Serial Killers Behind Famous Horror Movies

Indexado: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Charles Cullen, the good nurse. In the early 2000s, patients began dying unexpectedly in hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. There was no clear pattern, nor was there an obvious cause, just a quiet, growing number of deaths.

[00:00:13]All connected by one thing, a nurse named Charles Cullen. There's a particular kind of horror in trusting someone completely. Not the monster under the bed, but the person holding your hand in a hospital room at 3:00 in the morning, checking your IV, telling you everything is going to be fine.

[00:00:28]Cullen graduated from nursing school in 1986. Two years later, he killed his first patient. What followed was a 16-year nursing career spanning 10 hospitals and nursing homes across New Jersey and Pennsylvania and a body count that may never be fully known. He confessed to 29 murders. Claimed he may have killed as many as 40. Some estimates put the true number closer to 400. 400 people. His method was almost impossibly simple. He injected lethal doses of medication directly into IV fluid bags. primarily deoxxin, insulin, and lidocaine. He would volunteer for overnight shifts when supervision was minimal. When suspicion mounted, he didn't run. He simply applied for a job at the next hospital and got it. One former supervisor's notes on Cullen read, "Would not consider rehire medication issue. Hospitals were happy to keep his activities quiet if he would simply resign." Some actively avoided investigators. The system didn't just fail to stop him, it helped him keep moving. He called himself an angel of mercy. He said he killed to end suffering, but not all of his victims were terminal. Some had been expected to recover. His own nurse colleague described many of them as people on the mend. The victims included a judge, a priest, a 21-year-old man whose mother told the court, "Instead of giving him presents, I get to put flowers on his grave." "What finally stopped him wasn't the hospitals. It was a nurse named Amy Lavvern, a single mother with a heart condition who worked alongside Cullen at Somerset Medical Center. When the police approached her, she was afraid, but instead of turning away, she wore a wire and gathered the evidence that brought him down. In 2006, Cullen was sentenced to 18 consecutive life sentences. His earliest possible parole date is June 2388.

[00:02:08]In 2022, Netflix released The Good Nurse, starring Eddie Redm as Cullen and Jessica Chastain as Amy Lauin. It is one of the most chilling things Netflix has put out, not because of gore or jump scares, but because of how ordinary Cullen appears, how likable and easy to trust. A companion documentary, Capturing the Killer Nurse, was released the same year, featuring interviews with Cullen himself, his co-workers, and the detectives who caught him. Cullen also happens to have influenced multiple episodes of Criminal Minds, where characters described as angel of death type killers share direct parallels with his profile, moving between locations, killing through overdose, and being identified through discrepancies in medication records. But here's what makes Cullen different from almost everyone else on this list. He wasn't hiding behind a mask. He wasn't performing charm or constructing a persona. By most accounts, he was genuinely kind. The co-workers who trusted him weren't wrong to trust him, at least not in the ways they knew him.

[00:03:06]In his mind, he probably thought he was doing his victims a favor. The good nurse persona was real, too. John Wayne Gay, Psycho, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.

[00:03:18]On the 16th of November, 1957, a hardware store owner disappears without a trace in Planefield, Wisconsin. Police follow the last known lead to a quiet farmhouse on the edge of town. Inside, they don't just find a body. They find a nightmare. Furniture made from human bones. Skulls turned into household items. A vest made from a female body.

[00:03:38]Torso complete with breasts. The man living there, Edgy. Edgy gave horror movies, something that would last. He gave them a blueprint. Edgy was a quiet, soft-spoken farmer from Planefield, Wisconsin. He helped neighbors. He babysat children. By all accounts, he was considered one of the most dependable babysitters in town. What nobody knew was what he kept at home.

[00:03:58]Gain had been digging up bodies from local cemeteries and using them to create what investigators could only describe as a shrine. He confessed to two murders, but the collection suggested the horror went far deeper.

[00:04:09]Psychologists pointed to his deeply controlling, fanatically religious mother, as his motivation, a woman who preached that all women except herself were instruments of the devil. When she died, Gynne was lost. And then he became something else entirely. Ed Gyn's crimes inspired three of the most influential horror films ever made. Psycho in 1960, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974, and The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. Alfred Hitchcock drew on Gyn's twisted obsession with his overbearing mother to craft Norman Bates, a seemingly mild-mannered man harboring a terrifying monster within, just as Gyn's warped devotion to his late mother drove him to madness. Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre was more direct. a killer who wears the skin of his victims, lives in an isolated rural home, and surrounds himself with furniture made from human remains. And then there's Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. According to FBI profiler John Douglas, Buffalo Bill's desire to kidnap, kill, and skin female victims to create a woman suit was drawn directly from what writer Thomas Harris knew about Gain. One man, three of cinema's most iconic monsters.

