Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Some murder cases create such intense media circuses that they inspire numerous fictionalised "true crime" depictions thereof, sometimes years or even decades later, with varying degrees of historical accuracy and queasy exploitation. There have been dozens of movies and TV shows made about Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson respectively; even less notorious killers like Aileen Wuornos has been the subject of two movies and numerous documentaries. Oftentimes, one of these films comes to be seen as the definitive account of the events in question: David Fincher's film Zodiac is widely considered the "canonical" film about its titular serial killer, despite being neither the first nor last such film.
This got me thinking about the most famous serial killer of all time, Jack the Ripper: a case which, like Zodiac, remains unsolved decades later. There have been dozens if not hundreds of attempts to depict the murders more-or-less historically accurately in feature films, along with further hundreds of fictional works inspired by the case (even one of the first films directed by no less than Alfred Hitchcock, released thirty-nine years after the actual case - the same interval as that between the Zodiac murders and Fincher's film). This got me wondering: is there a film which is to Jack the Ripper as Zodiac is to the Zodiac killer - a film with a scrupulous regard for historical accuracy comparable to Fincher's, which takes few if any gross historical liberties, and which scholars consider an accurate portrayal? (Right off the bat this would immediately exclude Alan Moore's From Hell or its film adaptation, which were never intended to be historically accurate; or any of the various fanfic works which depict the murder being investigated by Sherlock Holmes.)
More broadly, what are some of your favourite films or TV shows in this sub-genre of "historically accurate, non-exploitative true crime"? The other night I watched the film Harvest starring Caleb Landry Jones, who I recognised from supporting roles in Get Out and the Twin Peaks revival. (Harvest was interesting and gorgeous to look at, but ultimately rather dull, and its runtime felt unearned.) I went on Jones's Wikipedia page and found that he recently won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his starring turn in Nitram, a fictionalised portrayal of the infamous Port Arthur attack in 1996, the worst mass shooting in Australian history and which directly precipitated that country's gun buyback program which American gun control advocates often seek to model. Nitram's director Justin Kurzel previously directed Snowtown, a fictionalised account of a group of serial killers operating in the titular Australian town in the 1990s, which I've heard is an excellent but gruelling watch. If any of you have seen Nitram or Snowtown, are they worth checking out?
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