City in Fear is a 1980 American made-for-television drama film directed by Jud Taylor, under the pseudonym Alan Smithee, and written by Peter Masterson based on a story by Albert Ruben.

The film, starring David Janssen (in one of his final roles), Robert Vaughn, Mickey Rourke, Susan Sullivan and Perry King, follows a newspaper's attempts to sensationalize the killing spree of a psychopath.

Meanwhile, the killer is revealed to the viewers to be a dangerously disturbed grocery store employee, named Tony Pate, who is one of several suspects that LAPD detectives John Armstrong and Raymond Zavala, are investigating.

Part of the plot is loosely based on the Son of Sam murders and shows a deep insight into how newspapers and television news will go to extreme lengths to sell papers in order to exploit a time of a local crisis.

Goldman got the idea when he came home one afternoon to find that his daughter, then about twelve, had tried to dye her hair because the real life serial killer, Son Of Sam, was said to be killing dark-haired women.