DOUBLE FEATURE 07.10.20

BY: Daniel Fisher

Countless movies and television shows have been inspired by In Cold Blood, based on Truman Capote’s ripped-from-the-headlines non-fiction novel. The 1967 film, together with Arthur Penn’s iconic Bonnie and Clyde, spawned the uniquely American true-crime genre. The chilling crime In Cold Blood documents — the 1959 home invasion and murder of four members of the Clutter family in a robbery-gone-wrong — tapped into our deepest fears and continues to echo within our psyche. One would be hard-pressed to conjure a darker scenario, even in fiction — to be held captive in your own home and unable to protect your family. One of the brilliant elements of the movie (among many, including the morbid detail that it was shot in the house where the murders happened) and what prevents it from exploiting the atrocities it depicts, is how the real-life killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, are portrayed —as the clueless, unsavory losers they were. 

Released in 1973, Badlands was loosely inspired by real-life-killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugit, who murdered ten people during an eight-day spree in 1958 (interestingly, the year before the Clutter murders). It served as inspiration for a handful of other films, including Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers. Terrence Malick’s first film, with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, is an undisputed masterpiece. The film’s lyrical cinematography paints a vast, dreamlike Midwestern landscape, flat and stark as the blunt, unglamorous depictions of the murders. The violent, psychotic couple is coasting along on a different plane of reality, outside of our own. They inhabit their childlike fantasy in which they can do anything they please, without consequence, though the foreboding rumblings just beneath the surface suggest otherwise. They’re not called the Badlands of Montana for nothing. 

Zodiac, David Fincher’s 2007 meticulously crafted, atmospheric thriller about the infamous Zodiac killer who terrorized San Francisco during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, is a unique entry in the true-crime genre. Based on the non-fiction book by Robert Grayson, the central protagonist in the film portrayed by an understated Jake Gyllenhaal in one of his most exceptional performances.  Zodiac successfully weaves together elements from several different genres: it is at once a police procedural, a newsroom drama and a true-crime thriller. The character-driven narrative is slow-burning and hypnotic— it is not so much the actions of the killer, but the characters and the investigation that propel the plot and build suspense. The evocation of place and time is masterful, as is the cinematography. Be warned: the murder scene that opens the film is extremely disturbing, not because it is gruesome but because of how brutal, realistic and sudden it is.