Cinema has gone back to real killers since the early days of sound, and the better films about them have usually been less interested in the killer than in the society around him. Eight European, Iranian and Australian cases, each of which produced a feature film, show how far that habit can run. Some of the films follow court records closely. Some invent a central character. One was made from the transcript of a psychiatric examination, and one rests on a legend that historians have taken apart. Each case begins with what the courts decided and then turns to the film and what it did with the record.
Peter Kürten was born on May 26, 1883, in Mülheim am Rhein, now part of Cologne. Britannica, in an entry by the historian Philip Jenkins, describes him as the third of 13 children and says that by his last arrest he had been sentenced to prison nearly 30 times. The legal historian Martin Rath, writing in Legal Tribune Online, records that the first killing for which Kürten was convicted took place in Mülheim in 1913, when the victim was a girl of nine. It would have stayed unsolved, Rath writes, without the detailed confession Kürten made 17 years afterward.
The Düsseldorf series came in 1929. Between February of that year and May 1930 there were more than twenty attempted and at least eight completed killings, mainly in Düsseldorf, and no one could say who was responsible. Berlin sent help. Ernst Gennat, a leading detective of the Berlin criminal police, supported the Düsseldorf officers and, according to Rath, coined the German word Serienmörder, serial murderer, in connection with the case. More than a hundred clairvoyants offered their services to the police, and the critic A. A. Friedländer reported in 1931 that every one of them had failed.
Kürten was arrested in 1930. A woman who had survived the series led investigators to him, the German Press Agency reported in 2023, and he had confessed to his wife. Experts, among them the forensic physician Karl Berg, examined him and judged him fully responsible for his acts. The trial before the jury court at the Düsseldorf regional court ran from April 13 to 22, 1931, and drew national attention; Britannica says he sat in a specially built cage. On April 22 the court convicted him of murder in nine cases and attempted murder in seven. It imposed the death penalty for each murder and a combined term of 15 years' penal servitude for the attempts. The court left out two earlier killings he claimed as a boy in 1893, because the criminal code of the German Reich set responsibility at the age of twelve and nothing could be proved. He was executed at Cologne on July 2, 1931.
In 2023 a file thought lost, that of the investigating judge Carl Hertel, came to light and was added to the 223 court files already held by the state archive of North Rhine-Westphalia. Letters in it, the press agency reported, suggest that Kürten did not expect to be executed.
Fritz Lang’s M was released in 1931. TCM’s account of the film says Lang and his wife and collaborator Thea von Harbou "decided that the most horrible crime was that of a child murderer," and that Lang, who had contacts in the police and met several real offenders while preparing the picture, drew his greatest inspiration from the man then terrorizing Düsseldorf. The man in the film is not Kürten. He is an invented figure named Hans Beckert, played by Peter Lorre, whom TCM calls a complete unknown at the time. The film takes its subject from the Düsseldorf years and its argument from Lang’s own interests: the city’s fear, the pressure on the police and the question of who has the right to judge. Kürten’s real trial, with its psychiatric experts and its finding of full responsibility, was a more orderly business than anything in the picture.
Fritz Haarmann was born in Hanover on October 25, 1879. From 1918 he worked as an informer for the Hanover criminal police, who, according to the state archive of Lower Saxony, pressed him into the work; the archive says this was why earlier suspicions against him were not pursued and why reports from families were handled only after long delays.
The killings came to light in 1924. Haarmann was arrested in Hanover on June 22, 1924, and was tried with his former companion Hans Grans before the jury court at the Hanover regional court. The trial lasted 14 hearing days and ended on December 19, 1924. Haarmann was charged with 27 murders. The court convicted him of 24, victims aged 10 to 22 according to the state archive’s list, and acquitted him of three, Hermann Wolf, Adolf Hennies and Hermann Bock, on the ground that guilt was not proved. He was sentenced to death 24 times, accepted the verdict and was executed in Hanover on April 15, 1925. Grans was sentenced to death in 1924. After a retrial in 1926 he received 12 years' penitentiary for aiding two murders, and he was released in January 1946.
The case raised questions the verdict did not settle: how many people Haarmann had killed, why the police had let years of warnings go unanswered, and how far he was legally responsible.
