This chapter situates the American gothic in post-1960 cinema by exploring the modern serial killer film and its distinctly American lineage, borne of the success of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Landmark critical films are used to chart the seismic shifts American cinema has undergone in the post-classical period – from Psycho to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973), through to more recent invocations of serial killing in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), American Psycho (2000) and Dexter (2006–13). This chapter draws upon the popularity of the serial killer film, with careful consideration for the influence of significant real/reel American serial killers (such as Ed Gein and Ted Bundy), in order to argue that the figure of the serial killer is the embodiment of the counter-narrative American Dream: the consumerist and consumptiondriven American nightmare. Frequently co-opted into horror cinema, this nightmare, at its heart, owes a significant debt to the aesthetics and fundamental roots of American gothic, which typically features monsters, old dark houses, psychological fragmentation, hauntings, hidden histories, serial murder, sexual repression and dark desires. The serial killer film has thus become an overtly modern American contribution to the gothic in popular culture. Primarily focused on the cinematic narratives beyond the fantastical ciphers of classical literary monsters, this chapter draws from a distinct set of moments where the serial killer becomes central to the understanding of, and continued fascination with, consumerist nightmares, destructive individualism and psychotic fractures so central to the American gothic narrative today. Evidenced by the continuation of such serial killer narratives as Hannibal Lecter (and other cross-pollinated serial killer texts which attempt to emulate its enduring success), the reel serial killer is an exemplary conduit of the American Nightmare. The chapter concludes with a focused study of Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991), a landmark film that has garnered a prolific and celebrated afterlife across three decades of American gothic screen culture, through the continuation of Thomas Harris's series of ‘Hannibal Lecter’ novels, numerous film adaptations (1986–2007) and a television series, Hannibal (2013–15).