[00:05:15]Jeffrey Dmer, the Jeffrey Dmer story, 2022. On the 27th of May 1991, a 14-year-old Connorak Synths phone was found wandering the street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, naked, bleeding, disoriented.

[00:05:28]Bystanders call the police, but when officers arrive, a man calmly explains the situation. He says the boy is his boyfriend, drunk, nothing serious. The police believe him. They walk the boy back into the apartment. An hour later, he's dead. The man they trusted, Jeffrey Dawnmer. Between 1978 and 1991, Jeffrey Dmer murdered 17 people, mostly young men and boys, mostly gay, mostly men of color. He drugged them. He strangled them. He kept their skulls. He photographed their bodies. He attempted to perform labbotoies while his victims were still alive, and he ate them. Dmer was not a loner. He lived in an apartment building in Milwaukee. He had neighbors. He held down jobs, including, at one point, a position at a chocolate factory. His co-workers described him as quiet and unremarkable. The Dmer case exploded into pop culture almost immediately after his arrest and has never really left. In 2022, Netflix released Dmer Monster, the Jeffrey Dmer story, created by Ryan Murphy and starring Evan Peters. The show generated massive views and equally massive controversy with victims families publicly objecting to their loved ones being depicted without consent. What made Dmer so psychologically compelling to filmmakers wasn't just the horror of what he did. It was the question of how how does a person look this ordinary?

[00:06:44]How does someone smile, hold a job, speak calmly to police while a victim's body is dissolving in acid in the next room? That question has never been fully answered. And that's exactly why the cameras keep coming back. Ted Bundy, extremely wicked, shockingly evil, and vile. On the 15th of January, 1978, in the middle of the night, a man enters a sorority house at Tallahassee, Florida.

[00:07:07]Within minutes, two women are brutally attacked. The killer vanishes into the dark. Days later, he's arrested. Not hiding, not running, but driving a stolen car. His name Ted Bundy. If there is one name that changed how America understood the serial killer mindset, it is Theodore Robert Bundy. Before Bundy, the popular image of a murderer was someone obviously frightening, disheveled, threatening, someone you could spot coming. Bundy destroyed that assumption. He was handsome. He was charismatic. He was studying law. He volunteered at a suicide prevention hotline where he befriended a fellow volunteer named Anne Rule. Between 1974 and 1978, Bundy murdered at least 30 women across multiple states. Though the true number may be higher, his method was calculated and deeply cynical. He would approach women in public pretending to be injured, wearing a fake cast, using crutches, asking for help carrying something to his car. Once they were close enough, he struck. He escaped from police custody twice. At his trial in Florida, he conducted his own defense, flirted with the jury, received marriage proposals in the courtroom from women who found him attractive. When Judge Coward sentenced him to death, Coward told him he was a remarkable young man and that he wished circumstances were different. He was executed in January 1989. Bundy influenced the conception of Hannibal Lectar more indirectly. Thomas Harris had already introduced Lectar by 1981, but in 1984, Bundy himself offered to use his expertise to help investigators profile the Green River Killer, a dynamic that clearly resonated with Harris's vision of a killer consultant.

[00:08:37]Brett Eastston Ellis, author of American Psycho, told Rolling Stone that he read every book about Ted Bundy while writing the novel. Patrick Baitman, the charming, handsome, sociopathic Wall Street killer. At the center of that story is Bundy Filtered through 1980s excess. In 2019, Netflix released Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, starring Zack Efron as Bundy and Lily Collins as his longtime girlfriend.

[00:09:02]The film was deliberately shot to make Bundy appear likable. A choice that drew criticism, but also accurately captured why so many people refused to believe what he was. That's the most unsettling thing about Bundy, not the crimes themselves. Dennis Rder, Clove Hitch Killer. On the 15th of January 1974, a family of four was found murdered inside their home at 8003 Edgemore Street in Witchah. There was no sign of forced entry. No clear suspect, just a message sent later to the police. Three letters, BTK, bind, torture, kill. The man behind it, Dennis Rider. Of all the killers on this list, Raider may be the most quietly terrifying. Not because his crimes were the most numerous, not because his methods were the most extreme, but because of where he hid in plain sight. Dennis Rder was a married father of two, a Cub Scout leader, the president of his church council at Christ Lutheran Church in Witchah, Kansas, a compliance officer who issued citations to residents for code violations. Between 1974 and 1991, Raider murdered 10 people in the Witchah area. He planned his murders carefully, sometimes staking out victims for weeks in advance. He sent taunting letters to police and media, describing his crimes in elaborate detail, signing them with his self-appointed name. Then he stopped. For over a decade, BTK went quiet and the family man went to church.