Romuald Karmakar’s Der Totmacher, released in 1995, takes the last question and builds the whole film on it. According to the German film institute’s record and the European Film Academy, it is based on the stenographic transcripts of conversations recorded during six weeks of psychiatric examination in August 1924 at the provincial asylum in Göttingen. The action never leaves the examining room. Götz George plays Haarmann and Jürgen Hentsch plays the psychiatrist, Ernst Schultze. The film competed at Venice in 1995, where George won the Coppa Volpi for best actor, and took the German Filmband in Gold for best film and best direction. It is the most restrained film in this group. It shows nothing of the crimes and relies on the text of what a man said when he was asked to account for himself.
Fritz Honka was a night watchman in Hamburg who spent his free evenings in the bars of St. Pauli. Between December 1970 and January 1975 he killed four women, Gertraud Bräuer, Anna Beuschel, Frieda Roblick and Ruth Schult. The deaths came to light in Hamburg on July 17, 1975, and Honka was arrested that day; he confessed on July 29. On December 20, 1976, the Hamburg regional court convicted him of murder in one case and manslaughter (Totschlag) in three, held that his criminal responsibility was diminished, and sentenced him to 15 years with committal to a psychiatric hospital. He was released from psychiatric care in 1993 and died in October 1998, aged 63.
For decades the case was remembered for its setting. Since 2025 the Hamburg historian Frauke Steinhäuser, working from police files in the Hamburg State Archive and from records of the Nazi camp system, has reconstructed the women’s lives, and a memorial stone with their names stands in Ohlsdorf Cemetery. Beuschel, born in 1919 in Aschersleben, was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1942 after the Nazi authorities classed her as "asocial", and she survived the camps. Roblick, born in 1917, also survived them, and after the war the criminal police went on classing her as a "professional and habitual criminal", a label Steinhäuser describes as a continuation of Nazi categories. None of this is in the film.
Fatih Akin’s Der Goldene Handschuh, released in 2019, adapts the 2016 novel of the same name by Heinz Strunk. It had its premiere on February 9, 2019, in competition at the Berlin festival and opened in German cinemas on February 21. The film recreates the St. Pauli bar of the title and the 1970s Hamburg around it, with Jonas Dassler, heavily made up, in the lead. Reviewers disagreed about it. Anna Franklin of Film New Europe called it unremittingly dark, praised the production design and thought it lacked the humor and irony of Akin’s earlier work. Brigitte Häring of Swiss broadcaster SRF judged it carefully made but repellent, and her main complaint concerned the women: they stay nameless and without individual identity, she wrote, reduced to types, and she pointed out that Honka told the real trial he was drawn to older women while the film gives him an invented young blonde to fantasize about. By Häring’s account the contempt for the victims comes from the film itself and not only from its subject. The names on the memorial stone answer that complaint more directly than any review.
Andrei Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936, in a village in the Sumy region of Soviet Ukraine. He trained as a teacher and later worked as a supply agent for factories in the Rostov region of southern Russia, a job that kept him traveling by rail. Between 1978 and 1990 he killed children, teenagers and young women, most of them near the rail and bus routes linking Shakhty, Novoshakhtinsk, Novocherkassk and Rostov-on-Don. He was arrested in Novocherkassk on November 20, 1990. The trial before the Rostov Regional Court opened on April 14, 1992. He was charged with 53 murders and convicted of 52 on October 15, 1992, and sentenced to death. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia removed nine murder episodes from the verdict for insufficient evidence and upheld the sentence, so 43 murders stand as legally proven. President Boris Yeltsin refused clemency, and Chikatilo was executed at Novocherkassk on February 14, 1994.
The hunt is the part of the case that other countries remember. A man named Aleksandr Kravchenko was convicted of the first killing Chikatilo later confessed to, the death of Yelena Zakotnova, aged nine, in Shakhty in December 1978. Kravchenko was executed on July 5, 1983, and his conviction was overturned in 1990. Chikatilo’s confession to the same killing was included in his own conviction in 1992, and the Supreme Court removed it from the verdict a year later for insufficient evidence; as a result no one now stands convicted of it. In 1984 police detained Chikatilo as a suspect and released him because a laboratory result appeared to clear him. Young men with intellectual disabilities confessed under pressure to killings they had not committed. The investigation checked hundreds of thousands of people before he was arrested.
Citizen X, written and directed by Chris Gerolmo and broadcast by HBO in 1995, is based on Robert Cullen’s book The Killer Department. Variety’s reviewer described it as a compelling, fact-based account of an eight-year hunt in which a small group of investigators, led by a forensic specialist played by Stephen Rea with Donald Sutherland as his superior, are rebuffed by officials who deny that such a killer can exist. Jeffrey DeMunn plays Chikatilo. The reviewer praised the film for handling its subject without exploiting it and faulted a script that tells where it should show. The film is a drama about a bureaucracy. Its subject is the institutional failure that let a man go free, and it compresses a case that took more than a decade and involved many officers into the work of a few.
