Some people were talking about it on Facebook a few days ago, so I decided to take one for the team last night, and watched it.
Wow.
That it involves the kidnapping - TWICE - of an adolescent girl by a neighbor who had a crush on her is the least weird aspect of the whole story. There’s enough material that was just glossed over to make a miniseries, although I’m not sure most people could handle it.
AFAIK, it is unrated but should be NC-17 for content, even though it has no profanity or overt violent or sexual content. It really is that disturbing.
I was hesitant to watch it because I don’t usually go in for “real life murder mystery” shows and documentaries. I’m a single woman living alone, I don’t need to scare myself like that!
But this one I watched and not only is it not scary (the female child victim is alive and well and interviewed) it’s just…wow. Fucking nuts. This sounds rude to say but it’s a “great story” at least as far as stories go.
My jaw fell to the floor at the car ride with the dad and the abductor (you know, two boys) and it didn’t get back up until the show was over.
It’s sad to say but I feel these people’s being Mormons helped lead to their naivety. When they said they were Mormons I was like “yeah that totally fits.”
I’m also going to keep this in my pocket for when people say “America is getting more violent and scary.” Hey lemme tell you what shit was going down in 1974…
I’d like to know how Jan managed to heal from this (or if she did) and how the other family is doing now. My guess is that they’re reeeeeeeeally messed up.
Well, now I really want to watch it, but is it so dark it’ll leave me depressed? I was deeply disturbed and a little depressed after reading John Fowles’ The Collector. Is this movie on a par with that, heebie-jeebie-wise?
I don’t believe them to be as naive as they’re portrayed. I believe the truth is probably more twisted. I mean, the mom still wistfully smiles about their affair in 2018 after everything he’s done.
At one point when Jan was in the Catholic school in CA and she called home, one of her parents asks her if B still wants to marry her, and she corrects them, saying, “I want to marry him!” And their response was just so accepting of that, like they didn’t think anything of all the abuse that must have gotten her to that point of wanting to marry her abuser. Young girls marry older men in the LDS church all the time, right? I mean I’m sure it was out of fashion by then but still, if marriage is God’s will then who is anyone to question two people who want to get married.
Yeah, I went to bed feeling pretty gross after watching that.
Yeah, just wow, that’s a weird family and community. I was glad to see that Berchtold got convicted even though he convinced the victim and her family not to testify against him.
I haven’t seen anything in the way of a “making of” background, but the way it’s presented, that was a whole lot of home movies of really mundane daily stuff. I’d like to know how much was recreated and how much was authentic. For example, did the FBI really film themselves opening a storage unit door only discover the RV was gone? If it’s all recreated, they went to a lot of trouble to filter and age the “film” to mimic 1974. It’s a pet peeve of mine about these kinds of shows, such as Dateline or shows on the ID channel; if you’re recreating a scene, be honest about it and admit it.
The home movies that were splotchy and showed their faces were “real”. The ones that was just fuzzy, and didn’t show their faces, were most likely the re-enactments.
Here’s an article from “Vanity Fair” that goes into more detail about some things in the movie, and some things that aren’t in the movie (Jan has a son from a marriage that ended in divorce; the people who would like to take her father out back and shoot him - heard that more than once - are too late, because he died in November) and it does include spoilers, so watch at your own risk if you haven’t seen it yet, and want to.
She’s a fairly prominent actress, although I had never previously heard of her, and her IMDB page goes back almost 30 years.