Around my neighborhood, and likely in other places, the Ted Bundy movie on Netflix is just known as “the Ted Bundy movie on Netflix.” The real title, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, is not the easiest to remember, Perhaps in your own circles, you just shorten it to Extremely Wicked. Whatever you call it, you definitely watched it. Or you’re going to. Zac Efron as the notorious serial killer? There’s a lot of appeal there, even if your end goal is to talk about the issue of yet another showcase for a sociopathic murder rather than the victims or to defend it against those claims, arguing that the point of the movie is to focus on the women who weren’t murdered by Bundy but were still affected and are victims of a different sort.
Once you do watch the Ted Bundy movie on Netflix, I recommend you follow it with the relevant picks below. If you’re just looking for more Bundy biopics, there are others providing that list, but this week’s Movies to Watch does have a good helping of true crime and dramas based on true crimes, and a varied bunch at that, to satisfy if you’re looking for less repetition.
Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019)
Technically, we’re starting off with a miniseries rather than a movie, but we can’t ignore this other Joe Berlinger-helmed look at the life and crimes of Ted Bundy. He was working on this documentary when he was given the opportunity to pair it with Extremely Wicked, and it’s impressive that he was able to deliver both of them at the same time for the 30th anniversary of Bundy’s execution in January (plus this summer’s 40th anniversary of his big murder trial). Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes is in part a standard true-crime doc laid out in chronological order with archival footage and interviews but it’s also based around hundreds of hours of tapes of Bundy making a case of his innocence recorded in 1980 by journalist Stephen Michaud as research for his book The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy. It’s definitely one of the most fascinating serial killer documentaries out there.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
How do you know if a loved one is actually a serial killer or capable of becoming a mass murderer? For the woman known as Elizabeth Kendall (a pseudonym), played by Lily Collins in Extremely Wicked, the idea was unfathomable. Even after she had tipped the police off about Ted Bundy, her boyfriend at the time. Even following the numerous arrests and investigations and trials and in spite of the compelling evidence against him. It’s not emphasized in Extremely Wicked — there is a flashback montage that almost suffices — but in her book, Kendall does offer some clues she could have been more conscious of that the man sleeping beside her was some kind of psycho. Had Berlinger gone for more of that retrospective realization, his movie would have had more of a connection with Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, in which Tilda Swinton plays a mother attempting to look back on the life of her son, trying to recall anything she should have noticed about him being a possible psychopath, after the fact of him going on killing spree at home and school.
Zodiac (2007)
Berlinger does a decent job of evoking the 1970s and the films of that decade with Extremely Wicked, and it’s an intentional achievement considering he used anamorphic lenses from the time to get the look just right. He told Newsweek, “Instead of using production design to make an overly saturated, overly stylized version of the ’70s, I wanted to give that ’70s vibe more through the kind of glass, the lenses, we used. To use lenses that would have been available only then, not today.” Was it necessary for him to go with vintage equipment, though? For Zodiac, another movie about a 1970s serial killer, director David Fincher shot mostly with digital equipment and used a lot of digital effects combined with near-perfect costume and production design to present a wonderfully over stylized version. This masterpiece is interesting to watch in comparison with Extremely Wicked, additionally because of its focus on the people who seemed to know the killer best yet didn’t really know him at all — in his own way, the Zodiac killer pulled one over on every one since his identity remains unknown all these decades later.
American Psycho (2000)
The very handsome and charismatic Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ controversially violent 1980s-set novel American Psycho and Mary Harron’s beautifully bloody film adaptation, is somewhat inspired by Bundy. On two levels. Ellis read a lot of books about Bundy as research for the creation of the character, and Bateman is also said, in the novel, to be a fan of books about Bundy and other serial killers (he also idolized Donald Trump). In the movie, he mentions a bit of Ted Bundy trivia. Of course, the part about Bateman being successful and wealthy in his profession as a Wall Street investment banker is one aspect of the character that is very far from the real killer’s life. The other major difference is that nobody, not even his fiancee, realized Bundy was a serial killer, but he was, while nobody, not even his fiancee, realizes Bateman is a serial killer, and maybe he wasn’t and it’s all in his head as a deranged fantasy.
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