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11 May

Resident Evil Village: Lady Dimitrescu and the Real Serial Killer Who Inspired Her

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Resident Evil Village, Capcom’s newest vision of horror, unleashed its villain, Lady Alcina Dimitrescu, onto the world in January, and the internet has hardly been the same since. Before we’d even seen anything substantial from the new game, the nine-foot “Tall Vampire Lady” was already the sequel’s most popular character, the subject of countless memes and even a few…salacious mods and videos. With the release of the game this month, Dimitrescu’s star is shining even brighter. We just can’t stop talking about our Lady. And when you hear who the developers at Capcom turned to for inspiration when creating this…
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14 Apr

Confronting a Serial Killer Review: The Confession Is Chilling, But the Story Is Balanced

New DVD release, , , , , ,
The new Starz documentary series Confronting a Serial Killer is captivating, immersive and infuriating. One of the first things we learn is how victims are parsed through the criminal justice system. On the scale of homicide priorities, “pretty white college students are the most dead, black hookers are the least dead.” Because it tells a story about an under-represented and largely dismissed cross-section of the community, Confronting a Serial Killer focuses on the victims. Even the journalist spearheading the investigation is a survivor. Putting a human face and voice to statistics is a slowly growing trend in true crime coverage.…
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31 Jan

The Little Things Reminds Us Why We’re Drawn to Charismatic Serial Killers

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This The Little Things analysis contains spoilers. Read our spoiler-free review here. The Little Things can be seen as a tainted police procedural with its murky ambiguity and troubling ending. But it’s also the story of a man for whom the allure of a charismatic serial killer goes too far. After all, serial killers make up less than one percent of homicides but they average a double-digit percentage of Hollywood crime films, and probably a majority of prison fan mail. What is it about these one-percenters we love so much? Directed by John Lee Hancock, the supposed sociopath in The…
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30 Jan

Best Serial Killer Movies of the ’90s Ranked

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Someone must have left the freezer door in the morgue open, because grisly reminders of the past are thawing before our eyes. You can see it this weekend with the release of John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things, a throwback to the days when movie stars hung out at crime scenes instead of in spandex, and it’ll be more apparent next month with the launch of Clarice, a television spinoff of 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. All the evidence points to only one conclusion: the serial killer thrillers of the ‘90s are back! Not that we’re complaining. For a…
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11 Jan

Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer Review – Richard Ramirez Docuseries Speaks Plainly

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Netflix dives into one of the most horrifying cases of multiple murders with its eyes wide open in Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. The documentary is told from the perspective of the investigators at the heart of the case, particularly a veteran homicide detective and his young, enthusiastic partner. They had nothing going into the case, and when they did dig out the clues, they often lost what they had because of its newsworthiness. The series works because it treats the audience the same way as the cops were treated: infuriatingly. Every clue, setback, and recalculation in…
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16 Nov

Crazy, Not Insane Review: HBO Serial Doc Examines Haunted Minds

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“Bigotry and insanity are different,” Psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis says at the beginning of HBO’s documentary Crazy, Not Insane. The idea that someone can kill for perfectly sane, yet irrational reasons goes to the heart of the controversial doctor’s work. Her mother seemed to be able to name every famous anti-Semite. Henry Ford, Richard Wagner, Joe Kennedy and “even Walt Disney,” Lewis lists. The man who made Bambi, which made Lewis cry as a little girl, hated Jews, she bemoans as the film unfolds. You never know what lies underneath even the most innocent appearing exteriors, director Alex Gibney’s…
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26 Oct

Crazy, Not Insane Doc Studies Serial Killers’ Minds on HBO

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Psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis is an influential and controversial figure. She interviewed Ted Bundy four times in 1986 at the request of the defense. Dr. Lewis pioneered psychiatric legal avenues by exploring trauma as root causes of horrific crimes in many cases. HBO’s upcoming Crazy, Not Insane will explore Dr. Lewis’ “lifelong attempts to look beyond the grisly details of homicides into the hearts and minds of the killers themselves,” according to the advance press. The documentary debuts Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 9 pm. Directed and produced by Oscar-winner Alex Gibney (The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley,…
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16 Sep

