T.He didn’t focus on the first minute of Knight Stalker: Hunt for Serial Killer, the new Netflix True Crime Mini-Series, Tytler Killer, not the real name Richard Ramirez, but the city he terrorized in the 1980s: Los Angeles, Sun-Real, Black. Long kissed by both Dahlia, Manson’s murder) and fiction (Raymond Chandler’s works, a whole genre of films). From its title font to its dark and synth hits to the intrusive cover, Night Stalker evokes the mid-80s – especially after the 1984 Olympics, and in 1985, after a steady heat and spots of a summer brutal home invasion.
The Night Stalker contains many of the main stamps of the true crime genre – click on the crime scene photos for an elaborate slow-mo montage, unusual irrational serial killer story, CD bar aesthetic. From June 1984 until his arrest in August 1985, Ramirez, then 25, and a slightly, tended man with black curls and large, annoyingly sharp-eyed blocks uncomfortably presented police coverage in the press coverage, killing at least 13 people in the length of the violence, in which the law And spread at least three different episodes of the arrangement. Victims – some brutally murdered, some left to call for help – between the ages of six and six. Was not a constant target of gender, age, race or class; Assassination weapons ranged from strangling telephone cords to point-blank shootings. Sometimes the killer would leave devilish messages or symbols, other times he would stop eating a piece of fruit from the fridge.
The only commonalities seemed to be unlocked doors or windows, and as the hits intensified – some within the same night, or within two days of each other – LA residents zipped up their homes in the 100F heat, bought window bars, or adopted large dogs. Fear of Night Stalker Boogieman’s “unfamiliar, nameless, faceless, diverse nature” “caught the city,” series director Tiller Russell told the Guardian.
After 30 years in the memory of Gil Carrillo and Frank Celerno exploring the local Angeles police, Russell, a veteran of the true crime series interested in pursuing law and order-style as a local crime reporter, entered the story of Knight Stalker 30 years later. Who took care of crimes in the five annoying months in 1985 and who served mostly as the ‘dual narrators’ of the series. Russell first met Carillo through a colleague at the old world-school L.A. joint “steakhouse bar” and was “completely obscured by the accuracy and uniqueness of his memory,” he recalled. Carillo, in the mid-30s at the time of the murder, remembered the exact times and dates, what the victim was wearing, the address of the crime scene.
The medical rigor of Carillo’s memory of the case surprised Russell, who said, “This is a human story – what effect does it have on the people who live there?” For cops, surviving victims and family members, he asked, “What is the human soul on them?”
Night Stalker is thus four episodes of true crime in which the violent offender is gratefully offended. According to any of the horrible memories of the inhabitants of Lomi Angeles who remained almost unknown until the final episode, or any interest in inspiring Ramirez, the sequence of events in this series, attack by invasion, granular key by key, is played psychologically. This timeline stands in the way of investigating the case with Carillo and Celerno with relentless business, who ran minimal sleep and judicial fears that Ramirez will target his family in the wake of the press coverage of the investigation. Russell also collects memories of humanity, in the very gruesome details of their deaths, in the inspirational coverage of the family members of some of the victims. (Ramirez, who was sentenced to death for 13 murders among other crimes, died of cancer in San Quentin State Prison in 2013, at the age of 53).
Focusing away on Ramirez was a deliberate attempt, Russell said, to avoid Knight Stalker’s “very strange and surreal afterlife,” in which Ramirez, in a small group, became something of a sexual symbol of the devil. Witness statements at the time focused on two unknown but shocking facts about Night Stalker: his strong, monstrous body odor, and his missing or rotten teeth in his mouth (the sting operation failed to catch Ramirez) that included a dentist’s office fee. But in the photo, Ramirez is tall and tall, with a prominent cheekbones and black hair rock-star flop; Those members wore only jackets and rock band hats. In other words, as evidence of the bizarre occurrence of men on the death row in abundance of marriage proposals: a fitting figure for the exploitative re-enactment by some as a hot, lost sign of darkness.
“It was really important to me not to fall prey to the false myths that I felt,” said Tiller of the incident. “This guy is not Jim Morrison of serial killers. There is nothing cool about this. “In Night Stalker, Russell linked detectives’ memories with the testimony of family members,” by immersing you in the stories of these people, not knowingly falling prey to the exploitative or sensual nature of the Ramirez legend, which had a massive and dramatic and indestructible effect. Ramirez. ”
Still, the corrective focus on law enforcement, which serves as a knight stalker, as in most crimes shows both real and fictional as the guiding protagonist of the story, has its own limitations. That is to say, the focus of the police in American crime stories, and the assumption on TV, that the police are always the main character – a troop that, inadvertently or not, works to clean up the work of the police and make the police normal as good men. While America’s record of racist policing and the murders of George Floyd and Brona Taylor this summer suggest otherwise.
Knight Stalker’s cop-centric statement – Carillo and Celero’s undeniable creations and accomplishments aside, when asked about any inconveniences – Russell agreed that, in general, “we are dealing not only with a crisis in policing but a kind of failure in policing, and cultural Seems like a moment of reckoning, this should change now, today and forever. “
“Telling a story based on law enforcement, it becomes an interesting question,” he said. “At the same time, we’re telling the story of something that’s 35 years old, and very specific to that. So I think it’s important to understand the lens through which to see the story.
“The way we are dealing with these issues will not work anymore. It’s time to dump her and move on, “she said, referring to the deaths of black men at the hands of police. “But at the same time, brave people are doing extremely challenging, impossible tasks, and you need law and order and the police. So these are the questions of our time that we are all wrestling. ”
Knight Stalker’s goal is to resurrect the summer in the midst of a catastrophic fever, by postponing a police investigation, supplementing a Street Local TV interview, or reuniting family members and beat players with Ramirez’s final arrest. , 1985, instead of serial killer mystery. The story “became this tapestry of Los Angeles, and a portrait of place and time,” Russell said, referring to the series as “a carnival of people … whose lives influenced him.”
