Era of the killer: Why Hollywood is captivated by true crime
In the year that marks the 50th anniversary of the Charles Manson murders and 30 years since Ted Bundy was executed, Hollywood has jumped on the murder bandwagon. The growing demand for true crime has led to a new phase in Hollywood — the era of the killer.
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When the Florida Supreme Court made the call to allow cameras into a courtroom for the first time to film the 1979 trial of serial killer Ted Bundy, they couldn’t have known what they were starting.
At the time, the live coverage fed the insatiable appetite for murder and mayhem. In 2019, our true crime obsession continues.
In the year that marks the 50th anniversary of the Manson murders and 30 years since Bundy was executed, Hollywood has jumped on the murder bandwagon.
Indeed, the growing demand for true crime, fed by movies, docuseries, podcasts and books to a predominantly female consumer, seems to have brokered a new phase in Hollywood — the era of the killer.
“Bundy, for me, is the Big Bang of our current insatiable appetite for true crime,” says Joe Berlinger, director of Netflix’s new Bundy film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile.
“For the first time ever Americans could sit at home, in the comfort of their living room chair, and watch serial murder, serial rape, as live entertainment.”
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Three movies will be released this year alone about Charles Manson, the cult leader who ignited a group of young girls to kill five people in 1969.
Quentin Tarantino says of his eagerly-awaited Once Upon A Time In LA: “I’ve been working on this script for five years, as well as living in Los Angeles County most of my life, including in 1969, when I was seven years old. I’m very excited to tell this story of an LA and a Hollywood that don’t exist any more.”
Leonardo DiCaprio will star as Dr Henry Howard Holmes, often (incorrectly) called America’s first serial killer, who admitted to killing 27 people in the late 1800s.
H.H HOLMES
Leonardo DiCaprio has had the film rights to Erik Larson’s novel Devil In The White City for more than a decade. And while the path to production has been slow, the story of one of America’s earliest serial killers finally looks set to get started this year.
DiCaprio will play the lead character of Henry Howard Holmes, who is said to have used Chicago’s World Fair of 1893 to lure victims to his “murder castle” which he decked out with a gas chamber, crematorium and dissecting table.
When he was caught, he admitted to killing 27 people. While some claim the figure could be up to 250, he was only ever definitively linked to the murder of his friend and accomplice Benjamin Pitezel, for which he was hanged in 1896. It was also strongly believed he killed Pitezel’s four children.
Either way, he is often touted as America’s first serial killer, but this, too, is incorrect. Criminologists today claim a person who kills two or more people in separate incidents can be labelled a serial killer. And there were many that came before Holmes — namely teen killer Jesse Pomeroy, who killed at least two children in the mid-1800s, and the Servant Girl Annihilator, who killed seven women and a man in 1884-85 and who was never caught.
CHARLES MANSON
It’s no accident that in the 50th anniversary year of the gruesome Hollywood murders ascribed to cult leader Charles Manson’s followers, The Family, there will be three movies released about the crime.
The first, Charlie Says, stars British actor Matt Smith (who played Prince Phillip in The Crown) as Manson but focuses more on his followers — the three women so beguiled by Manson they killed five people at his behest, including movie star Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time to her director husband Roman Polanski.
The Haunting Of Sharon Tate, starring Hilary Duff as the beautiful young star, was released in April.
But the most anticipated of all is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood with an all-star cast including Aussie actors in pivotal roles: Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate and Damon Herriman as Manson.
They are joined by Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Dakota Fanning and the late Luke Perry.
It will premiere at Cannes Film Festival next week, ahead of an Australian release on August 15.
GYPSY ROSE BLANCHARD
True crime fans will be familiar with the bizarre tale of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her controlling mother, Dee Dee, who was found dead in her Missouri home in 2015.
But with the release of the Hulu series The Act this year, a wider audience discovered the story of the apparently disabled Gypsy Rose who, with her secret lover Nicholas Godejohn, was charged with and convicted of her mother’s murder.
The series, which stars Patricia Arquette as Dee Dee, reveals the crazy circumstances leading to the brutal murder, including Dee Dee’s insistence Gypsy Rose pass herself off as disabled and chronically ill for most of her young life, accepting the sympathy and financial benefits which came their way.
It was believed Dee Dee suffered from Munchausen by proxy, a disorder whereby a person elicits sympathy and attention due to a fictitious illness of someone in their care.
When the revelations of Gypsy Rose’s strange upbringing came out at the trial, the young woman garnered a lot of sympathy and the debate still rages over whether she was a victim herself or just a callous killer.
She has told a reporter from jail: “I think (my mother) would have been the perfect mum for someone that actually was sick.”
The series proved so popular Hulu CEO Randy Freer says it has driven more subscribers than any other series in its first month.
TED BUNDY
If has the hallmarks of a blockbuster, including a gorgeous leading man in Zac Efron. But Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile has been criticised for glorifying one of the world’s worst serial killers: Ted Bundy.
The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and sold to Netflix for $9 million, was one of the most hyped movie releases of the year.
Based on the memoirs of Bundy’s ex-girlfriend Liz Kloepfer (played by Lily Collins), it focuses not on the grisly murders of 30 women in the 1970s but Bundy’s arrest, two jail escapes and trial for murder.
At the time of his arrest Bundy claimed he was “more popular than Disneyworld” and it seems he was not far off the mark. Psychologists today use the term “the Bundy effect” or “the halo effect” to describe our inability to believe that a good-looking, polite person such as Bundy could be capable of the horrific crimes he was executed for in 1989.
The choice of Efron to play the enigmatic serial killer, from that point of view, seems enlightened. But it’s not a role Efron took on lightly.
“I feel a responsibility to make sure that this movie is not a celebration of Ted Bundy,” Efron told Variety.
“Or a glorification of him. But, definitely, a psychological study of who this person was. In that, there’s honesty.”
The film is the creation of Joe Belinger, who also made the doco Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which aired on Netflix.
JEFFREY DAHMER
Like the Ted Bundy flick, My Friend Dahmer is presented from the perspective of someone close to Jeffrey Dahmer, the man who killed and dismembered 17 boys and men from 1978 to 1991.
Based on the book by his schoolfriend John Backderf, and starring Ross Lynch as the young serial killer, it focuses on the killer’s adolescent years and, in this way, attempts to understand what made him one of America’s worst murderers.
In another similarity with the Bundy movie, both serial killers are ironically played by former Disney stars — Zac Efron rose to fame in the High School Musical franchise and Lynch in the Disney Channel show Austin & Ally.
Lynch’s portrayal of the troubled young man in the 2017 movie was heralded for its subtle insights into the developing mind of a killer, from his socially awkward friendships to his fascination with trapping and killing animals and his difficult relationship with his parents.
Lynch, who didn’t know who Dahmer was before getting the script, says he struggled with the knowledge of who his character becomes in the years after this film ends.
“It wasn’t so much getting into a young Dahmer’s head that was hard, but getting out of it at the end of the day,” he says.
“My coping mechanism was taking long showers. That was how I shed him every night.”
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