Conversations with a killer: the Ted Bundy tapes and affective responses to the true crime documentary

ABSTRACT Joe Berlinger’s docu-series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) explores the violence, victims, and social context of Ted Bundy’s crimes. The documentary critiques the ‘handsome genius’ image created by the media and recognizes the power of privilege within Bundy’s story. However, website reviews suggest conflicting readings of the documentary. They reveal that some viewer responses come from a reading of the text that relies more on their ingrained responses to the genre conventions of the documentary than the nuance Berlinger builds into the straight-forward narrative. In the process, these reviews show the potentially fraught emotional capability of the documentary, particularly when content focuses on well-known cases like Bundy’s. In addition, they expose the capability of true crime documentaries to produce necessary emotional responses in order to reframe established narratives.