It was late 2010. A cold wind was whipping off the Atlantic, biting into the dunes of Gilgo Beach. Police weren't even looking for a serial killer back then; they were looking for Shannan Gilbert, a young woman who had vanished into the marsh after a terrifying, 23-minute 911 call. What they found instead changed Long Island forever. They found four bodies wrapped in burlap. Then they found more.
The story is so haunting it was bound to become Hollywood fodder. Honestly, the Long Island serial killer movie landscape is a bit of a mess because the case stayed cold for so long. For thirteen years, we had movies and documentaries guessing at a ghost. Then, in July 2023, everything flipped. Rex Heuermann, a Manhattan architect who lived a seemingly boring life in Massapequa Park, was arrested.
Suddenly, the old movies felt like unfinished chapters.
Lost Girls and the Problem with True Crime Dramas
If you’ve searched for a Long Island serial killer movie, you’ve definitely seen Lost Girls on Netflix. It dropped in 2020. Amy Ryan plays Mari Gilbert, and she is phenomenal. She captures that raw, desperate, "I will burn this police station down if you don't listen to me" energy perfectly.
But here is the thing: Lost Girls isn't really about the killer.
It’s about the systemic failure. It’s about how the Suffolk County Police Department, led at the time by the now-disgraced James Burke, basically shrugged off these women because they were sex workers. The movie focuses on the "Gilgo Four"—Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthélemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello.
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Director Liz Garbus made a choice to center the families. It was a good choice. However, if you're watching it in 2026, it feels weirdly incomplete because it ends with the mystery still wide open. We didn't know about the pizza crust DNA yet. We didn't know about the green Chevrolet Avalanche or the burner phones used from Midtown Manhattan.
What the Script Got Right (and Wrong)
The film is based on Robert Kolker’s incredible book. It gets the geography right—that desolate, scrubby stretch of Ocean Parkway. It gets the frustration right. But it leans heavily into the theory that Dr. Peter Hackett or Joseph Brewer were the "bad guys." While their behavior was certainly strange, they weren't the monster under the bed. The real monster was a guy taking the Long Island Rail Road to work every day in a suit.
The 2025/2026 Shift: Gone Girls and House of Secrets
Since the arrest of Rex Heuermann, the "movie" version of this story has shifted into high-gear documentary filmmaking. Reality became scarier than the scripts.
In March 2025, Liz Garbus actually returned to the subject with a three-part Netflix docuseries called Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer. It’s basically the updated, non-fiction sequel to her 2020 movie. It actually ranked third on Netflix during its release week because people were dying to see the new evidence.
Then you have the Peacock special, The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, which dropped in June 2025. This one is produced by 50 Cent, which sounds like a weird pairing until you watch it. It’s visceral. They actually went inside the Heuermann house. Seeing the "vault" where he kept his hundreds of firearms and the cramped, cluttered rooms where he lived with his family is chilling. It makes the 2013 horror-style movies look like cartoons.
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Why the 2013 "Gilgo Beach Murders" Movie is Best Avoided
There is an older film from 2013 simply titled The Long Island Serial Killer (sometimes called The Gilgo Beach Murders).
Don't bother.
It was made way too early. It's an indie "true crime horror" flick that tries to turn a tragedy into a slasher movie. It was filmed in ten days. It focuses on a fictional college student who starts escorting and runs into the killer. Honestly, it feels exploitative and misses the entire point of why this case matters. It doesn't have the nuance of the later productions. It doesn't understand the corruption in the Suffolk County PD that allowed the killer to keep hunting for a decade.
The Rex Heuermann Factor
The "Long Island serial killer movie" everyone is waiting for doesn't exist yet—not in a scripted sense.
There are rumors that a major studio is eyeing a prestige miniseries about the investigation, focusing specifically on the "Task Force" that finally used hair-braid DNA and cell tower pings to catch him. But there's a hurdle. The trial is still the main event.
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In 2026, the real-life courtroom drama is more compelling than anything a screenwriter could cook up. We’re hearing about:
- The Pizza Box: The DNA from a discarded crust in a Manhattan trash can.
- The Wife’s Hair: How his wife’s hair was found on the burlap, likely transferred from his clothes while she was out of town.
- The Computer Searches: His alleged searches for "sadistic materials" and updates on the Gilgo investigation itself.
Actionable Insights for True Crime Viewers
If you’re looking to dive into this case through film, don't just pick the first thing on your streaming menu.
- Watch "Lost Girls" (2020) first. It sets the emotional stakes. It makes you care about the women as humans, not just "victims."
- Follow it with "Gone Girls" (2025) on Netflix. This bridges the gap between the mystery and the arrest of Rex Heuermann.
- Check out the 48 Hours specials. Their reporting on the "Architect of Death" is technically more accurate than any dramatized movie.
- Read the court filings. If you really want the truth, the bail application for Heuermann is 32 pages of the most terrifying "movie script" you’ll ever read.
The story of the Long Island serial killer is still being written in a Riverhead courtroom. No movie can capture the full scope of it until the final verdict is read. For now, stick to the documentaries that respect the victims' families rather than the early 2010s films that tried to turn a nightmare into a cheap thrill.
Keep an eye on Prime Video as well. Their upcoming docuseries Killing Grounds is promising unprecedented access to the 2025-2026 trial proceedings, which will likely be the definitive visual record of how a monster was finally taken down.