Yahoo News 8 actors who were TERRIFYING as real serial killers
The role of a lifetime or a harrowing nightmare? Playing a serial killer has got to be one tough job for an actor, but plenty of them seem keen to sign up for it.
The latest to jump on the mass-murderer train is Zac Efron, who'll be playing notorious killer Ted Bundy in the upcoming biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.
Here are eight actors who went before him – and the notorious serial killers whose stories they told to uncomfortably chilling effect.
1. Jeremy Renner as Jeffrey Dahmer
Before he was Hawkeye in The Avengers, Renner played one of the most notorious killers in history. Dahmer killed, raped and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, indulging in cannibalism and necrophilia, too.
The film runs dual timelines, focusing on Dahmer's troubled childhood intercut with scenes of dismemberment. Captain America would definitely not approve.
2. Richard Attenborough as John Reginald Christie
Attenborough is suitably creepy and menacing in acclaimed biopic 10 Rillington Place, named after the dingy house in Notting Hill where Christie lived and killed his victims – before stashing the bodies in the walls.
Christie murdered eight people in the 1940s and early '50s, including his wife. Two more of his victims were Beryl Evans and her baby daughter Geraldine, tenants of Christie's. At the time these deaths were pinned on Beryl's husband, Timothy, who was hanged for the crimes.
3. Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos
One of the most famous female serial killers in the world, Aileen Wuornos shot and killed seven men between 1989 and 1990. That said, Wuornos had a particularly hideous background – she says all of her victims raped or attempted to rape her – and, as serial killer movies go, Monster is pretty sympathetic.
Charlize Theron won an Oscar for her incredible, transformative portrayal of Wuornos in Patty Jenkins' film, focusing on her fictionalised relationship with her girlfriend Selby, played by Christina Ricci and based on Wuornos's real-life lover Tyria.
4. Mark Harmon as Ted Bundy
Double Bundy! Yes, Efron's effort is not the first time Hollywood has tackled the now-executed killer who murdered at least 30 women in seven states over four years in the '70s.
Bundy is notorious for being the good-looking, charming serial killer, and Mark Harmon (who's now best know for NCIS) nails the look and demeanour effectively in the so-so TV movie The Deliberate Stranger.
5. Brian Dennehy as John Wayne Gacy
If you think clowns are scary, you should see default '80s grizzled cop Brian Dennehy as John Wayne Gacy, the killer who used to dress up as Pogo the Clown to entertain local kids when he wasn't busy raping and murdering 33 young men between 1972 and 1978.
Gacy was a father of two and a well-known businessman and member of the community. Dennehy's TV movie To Catch a Killer focused on the cat and mouse chase between Gacy and the police, who were struggling to find enough evidence to nail him.
Until they found 29 bodies buried throughout his property, that was...
6. Michael Rooker as Henry Lee Lucas
Henry Lee Lucas was a drifter who confessed to killing 600 people and was convicted of killing 157. Although it's largely believed that most of these confessions weren't true, Lucas did kill at least three people.
John McNaughton's seminal horror Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer fictionalises Lucas's story, focusing on a spell where he lived with prison buddy Ottis Toole and Toole's niece.
While only loosely based on the truth, Henry scored wide acclaim among critics for Michael Rooker's performance, way before his Guardians of the Galaxy turn, as a psychopath who seemingly kills completely without conscience. Chilling.
7. Tony Curtis as Albert DeSalvo
The Boston Strangler is the name given to the murderer (or murderers?) of 13 women in Boston in the early '60s. Richard Fleischer's 1968 movie of the same name is a crime thriller starring Tony Curtis – who scooped a Golden Globe nom for his troubles – as DeSalvo, a man with split-personality disorder who confessed to the crimes.
In real life, theories suggesting DeSalvo wasn't responsible for all the murders – that there was more than one strangler, in fact – have been mooted, though DNA evidence in 2013 linked DeSalvo to one of the cases previously in doubt.
8. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen as Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather
Terence Malick's debut feature Badlands was a loose telling of the real-life case of teenage killers Fugate and her older boyfriend Starkweather.
Starkweather killed Fugate's family and the two went on a killing spree across the US. Malick's film is narrated by Spacek and uses a dream-like, fairy-tale quality against the cold violence of Sheen's James Dean-cool Kit Carruthers.
These days it's rightly considered a masterpiece.
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