Mothers who handed their babies to Dagmar Overbye paid her about 200 kroner, The Copenhagen Post reported, roughly a year’s wages for a live-in servant.
The case came to the police in 1920 after the mother of a baby girl went to them. Overbye was arrested in Copenhagen. She confessed to killing that child and then to a long series of others. She confessed to as many as 16, and later writers suspect 20 to 25 or more, none of which a court tested. She was convicted of killing nine infants and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she died in prison in 1929.
Magnus von Horn’s Pigen med nålen, The Girl with the Needle, premiered in competition at Cannes on May 15, 2024. Von Horn told Nordisk Film and TV Fond that he did not want a conventional biography. His central character, Karoline, a young factory worker played by Vic Carmen Sonne, is invented, and Trine Dyrholm plays Overbye. He and his co-writer, Line Langebek, set the story in postwar Copenhagen and shot it in black and white, mostly in Poland. He described the crimes as "an answer to a call from society." Catherine Wheatley of Sight and Sound, calling it loosely adapted from the real case, saw in its angled compositions the influence of German expressionism and thought of Murnau, Wiene and Lang. Of the eight films here it is the one furthest from the documentary record and closest to the social argument the Danish public had in 1921.
Enriqueta Martí was arrested in Barcelona on February 27, 1912, after a five-year-old girl who had been the subject of a two-week public alarm was recovered alive in her keeping. She was held for trial over the abduction of that child and died in the Reina Amalia women’s prison on May 12, 1913, without being tried. Within days of her arrest the city’s newspapers had built a legend around her of child murder and of remedies sold to rich clients. According to elDiario.es, the Barcelona papers gave the case up to four pages a day.
The historians who went back to the newspapers and court files, among them Jordi Corominas and Elsa Plaza, identified no evidence that she had killed anyone. The material seized in the case did not support the accusations, according to elDiario.es and betevé. Barcelona Metropolitan reports that her death certificate gives uterine cancer as the cause, and that the story of her being beaten to death by other prisoners is treated by historians as legend. Patricia Melgar, reviewing Plaza’s 2014 book on the 1912 case, records that Plaza located a court register for 1912 listing 236 cases of ill-treatment, abduction and disappearance of minors, and reads the Martí affair as a distraction from them. The one act the record supports is the abduction of one girl. Everything else is allegation.
Lluís Danés’s La vampira de Barcelona was released in Catalan cinemas on December 4, 2020, after its world premiere at the Sitges festival, where it won the audience prize. Nora Navas plays Martí. Its protagonist is a fictional journalist, Sebastià Comas, who investigates the blame placed on her and finds an elite willing to protect its own. Danés told Catalan News that Martí was "not a saint" but a scapegoat, and that fake news existed in 1912 as it does now; he described a world between Tim Burton and Dickens. The film is a period thriller that sides with the woman the city condemned. It has since won Gaudí Awards and the best special effects prize at Manchester’s Grimmfest. It argues against the legend while retelling it.
Saeed Hanaei was a construction worker in Mashhad, the shrine city in northeastern Iran, married with three children. Between 2000 and the summer of 2001 women of the city were killed one after another. Police arrested him on July 25, 2001. Hanaei told reporters that he had acted "for the sake of God and for the protection of my religion," according to the Deseret News.
What made the case known beyond Iran was the response. The head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, said the killer would not have been provoked had the country’s moral laws been enforced. Hanaei’s defense rested on the claim that the women’s blood could lawfully be shed, a rule under which a person who kills someone deemed to merit death is not treated as a murderer. The trial judge, Gholamreza Mansouri, rejected it. Hanaei was sentenced to death. He was executed in Mashhad in April 2002.
Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, which competed at Cannes in 2022, is the least comfortable film in the group. Abbasi, who co-wrote it with Afshin Kamran Bahrami, could not shoot in Mashhad. The Hollywood Reporter notes that it was made in Amman, Jordan, and Abbasi told TheWrap that his approach to the Ministry of Culture, including an offer to cut explicit material, did not win permission. Mehdi Bajestani plays Hanaei. Zar Amir Ebrahimi plays a Tehran journalist who comes to the city to cover the case; she is an invented character, Kurt Loder wrote in Reason, and her performance won the best actress prize at Cannes. Abbasi has said the film is not a true crime story. He wanted a noir about what he calls a "serial killer society," in which a devout man can confess and still be celebrated as a hero, and he says the violence is explicit on purpose. The Hollywood Reporter’s critic called it far from subtle filmmaking and thought a central trap strained credulity. Ebrahimi has received death threats, according to TheWrap, and the film has not been released in Iran.
