The Night Stalker on Netflix Epitomizes Everything Wrong with The True Crime Genre
Night Stalker. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Ever since Making a Murderer, Netflix has had an addiction to true crime from which it will probably never be weaned. I get it - true crime sells. People are both thrilled and terrified by the prospect that evil lurks out there in the world just beyond sight, and they are fascinated by the efforts of society to root it out and track down the worst of us.
The genre poses some moral questions about whether personal tragedies like murder should be turned into entertainment and a show like Evil Genius gets way too close to its subject. But these cases are in the public record anyway and so documenting them and presenting them for public consumption doesn’t strike me as terribly controversial.
That is, as long as they are done tastefully and with an eye to being informative rather than merely trafficking in sensationalism. Lately, though, it seems like these true crime shows and nonfiction investigative podcasts and the like are more interested in selling the macabre and shocking aspects of their stories, rather than functioning as traditional journalism or documentary filmmaking.
As recent embarrassing retractions published by the New York Times show, there is a lot of pressure on producers and journalists to find sources and stories that have a great, made-for-TV hook. Even if it’s too good to be true, the incentives are there to look the other way and juice up the story to make it as appealing and pulpy as possible.
Netflix’s new docuseries on Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, falls into a very similar trap. It’s not that the information the show is telling us isn’t true. It’s that the producers of this show have gussied it up with all this dramatic music and totally unnecessary imagery in order to try and cultivate the most shocking, macabre vision they can.
They are not just telling the story of a serial killer who was loose in 1980s Los Angeles and his eventual capture by police - they are distorting the story with layers and layers of totally unnecessary flourishes and additions. Instead of just letting a witness speak into the camera about what happened, they insert a smash cut of some dirty broken teeth in the middle of her sentence, and then overlay everything with this thick, cheap-sounding dramatic music.
If you have a compelling story to tell - and this is surely a compelling story - then just let the archival material and the interview participants tell the story. You don’t need to keep injecting more drama and and more tension into it. These flourishes are distracting, they add nothing and in fact they cheapen the actual crimes being recounted by the actual people who actually experienced them. Their stories are sufficient to carry the weight of any show about a serial killer.
I found the editorial decisions made in the production of The Night Stalker so distracting I was not able to finish it. Just look at the promotional art they are using to market the show, with this moody crimson slash of light illuminating the killer’s eye. It’s so cheap and so unnecessary.
And I think that, with so much pressure to produce content for this genre, you are going to keep seeing more shit like this that takes stories about crimes in all their complexity and then puts them through a Lifetime Channel Original Movie meatgrinder of half-baked cheesy visuals, ominous voice overs and Phantom of the Opera knock-off music in order to dial up the tension because these imbeciles don’t understand why true crime as a genre has any appeal in the first place.
