I expected “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” to glamorize Ted Bundy. It didn’t. It did something more nuanced and characteristic of good art: It made viewers sympathize not with its antagonist, but with the people who were blinded from his horror.
It’s no secret that Americans are obsessed with true crime, and nowhere is that more evident than the recent slew of Ted Bundy content. There’s the Netflix docu-series, the ABC documentary, and the Netflix film starring Zac Efron and Lily Collins: “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.”
The title comes from the mouth of a judge in Bundy’s last court hearing. “The court finds that both of these killings were indeed heinous, atrocious and cruel, and that they were extremely wicked, shockingly evil, vile and the product of a design to inflict a high degree of pain and utter indifference to human life,” said Florida Judge Edward D. Cowart in 1979, before he sentenced Bundy to death.
The phrase is an appropriate one for the man who admitted to killing 30 women and girls in torturous ways and who probably killed even more. Making a movie about a monster such as Bundy is always tricky. As much as we abhor his crimes, it’s easy to look at the killer’s benign face and think, with almost admiration, “Wow, and he really got away with it.”
Until he didn’t. Which is actually what makes “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” so good. I was skeptical about the film after the internet went crazy over hot Efron-as-Bundy, and Netflix even had to tweet, “I’ve seen a lot of talk about Ted Bundy’s alleged hotness and would like to gently remind everyone that there are literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service — almost all of whom are not convicted serial murderers.”
But “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” doesn’t just paint Bundy as a beefcake. Efron does a fantastic job playing a manipulative, sociopathic narcissist who craves attention and never admits guilt. The movie’s greatest strength is that it shows how poor Elizabeth Kendall could’ve been fooled enough to become Bundy’s girlfriend, and Carole Anne Boone was so smitten with the monster that she married him and had his child while he sat on death row.
As someone who was born after Bundy’s execution, I found myself wanting to dig through the facts of his life and trial to verify the salacious details of the story. Surely the romance between him and Boone wasn’t real, at least. But it was. And by the end of the film, it wasn’t so surprising how Bundy had deceived so many.
The film highlights Kendall’s perspective, and it pays homage to her memoir, My Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy. Screenwriter Michael Werwie said he wanted “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” to focus on the “emotional” side of the story.
“I was compelled by all of the mundane domestic details of his life and I thought an interesting way into a serial killer’s story would be to show no serial killing at all. I wanted to explore the love story of it all,” Werwie told the Hollywood Reporter.
By itself, the assertion — that exploring a killer’s domestic life without showing his killing is a good way to tell his story — seems dubious, if not outright irresponsible. Yet by presenting the film from the perspective of Kendall, who had to realize Bundy’s guilt herself, “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” actually humanizes Bundy’s victims.
It’s easy to criticize women for falling for his charms, especially Kendall or Boone, until you see the way a narcissist can spin any situation in his favor. He’s being framed, Bundy insists throughout the film, and he’s going to escape someday, just like the protagonist of the French novel Papillon. He loves Kendall, he insists, and he would never do the wicked things of which he’s been accused.
It’s easy to believe him until the end of the film. Critics would be right that “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” glamorizes a serial killer if it weren’t for the last few scenes of the movie, during which the horrific details of Bundy’s crimes are revealed. Bundy is neither innocent nor sympathetic, but you see how he could’ve fooled people into thinking so for so long.
“Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” is not pleasant to see, but it is worth a watch if you wonder not just why there is great evil in the world, but why good people sometimes let it happen.
