As Hagmaeir returns, year after year, to talk to Bundy, looking to uncover his hidden horror, Elijah Wood, still boyish at 40 but with an enhanced cunning, plays Hagmaeir as a devout Christian who’s willing to approach Bundy as a human being with a soul he wants to peer into.
WHO PLAYED DAHMER 2002 MOVIE
In “No Man of God,” Bundy keeps insisting that he’s not crazy, and that’s his tease, his way of saying, “You’re frightened of the me inside you.” The movie is based on audiotape recordings of the relationship that developed over several years between Bundy and Bill Hagmaeir, and it’s structured as a cat-and-mouse game. That’s because Bundy, like Lecter, was a killer smart enough to treat murder - at least, in his own mind - as a demonic philosophical game. (I think it’s even greater than “The Silence of the Lambs.”) It’s based on Thomas Harris’s 1981 novel “Red Dragon,” which was a thriller meditation on the then-exotic world of FBI profiling, and the book’s conversations between Lecter and Agent Will Graham were based, in part, on interviews given by Bundy. Like so many, I’ve gorged on the drama of Hannibal Lecter - and I mean really reveled in it, since “Manhunter,” the 1986 movie that introduced Lecter on the big screen, is my favorite thriller of all time. I’ve consumed the Bundy tapes, the Dahmer tapes, the endless loops of Manson arcana, the true-crime shows about the monsters in our midst. Like a lot of people, I’ve put in my own voyeuristic time with serial-killer documentaries and serial-killer thrillers.
WHO PLAYED DAHMER 2002 SERIAL
Yet part of what the critics were really saying, I think, is that they’d had enough of the whole lurid fixation on serial killers, which can grow so obsessive that it threatens to turn these violent sickos into warped antiheroes. I thought the fact that the film tried to merge his point-of-view with that of the audience was the key to its power and authenticity. I thought the movie was honest and effective, but there was a lot of criticism directed at it that said, in essence, that by showing us events from Bundy’s point-of-view, it was asking us to “sympathize” with him.
WHO PLAYED DAHMER 2002 SERIES
And, of course, so do we.īut have we been here too often? Two years ago, there was another drama about Bundy, “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” directed by Joe Berlinger (who also put together the four-part Netflix documentary series “Confessions of a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes”), and it featured a fine performance from Zac Efron, who took us inside Bundy the ’70s American Jekyll-and-Hyde. But Hagmeier, as a profiler, wants something more. The old, vintage police interrogation techniques were about evidence, “motive,” the logistics of crime. But after he and Bundy exchange letters, Bundy agrees to talk to him. He has been told that Bundy hates the feds, and won’t give them anything. Hagmaier is interviewing Bundy as part of his role in the FBI’s new profiling unit. If Ted Bundy is the monster hidden by a “normal” façade, the question his existence raises is: How many people out there are capable of being Ted Bundy?Īt least, that’s how he sees it. And that makes him, in a way, a walking metaphor. Like Manson, he’s a media celebrity: the serial killer who looked and acted like the guy next door. But what he still has is his mystique, and for him that’s a kind of freedom. He will spend the rest of his life in prison (or be executed), so his freedom is gone. It’s 1985, and Bundy has been captured and convicted. But part of what makes Bundy tick is that Bundy won’t let anyone know he’s the cagy guardian of his dark secrets.
Hagmeier wants to know what makes Bundy tick. For most of the movie, we’re watching FBI Special Agent Bill Hagmaier ( Elijah Wood), one of the Bureau’s founding profilers, interview Bundy, who is seated across from him, in handcuffs, at a small metal table inside the Florida State Prison.
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