John Justin Bunting led a small group in Adelaide’s northern suburbs that killed at least 11 people between August 1992 and May 1999. He justified the killings with accusations against the victims that an ABC report on the families found mostly baseless, and the group collected about $95,000 in welfare payments in their names. Most of the victims were relatives, friends, partners or neighbors of the men who killed them. South Australia Police said the group "preyed on itself." The deaths came to light at Snowtown, a farming town about 140 kilometers north of Adelaide, in May 1999. Most of the killings took place elsewhere, a point residents made when the film was announced.
A jury in the Supreme Court of South Australia convicted Bunting of 11 murders on September 8, 2003. He was charged with 12; the jury could not agree on the twelfth, the death of Suzanne Allen, and prosecutors did not seek a retrial. On October 29, 2003, Justice Brian Martin sentenced him to life imprisonment and declined to set a non-parole period. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal on May 24, 2005. Robert Joe Wagner was convicted of 10 murders. James Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four and gave evidence for the prosecution; AAP reported his release on parole on October 8, 2026. Mark Haydon, whose wife was among the dead, was not convicted of any murder but of seven counts of assisting offenders. As of news reports to October 8, 2026, Bunting remains in prison in South Australia.
Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival in February 2011. Some relatives of the victims asked that it not be made and complained to South Australia’s Commissioner for Victims' Rights, Michael O’Connell, who asked for a private screening for the families and said he had been assured the film "isn’t a body count." The film concentrates on Bunting’s hold over a young man in his circle and does not set out the murders one by one. It is the case in this group in which the relatives' wishes were most openly at odds with the filmmakers, and Kurzel and his producers, the ABC reported, avoided publicity.
Set side by side, the eight films fall into groups. M turned a German case into an argument about justice and kept its offender fictional. Der Totmacher used a psychiatric transcript and nothing else. Citizen X and The Girl with the Needle compressed or invented people to carry a case about institutions. La vampira de Barcelona and Holy Spider added fictional journalists to cases whose public meaning was larger than their evidence. The Golden Glove and Snowtown stayed closest to the killers, and drew the sharpest objections from a critic and from relatives.
The convictions range from one murder and three manslaughters in Hamburg to 52 murders in Rostov, later cut to 43, and one subject was never tried at all. The courtroom cases left names, dates and exact wording, and the films departed from them in different degrees. In the Martí case the record is mostly absence, and the film is the only place where the legend and its answer meet.
• 1883: Peter Kürten born in Mülheim am Rhein.
• 1912: Enriqueta Martí arrested in Barcelona on February 27.
• 1913: Martí dies in prison on May 12, untried.
• 1918: Fritz Haarmann begins work as a police informer in Hanover.
• 1921: Overbye convicted and sentenced to death; the sentence is commuted to life imprisonment.
• 1924: Haarmann arrested on June 22, convicted of 24 murders on December 19.
• 1925: Haarmann executed on April 15.
• 1929: Overbye dies in prison.
• 1931: Kürten convicted on April 22 and executed on July 2; Lang’s M released.
• 1970 to 1975: Fritz Honka kills four women in Hamburg; arrested July 17, 1975.
• 1976: Honka convicted on December 20.
• 1978 to 1990: Andrei Chikatilo’s killings in the Rostov region; arrested November 20, 1990.
• 1992 to 1999: John Bunting’s group kills at least 11 people; the case comes to light at Snowtown in May 1999.
• 1992: Chikatilo convicted of 52 murders on October 15.
• 1993: Supreme Court of Russia reduces Chikatilo’s convictions to 43.
• 1994: Chikatilo executed on February 14.
• 1995: Der Totmacher and Citizen X released.
• 2001: Saeed Hanaei arrested in Mashhad on July 25.
• 2002: Hanaei executed in April.
• 2003: Bunting convicted of 11 murders on September 8; no non-parole period on October 29.
• 2011: Snowtown premieres in Adelaide.
• 2019: The Golden Glove premieres in Berlin on February 9.
• 2020: La vampira de Barcelona released in December.
• 2022: Holy Spider competes at Cannes.
• 2024: The Girl with the Needle premieres at Cannes on May 15.
• 2026: James Vlassakis released on parole, October 8.