Thirty years after the death of Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer has made an unexpected return. Bundy is the latest subject to become the focus of the recently revived true-crime genre.
Netflix released the documentary series "Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes" on Jan. 25, the 30th anniversary of his death. Two days later, a biopic of his life, "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile," debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and is expected to be released widely later this year.
The Netflix series boasts "present-day interviews, archival footage and audio recordings made on death row." Interviews peppered throughout the first episode include insight from several police detectives from King County and the Seattle Police Department.
The documentary series may attract viewers to its "never before heard" tapes -- Netflix says it pulled audio from more than 100 hours of tapes between Bundy and reporter Stephen Michaud -- but it, like most documentaries, wants to start at the beginning.
The first of four episodes focus on Tacoma, the site of his early childhood, and Seattle's University District, the location of his first reported murder.
"Conversations" found in Netflix's documentary are more often than not, one-sided monologues delivered by Bundy. Clips from the audio tapes sound like a man trying to take control of the narrative around him, an effort that would prove useless.
The documentary's subject matter is unsurprisingly dark in nature. Netflix issued a "don't watch it alone" warning on the day of the documentary's release.
Ted Bundy's sudden injection into the pop culture zeitgeist is not entirely coincidental. Both the Netflix series and "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" - whose title comes from the judge’s verdict - were directed by Joe Berlinger.
Ted Bundy, played by Zac Efron, won over most critics at the Sundance premiere. But Berlinger was stuck justifying the movie's existence and arguing against claims the movie humanizes the serial killer.
"I think the state of film criticism is not what it used to be, and there are a lot of people who have an agenda, who refuse to see the film for what it is, because they want to fit an agenda, which sounds defensive by me, but it’s not," Berlinger told IndieWire.
The director said he hopes what audiences take away from the movie is that trust must be earned.
“As a father of daughters at the age of the prototypical Bundy victim, there’s a lesson that I want them to have, the deeper meaning and reason to do this film, which is that, people need to earn your trust,” Berlinger said.
The justification for the film may be up for debate but Bundy certainly had no shortage of high-profile coverage during his lifetime and the years following his execution in 1989.
Bundy was executed after being convicted of killing a 12-year-old and two Florida State University sorority sisters. He confessed to ending the lives of dozens more. THR reports the movie, written by Michael Werwie, is told from the point of view of Bundy's former girlfriend.
Women started disappearing in the mid-1970s in the Pacific Northwest, from the Oregon State University campus, north to Bellingham and east to Ellensburg. At least nine were killed and one was severely beaten.
