Parents' Guide to Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman

Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman is yet another of the roughly two dozen documentaries and feature-length movies "based on true events" about the serial killer. Often shot like a horror movie, with jump scares and suspenseful music galore, the movie comes across as a cynical Hollywood attempt to sensationalize gruesome violence and exploit Bundy's incomprehensibly evil murders and the traumatic suffering endured by those who survived what Bundy did. While the movie does give equal time to the FBI agents who tracked Bundy down, and a "Where are they now?" montage at the end discusses the positive work those who caught or survived Bundy did in the years after the serial murders, disturbing sequences involving Bundy's fantasies and the suspense leading up to the attacks are much more likely to resonate, unfortunately.

It's not a bad movie from a technical standpoint. But it doesn't really contribute anything new to a story told too many times about a sociopath who doesn't deserve so much of "the Hollywood treatment," or any of it, really. What does it say about an industry that, for every documentary about, say, Gandhi, churns out roughly one billion documentaries about serial killers and fascist dictators? Are audiences really that evil-obsessed, or is this a cynical appeal to an innate fascination with people trying to make sense of ugly true-life evil? Do we better understand serial or mass murder, or is this merely lowest common denominator entertainment? It's past time to derive so much "entertainment value" from creeps like Bundy, and long past time to take the "anti" out of "anti-heroes."