[00:10:22]However, in 2004, bored by the lack of coverage of his case, he began sending letters again. He asked police whether a floppy disc could be traced. They told him no, but it could. DNA tests showed a genetic match that led investigators to Raider. He was arrested in February 2005 outside his Park City home. Officers asked if he knew why he was being taken in. He replied, "Oh, I have suspicions why." Stephen King has said his novella, A Good Marriage, was directly inspired by BTK, specifically by the central question of what it would mean to discover after decades of marriage that your spouse was a serial killer. Thomas Harris has said that Francis Dollarhide in Red Dragon was partially based on the then unidentified BTK killer, the character who sends taunting letters, who wants to be known even as he hides.

[00:11:08]The 2018 film The Clove Hitch Killer drew its central idea directly from Raider, a seemingly perfect family man whose teenage son slowly realizes who his father really is. Raider is currently serving 10 consecutive life sentences. He is 80 years old and still alive. The church he led, the family he built, the reputation he cultivated, all of it was real. All of it coexisted for three decades with everything else he was. That's what makes BTK different from the others on this list. Gayy performed as a clown. Gynne lived in isolation. Dmer barely left his apartment. Bundy relied on strangers.

[00:11:41]Raider was integrated, trusted by everyone around him. He didn't hide in the dark. He was a devoted Christian.

[00:11:47]John Wayne Gayy, American Horror Story.

[00:11:49]It in December 1978, police investigating the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Past step into a quiet suburban home in Norwood Park, Chicago, after neighbors complain about a strange smell. At first, it's dismissed. Mold, rats, or perhaps plumbing. But as officers dig beneath the house, they uncover something far worse. Bodies. Dozens of them. This wasn't just a crime scene. It was a graveyard. The man responsible, John Wayne Gay. He made kids laugh and adults fear him. But behind the red nose and painted smile, Gayy was one of America's most terrifying serial killers. And the movies, they barely scratched the surface of what he really did. Gayy wasn't just any criminal. He was a respected contractor, a community organizer, a man who threw neighborhood parties, had photos taken with political figures, and yes, dressed as a clown called Pogo to entertain children at birthday parties and hospitals. He called himself Pogo the clown. He developed the character himself, performed at charitable events, and by all accounts, the children loved him. So did the community, which is exactly how he got away with it for so long. Between 1972 and 1978, Gayy lured at least 33 young men and boys to his home in Norwood Park, Chicago. He would trick them, restrain them, assault them, and kill them. After his arrest, Gayy reportedly said, "Clowns can get away with murder." Now, you've heard of Pennywise, Stephen King's shape-shifting, child- hunting nightmare clown from the 1986 novel it later adapted into the 1990 miniseries with Tim Curry, then the blockbuster 2017 film with Bill Scarsgard. King has never explicitly confirmed that Gayy was the inspiration for Pennywise. He has said his own fear of clowns and the figure of Ronald Macdonald influenced the character's appearance. While Gayy was arrested in December 21st, 1978, 8 years before King wrote it, whether Gayy was a conscious influence remains unknown, but the matches are impossible to ignore. A clown who targets children. A community that doesn't see what's in front of them. A monster hiding behind face paint and a friendly smile. The stranger danger panic of the 1980s. powered in no small part by the Gayy case, spread through the cultural atmosphere in which King was writing. Did Gayy inspire Pennywise? King says no. But ask yourself, do you think the world's most famous killer clown being caught just 8 years before the world's most famous fictional killer clown is purely coincidental? American Horror Story referenced Gayy twice. First through a clown character named Twisty in Freak Show, clearly inspired by Gayy's character, and then by portraying Gayy himself in Hotel with John Carol Lynch playing the character in full clown makeup. Gayy was executed by lethal injection in May 1994. His last meal was fried chicken, shrimp, and strawberries.

[00:14:27]His last words remain disputed to this day. Some accounts say, "Kiss my ass."

[00:14:31]Others say he spoke about the state murdering him. Either way, not exactly remorseful. If you'd like to see more stories like this, make sure to subscribe and feel free to drop suggestions for the next video in the comments.