If Netflix’s hit true crime doc American Nightmare was made a decade ago, the lens would have turned far more to the perpetrator of the terrible crime.
That is the verdict of true crime supremo Felicity Morris, who has made a number of award-winning docs for Netflix including American Nightmare, which she co-directed.
American Nightmare covers the March 2015 kidnapping of Denise Huskins from the home she shared with her boyfriend Aaron Quinn. The pair were initially viewed as staging a fake kidnapping, with Huskins labeled the “real Gone Girl” by the press, before the arrest and conviction of Matthew Muller, the real perpetrator.
Speaking today at Deadline’s Reality TV Summit UK on a panel with true crime presenters and commissioners, Morris said “a decade ago the focus might have been on the perpetrator who had orchestrated the unimaginable kidnapping.”
“But actually we deliberately decided to very much leave him and who he was and where he came from as a footnote,” Tinder Swindler director Morris said. “It was the experience of the person who was kidnapped, then not believed, and her boyfriend and his treatment by the police [that we focused on]. Right from the get go we said we are not interested in Matthew Muller, we don’t want his name to be talked about at the end.”
American Nightmare was a big hit for Netflix, hitting top 10s around the world after amassing millions of views.
“Opportunistic crime w**k”
Speaking about the problem of unethical true crime that “prioritizes the perpetrator,” David Wilson, who presents Channel 4’s , did not mince words when he said that some out there are making “opportunistic crime w**k.”
At this end of the true crime spectrum, Wilson said producers and commissioners are taking a “pile it high, sell it cheap, show me the blood spatter” approach, which he described as “sensational and salacious.”
Wilson even claimed that some ideas for true crime shows are “made up,” despite the genre being rooted in non-fiction. “I hope they will be exposed as fraudulent and fake,” he added of these ideas.
Wilson’s In The Footsteps Of Killers co-host Emilia Fox said true crime to her is “about exploring the things in life that we hope we will never have to experience, testing the waters of how to gain knowledge about it and preparing ourselves.”
John Balson, a producer on In The Footsteps Of Killers, tragically commited suicide two years ago, a few months after he stopped working on the show.
Addressing this at the summit, Wilson said “even today our thoughts are always with his family,” as he backed Channel 4 and producer Alaska TV for having the correct welfare procedures in place throughout. Both were found to have “discharged their respective duties of care” after an independent review from Channel 4.
“Students ask me a lot how I cope with the work that we do,” he added. “This is moving slightly beyond poor old John Balson but one of the things I say is, ‘You should not do this work unless you are psychologically robust and have support networks that are going to be helpful to you. Unless you have outside interests and are going to compartmentalize’.”
The group were speaking at Deadline’s Reality TV Summit UK, which runs at SXSW London today.
