SCRIPTOPHOBIC NOTE: We don’t normally do spoiler warnings, however The Clovehitch Killer is a recent release, so be warned!
The Clovehitch Killer (2018) is a great film. It’s also a frustrating one for those who have an interest in serial killers. The killer, Don Burnside (played to eerie perfection by Dylan McDermott), is heavily inspired by Dennis Rader, better known by his murderous moniker BTK— Bind, Torture, Kill, in reference to his methodology. Rader was captured in 2005, over a decade after his last kill, but screenwriter Christopher Ford reimagines the case right around present day. Just one more decade brings the advent of new technologies, as well as a culture further inundated by media focused on the men who become serial killers even more than it’s been since the mid-1970s. Rader became the poster child for evil lurking in plain sight around us. So while widespread cultural knowledge of these killers has been around for decades, the media wouldn’t begin its focus on the everyday, average murderer like BTK until only a decade ago. Prior to that Ted Bundy was the most normal-looking killer people had seen on television and in the papers, and he was the perceived exception to the rule at that time. Because this concept of the serial killer who looks and acts like the rest of us is a relatively new concept, The Clovehitch Killer’s characters live in a far different world from the people who existed in Rader’s orbit, and while the film remains one of 2018’s best horrors, it may strike serial killer enthusiasts as overly sentimental at times.
On its surface, the screenplay isn’t anything overly original, though the way it tells the story makes for interesting and exciting tension. The film’s methodical approach mirrors that of the killer himself, here known as Clovehitch instead of BTK, keeping with the real life murderer’s interest in rope bondage. There’s never exactly a surprise moment where we see dad become the killer suddenly. We gradually watch Clovehitch emerge out of Don’s regular personality. The scene where he puts on the clothing of his victims to take Polaroids is a chilling cherry on top of the tension. His terrifying image in contrast to a cross on his bedroom wall behind him is a horrifically perfect moment. This religious image is significant because religion is what effectively splits Don in half between who he is to the world and who he is alone or in front of his victims.
Part of what terrified people who knew Rader, after his crimes were revealed, was the fact nobody saw any evidence of his parallel lives. One scene in the film features Don trying to have a sex-related conversation with his son Tyler (played by Charlie Plummer), in which he inadvertently exposes himself to the audience, albeit cryptically. Don – supposedly a devout man of God, whose family, like many in their town, are model Christians – tells his son that his “body is a holy thing not to be desecrated.” He goes from talking about God and the body as a temple to calling sex “monkey stuff” and referring to men as a “sex-crazed” monkeys. This flip flop between religious language and decidedly evolutionary language belies that Don is not as devout as he makes himself out to look, likewise illustrating the thin veil between Don’s public and private lives.
The Clovehitch Killer is a fascinating serial killer film adapted from real life, and it’s precisely the real life elements that wind up making its story so frustrating. Clovehitch is all but an exact mirror of BTK, right down to Don’s physical appearance with his glasses, goatee, and an ever so slight potbelly. Don’s life is just about a replica of the one Rader lived: he leads a Boy Scout troop, his family attends church every Sunday without fail and other church functions where he’s a known face. These parallels aren’t negatives. The problem is how the screenplay handles transposing Rader’s story into one set around today. Ford’s screenplay can easily be considered as postmodern writing. His writing moves the real life timeline ahead a couple decades. This automatically imbues the plot and characters with the advantages of an increasingly technologically obsessed culture, as well as pop culture long familiar with serial killers.
A large part of the plot’s resolution involves a bit of postmodern gadgetry to aid Tyler and his murder obsessed friend Kassi (played by Madisen Beaty) in tracking and ultimately tricking Don. It isn’t that this plot point is unbelievable – not at all – it’s that the real BTK was killing victims between 1974 and 1991— a time when media was still catching up with how to present a social perspective on serial murder. The media had only just begun to focus on serial killers heavily, and these types of crimes weren’t yet entirely part of the Western criminal lexicon. Today, people are generally aware of how serial killers, more often than not, look and act like the rest of us. In the late ‘70s and the ‘80s, media were warning people about ‘stranger danger’ and presenting these killers as the wide eyed, Charles Manson-looking murderers perceptible to the untrained eye. This is at least a tiny part of what allowed Rader to operate with such stealth amongst his community. In the end it was Rader himself who allowed himself to be caught, using a computer disk from his church he sent to the police that was later traced back to him. In the film, Don’s caught because Tyler and, more specifically, Kassi are hyper aware of what a serial killer is and how they operate, not to mention the fact they have the internet to scour.
The film gives Tyler the benefit of living in the 21st century, and in 2018 it’s not unheard of that a killer could be anybody, even a seemingly straight laced, clean cut family man. For this reason, the screenplay falls into sentimentality by becoming a semi-wishful story about what might have been if only someone put together the hidden pieces of Rader’s secret life. Rader’s actual children were in the dark like anybody else, if not more so because he likely had to work hardest to keep them there, as opposed to the police whom he openly taunted through letters to the press. Tyler is a postmodern millennial with advantages that weren’t available to the real BTK’s children, because unfortunately life is not so neat and tidy, and just as he puts it during the finale: “The truth is, bad things happen to good people.”
In spite of any frustration The Clovehitch Killer might inspire in viewers familiar with Dennis Rader, the film remains a creepy, atmospheric story about how the perfect All-American family and life can conceal darker, more sinister things beneath the superficial facade. Don’s family lives in a repressed town where people can barely discuss sexuality, let alone any fetishes, and certainly not the depraved crimes of Clovehitch. Like Don, the town would rather bury their secrets. The screenplay’s truest moments, more than the majority influenced by Rader’s life, are about conservative community environments where people harbouring dark secrets are able to conceal themselves so long as they live by the status quo. Don and Rader both, above all else, acted like everyone else expected them to act, and in doing so afforded themselves the luxury of doing what they wanted in secret.
Although the film works well, and McDermott gives one of his best performances, the screenplay could have easily been entirely original without having to rely on any use of Rader as inspiration for the character of Don. It would have been interesting to see McDermott play BTK in a genuine biopic, because he embodies the unsettling double lives of Rader in Don to a point that it’s chilling without any over the top nuance. It’s rare for a film to simultaneously be an excellent ride and also frustrating in how it chooses to channel its inspirations. Serial killer enthusiasts are the only ones who’ll find any frustration here. Fictional distance from Rader might have served Ford’s screenplay better. If the film’s killer weren’t so easily identifiable as modelled on the actual BTK, the plot’s final destination wouldn’t feel like a saccharine letter to all the things that could have been. Then again, not all of us are obsessed with the details of serial killers and their murders, and that’s absolutely fine, too.
