Los Angeles Times

'The Ted Bundy Tapes' and 'Shockingly Evil': Why Joe Berlinger doubled down on the serial killer

The timing was uncanny: Days apart, on the weekend marking the 30th anniversary of the execution of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Joe Berlinger ("Paradise Lost" trilogy, "Some Kind of Monster") premiered his Zac Efron-starring Bundy film "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" at the Sundance Film Festival and unveiled the four-part docu-series "The Ted Bundy Tapes" to voracious true-crime fanatics on Netflix.

"It's a little bizarre," Berlinger admitted, stopping by the L.A. Times studio at Sundance. "I'd love to take credit for this master plan ... but the fact that I even did both is somewhat coincidental."

It was nearly two years ago that Berlinger was contacted by author Stephen Michaud with a tantalizing offer to dive into hours and hours of taped conversations with Bundy that Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth wrote into the nonfiction book "Conversations with a Killer."

"He said, 'I've never really

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