The purpose of this research paper is to take a closer look at the movie “Extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile”, which is a movie based on true events and life of serial killer and rapist Ted Bundy. This study aims to gain a deeper understanding of how serial killers are portrayed in movies and through which perspective the story is told. To get closer to our purpose we saw to two research questions, firstly how is the character Ted Bundy portrayed through semiotic resources? The second question we asked ourselves is; how can the different types of choices the production make contribute to further romanticizing of a serial killer? To answer these questions we used a multimodal critical discourse analysis method which focuses a lot on the visual elements such as a character's clothing, the way they speak and carry themselves and so on. To carry out the study we analyzed the characters in the movie, how they acted toward each other, what scenes were chosen to be shown in the movie and which parts of the real story were left out and what seemed to be the main focus in the movie. To achieve the purpose of the study the characters have been analyzed, mainly Ted Bundy. But also the different types of active choices the production made to embody Bundy and the events. Like the choice of events and how the story generally relates to reality. The results we got from our research is that the character Ted Bundy in the movie is highly romanticized when you see the way he is portrayed and what kind of scenes were focused on. It also became quite clear that the story is told through Liz’s perspective causing it to be told out of a biased and compromised angle.  Our conclusion is that it is quite clear when reading the results that there are tendencies to romanticize the main character even when it comes to serial killers based on real people.

In January 2019, Netflix released the unexpectedly popular Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Joe Berlinger, true crime director, compiled interviews with Bundy, law enforcement authorities involved with Bundy’s arrest and trial, and members of Bundy’s community to create a four-part docu-series focusing “on a man whose personality, good looks, and social graces defied the serial-killer stereotype, [which allowed] him to hide in plain sight” (Berlinger). The somewhat romanticized Ted Bundy Tapes serve as an example of modern folklore, in which the archetypal bogeyman has been narrativized for contemporary society as a charming, rather than hideous, monster. This bogeyman trope—a child-snatching, fear-inducing, paranoia-provoking monster—can be traced back through a number of famous folkloric tales, like The Pied Piper, through the fairytale realm, as illustrated with Peter Pan, and into popular contemporary media with productions like the Ted Bundy Tapes and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. These folkloresque narratives help to explain how certain trials or traumas were overcome. The Ted Bundy Tapes opened a discourse community surrounding Ted Bundy as more than a historically recorded villain, but as an almost fictive evil hiding behind a “hot” façade. Forming Bundy as a charming child-snatcher and then presenting this character in a widely available docu-series promulgated the surrounding lore, making Bundy into a bogeyman. Instead of romanticizing Bundy now, we have to recognize his form as a bogeyman character in order for this archetype to serve in a truly useful cautionary capacity and to help us work through inevitable trauma.