Last week, I was surprised to discover that an interview I gave to the American magazine Vanity Fair, and which was subsequently posted to their YouTube channel, had been viewed more than two million times.
Now, I would love to think that people are always desperate to hear my opinions but two million seemed like an extraordinary number of folks who wanted to hear me discuss how Hollywood uses serial killers – both real serial murderers and fictional ones such as Hannibal Lecter.
These numbers suggest just how fascinated we have become with this type of killer, although I wonder if people are captivated by what is true about them or what has been invented.
In the interview, I discussed how there are now a number of dramatic tropes that are always used in films or TV dramas about serial killers.
These include how the serial killer is usually portrayed as an “ordinary” person who fits into his community, while all the time he is committing murder.
We’re also used to seeing FBI profilers “enter the mind” of the killer to work out why they did it and, in doing so, how they have to guard against becoming just like the murderer.
And then we tend to see how the serial killer is usually caught through the dogged determination of law enforcement.
I thought about my Vanity Fair interview because I have just watched a new movie on Prime Video about the American serial killer Ted Bundy called No Man of God.
The film stars Elijah Wood and Luke Kirby and is based on actual transcripts of conversations between Bundy – rather brilliantly played by Kirby – and FBI agent Bill Hagmaier between 1984 and 1989.
By this stage, Bundy was on death row in Florida and, after decades of denials, he confessed to 30 murders committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978.
The likelihood is that the total numbers of his victims is even higher. His conversations with Hagmaier were part of what rather chillingly was dubbed a “bones for time scheme” whereby Bundy – just like Scheherazade weaving her stories, would talk about unsolved murders that he claimed that he had committed, as a way of keeping himself out of the electric chair.
Of course, the police from various US states were only too keen to get Bundy to admit to other murders and tell them where he had buried the bodies of his victims.
No Man of God, directed by Amber Sealey, joins a long list of films about Bundy – most of which have fed a fantasy that he was a charming, brilliant psychopath and a “boy next door” type – which has served to mythologise him and make serial killers more generally seem like aspirational figures.
Bundy has been played by charismatic actors such as Mark Harmon, Cary Elwes and most recently Zac Efron.
Kirby is also handsome but there is a genuine menace in his performance that surely better fits with what we know about the psychopathic Bundy.
My difficulties with the film all relate to the idea that profiler Hagmaier, played by Wood, could become like Bundy – a consequence of his need to find a fellow human being in his interviews with the serial killer, as opposed to a monster.
This is classic Hollywood cliche can be traced back to the real-life interviews conducted by Robert Ressler and John Douglas with 36 convicted serial killers, and which became fictionalised in TV series Mindhunter.
Douglas even gets name checked in No Man of God. This trope is pure nonsense and invention, and does not reflect at all how to go about interviewing someone who has been convicted or is suspected of having committed multiple murders.
It is simply a dramatic device to create a sense of “there but for the grace of God” between the characters, and which serves to imply that we are all capable of committing serial murder. Do I really have to make the point that we are not?
Oh, and for the record, nothing that Bundy told Hagmaier led to the discovery of the bodies of any other victims.
That at least fits with my own work with serial killers – you can never rely on a word that they’ll tell you.
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