DiCaprio reteaming with Scorsese for 19th century serial killer film

If you thought he was bad throwing dwarves around cocaine-fuelled Wall Street offices, or running plantations with tyrannical rule, Leonardo DiCaprio's latest baddie might just top the lot for villainy.

Variety reports that the actor is to re-team with Martin Scorsese for The Devil in the White City, in which he’ll be playing a prominent 19th century Chicago serial killer, who by the sounds of it is less 'Jack the Ripper' and more 'Hannibal Lecter meets Burke and Hare'.

Based on Erik Larson’s 2003 non-fiction book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic And Madness At The Fair That Changed America, DiCaprio plays Dr. HH Holmes, an ostensibly law-abiding hotelier who used scrupulous methods to murder anywhere between 27 to 200 people in the late 1800s. In the same period Chicago hosted the World’s Fair, the killer used charm and cunning to entice guests to his “murder castle”, so named due to the fact amenities included gas chamber, crematorium and a dissecting table on which Holmes would strip his victim’s skeletons to sell on for medical and scientific study.

It’s shaping up to be another big 12-18 months for DiCaprio, who will be hoping to finally snatch himself an Oscar having already wrapped on Birdman director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s The Revenant, and then of course has this, the sixth collaboration between the actor and Scorsese, in the pipeline.

De Niro, if you’re wondering, is still on eight. Will Leo catch him if he can? Only time will tell.