It’s been a big day for… Listening to...

0:00 10:23
GOAT

It’s been a big day for… Listening to...

MeToo

Zac Efron Is A Disturbingly Sexy Ted Bundy In His New Movie, And It's The Latest In A Problematic True-Crime Trend

For some people, not even murder is a turnoff.

The first full trailer for Ted Bundy biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile dropped over the weekend.

Bundy, played here by Zac Efron, murdered at least 30 women and girls, sexually assaulted most of them before and/or after (usually) bludgeoning or strangling them to death, and kept the heads of at least 12 of them in his home as trophies.

But with the generic swaggering retro rock soundtrack, lingering sexy scenes, shots of Efron sprinting comically or brooding handsomely, and BIG SMASHY TAGLINE SCREENS, the trailer comes off more Catch Me If You Can than Monster.

We get it: fun and sexy sells more tickets than dark and depressing. And trailers are a pretty lost art these days – just watching one risks spoiling the entire movie – so there’s absolutely no reason to assume the film has the same jaunty tone.

What’s more, the point of the movie is supposed to be that Bundy’s handsomeness and charm were exactly what allowed him to lure women into situations where they were alone, to insist on his innocence when his girlfriend Liz Koepfler reported him to the police as a suspect (and even after he was convicted), and to maintain adoring fans and correspondents who mourned him after his execution.

The entire design of Efron’s casting is to use the fact that he is extremely handsome against you, the audience. You’re supposed shift uncomfortably as you admire his chiseled features, finding yourself charmed or convinced as he represents himself in America’s first nationally televised criminal trial – you’re supposed to feel confused, conflicted, and repulsed by your feelings about him, like Koepfler must have, even though you know he did it.

Reviews from Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered, say that Efron nails the charm bit, as well as the necessary creepiness. Variety calls his performance “startlingly good: controlled, magnetic, audacious, committed, and eerily right… We see the desperate soul hidden in the psycho hidden in the charlatan hidden in the handsome straight-arrow.”

And while there are flashes of body-dragging in the trailer, there’s reportedly no actual onscreen depiction of any of the murders, in order to keep the audience perspective closer to Koepfler’s anguished uncertainty – which another review says “has the absurd effect of elevating Efron’s winsome Bundy into a protagonist you root for getting away with it all”.

We need to be having conversations about the fact that not all violent men are shark-eyed and scary-looking; that they can be charming, handsome, and kind to some people, and then commit unspeakably horrific violence before coming home to kiss their loved ones goodnight.

This is even more important as we reckon with the ugly stories we don’t want to believe about handsome men we don’t want to see as monstrous.

But so much true crime now, in the process of trying to turn criminals into characters, paints portraits of monsters that are a little too compelling.

And as we’ve learned from the weird fandom that’s grown around Penn Badgley’s handsome, violent obsessive in Netflix’s hit show You, you can show the whole story and people will still tweet about how hot the murderer is. 

So it feels like there’s almost no way to win when you’re telling the story of someone who was extremely sexy and shockingly evil and vile.

But unlike You, Extremely Wicked isn’t fiction – Ted Bundy’s victims were very real people. And in a way, focusing on his charisma instead of his crimes feels as cheap as any blood-soaked  re-enactments.