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Yet Another Ted Bundy Movie Announced, This Time Starring Chad Michael Murray, And A Backlash Has Ensued
"One Tree Hill" heartthrob has been cast as Ted Bundy in yet another movie about the serial killer, a casting decision that has stirred up criticism.
Yet another movie about Ted Bundy is in the works, this time starring Chad Michael Murray as the notorious serial killer.
“American Boogeyman” aims to tell the untold story of both a detective and rookie FBI profiler’s pursuit of the killer, Screen Daily reported in April.
“Ted Bundy is such a fascinatedly divisive character and is the true personification of evil,” Voltage Pictures president and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Deckter said, according to the outlet. “Murray is so talented and expertly captures Bundy’s charm and seductive nature, traits that the notorious killer exploited to win the trust of his victims as well as society.”
But the decision to cast Murray, known for playing hunks in shows like “One Tree Hill,” has spurred a flurry of criticism this week.
“Do we *really* need another movie on Ted Bundy? Like really?” one Twitter user wrote on Wednesday.
Just two years ago, Zac Efron portrayed Bundy in Netflix's 2019 film, “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.” The Bundy case was also recently reexamined in Netflix’s 2019 docuseries “Conversations with A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes” and again in the 2020 docuseries “Crazy, Not Insane.”
Another Twitter user posted photos of Bundy’s victims, and wrote, "The ONLY Ted Bundy adjacent movie I am interested in is one which respectfully tells the life stories of these women and girls, humanising them, portraying them as real people who lived & loved, rather than simply victims. And ONLY if their families give permission."
Bundy, who was executed in 1989 by electric chair, admitted to the murders of 30 women across the country between 1973 and 1978. He had sex with several of the corpses, sometimes days after he killed them. Kathy Kleiner Rubin, one of the two survivors of Bundy’s Florida State University sorority attack, in which two women died, spoke out about the horrific ordeal at CrimeCon 2019.
“I'm so tired of Hollywood romanticizing murderers and making films and TV shows about them,” another Twitter user wrote on Wednesday. “It's so disrespectful to the victims and their families.”
Jane Caputi, a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the Florida Atlantic University told Oxygen.com in 2019 that Bundy has been wrongly mythologized — largely due to his “white male privilege.”
“[Bundy] never got into the law school he wanted to,” Caputi told Oxygen.com. “He was a nose-picker, a nailbiter, not well liked as a child, he tortured frogs — his own opinion of himself preceded everything and the media did just buy that.”
“American Boogeyman” hits theaters on August 16. It’s sibling film “American Boogeywoman,” which will focus on serial killer Aileen Wuornos will be released the same day.