Des Episode 3 Review: a Serial Killer Drama With Brains and Heart

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This Des review contains spoilers. Serial killer dramas have a grimy reputation. The phrase conjures up lurid magazine headlines promising Sick! Twisted! Depravity! and Never-Seen-Before Crime Scene Photos! Think ‘true crime serial killer’, you think of Jack the Ripper tours and David from Psychoville poring over victim stats and working himself to a froth over all the gory details.   To shake off those associations and emerge as nuanced, intelligent and non-exploitative, a drama has to work hard. It has to foreground the human cost and trace a story that doesn’t revel in gore. It requires scripts that build in context and narrative…
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14 Sep

Des Episode 1 Review: David Tennant is Scarily Good as Real-Life Serial Killer

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This Des episode one review contains spoilers.  ITV must be feeling confident about the nation’s emotional resilience. While other channels are scheduling there-there comfort shows to hug us through These Unprecedented Times (there’s a new James Herriot on 5, and the BBC has just finished series four of Strike – a murder show, yes, but one overwhelmingly focussed on the immediate and pressing need for its two comely leads to start boning), ITV brings us the true crime tale of serial killer Dennis Nilsen. From Monday to Wednesday, ITV’s bedtime story will be about decomposing corpses, boiled human heads and a psyche…
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05 Sep

BTK: Chasing a Serial Killer Review – A Self-Aggrandizing Psychopath Gets His Wish

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“How many do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper of some national attention,” Dennis Rader asks early in BTK: Chasing a Serial Killer. The elusive strangler wanted to be a hall of famer, along with Jack the Ripper and the Son of Sam. He got off on the killings, and wanted everyone to know it. Investigation Discovery closes out Serial Killer Week with a three-part documentary exploring the psyche of the infamous “BTK” killer, and the devastating effects he had on the community around him. Like many of the murderers profiled during the week,…
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31 Aug

The Best Online Serial Fiction

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If there was a golden age of serial fiction, it might have been the era when Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain were publishing their stories-in-installments in print periodicals, with their readers desperately waiting for the next part of the tale. But if that’s true, right now might just be the platinum age of serial fiction. The digital medium is perfect for publishing stories as episodes, and modern readers who are used to receiving stories in an episodic format, thanks to television, may appreciate the medium in a more nuanced way than their historical predecessors. Modern serials make…
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14 Aug

Where to Read Serial Fiction Online

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Some days, it’s impossible to sit down to read a long book. Maybe you’re waiting to be admitted to an appointment, or maybe you’re standing in line. You might be on public transit, where balancing that hardcover doorstopper you checked out of the library is simply impossible. In those moments when your attention could be drawn to something else at any moment, it’s convenient to have something shorter to read. That’s where the current renaissance of serial fiction comes in. Publishers like Serial Box, Amazon, and apps like Tapas have created a host of short reading experiences when you only…
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12 Aug

Serial Killer Week Starts August 30 on ID

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Sharks look out. People are far more vicious, especially when it’s hot. ID is inviting audiences to chill out with America’s most prolific and elusive machines on “Serial Killer Week.” Starting Aug. 30, ID will premiere all-new specials every night at 9 p.m. Over the course of five days, ID will air over 12 hours of original programming. The premieres will include revelations about the infamous “Butcher Baker,” the notorious BTK Killer, and video confessions of Samuel Little, who is rumored to have killed 93 women. “We chose these cases not just because of these macabre monsters, or that each…
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17 Mar

What Lost Girls Didn’t Tell You About the Long Island Serial Killer True Story

Netflix, New DVD release, , , , ,
Netflix latest true crime drama Lost Girls tells the story of the Long Island Serial Killer – or elements of the case at least – but there is plenty more to learn about this strange and horrible series of crimes that didn’t make it into the movie. If you’ve seen Lost Girls and want to know more about the true story of the Long Island Serial Killer (aka the Craigslist Killer), here are some of the things the movie changed, omitted or chose not to focus on. This article contains spoilers for Lost Girls (but check out our spoiler free…
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13 Mar

Lost Girls Review: Netflix Takes on the Long Island Serial Killer

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Netflix feels like the right home for this compelling but low-key feature about the Long Island Serial Killer which wisely opts to focus on the families of the victims rather than the unsolved case itself. Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone) is sympathetic as Mari Gilbert, a hard-working and harassed single mother whose somewhat estranged eldest daughter Shannan goes missing after making a panicked 911 call from a gated community near Ocean Parkway, NY in the early hours of the morning. But the police take almost an hour to respond to the call, fail to request CCTV footage which might have…
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DVD Guide reviews current dvd releases of movies and TV shows. The reviews of these dvd releases are my thoughts and understandings of the movie, dvd releases or TV show and not be taken as fact.

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