a personal shout-out in the following column! Have a great weekend, ladies and gentlemen. Go see a movie that challenges your intellect, and feel free to post something on the comment board that challenges mine.