CNN
—
One of many standard tips of recent docuseries and actuality reveals is blurring the traces between truth and fiction, presenting tales that play off the viewers’s familiarity with Lifetime films and different types of drama. What distinguishes “American Nightmare,” Netflix’s newest wrinkle on that system, is watching the police fall prey to the identical mentality, believing that life consciously imitated artwork.
The quick model of what occurred in 2015 does sound virtually too weird to be believed: A younger couple, Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins, had somebody break into their house, drugging and binding him and kidnapping her. After a seek for Huskins, she later turned up tons of of miles away, saying she had been raped by her unseen abductor earlier than he let her go.
Like many productions on this style, “American Nightmare” capitalizes upon video of interviews recorded throughout the police station, TV information accounts and present interviews with these concerned, in addition to the rising skepticism of authorities relating to Quinn’s story. Even the endings to the episodes have a cliffhanger-style really feel.
What actually made the case resonate with the media, although, was the idea that Huskins had perpetrated a hoax seemingly modeled after the film “Gone Woman,” wherein a lady fakes her personal disappearance. The movie, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, had been launched the 12 months earlier than and was primarily based on a well-liked guide.
(October 3): This extremely anticipated adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as troubled couple Nick and Amy Dunne. Their issues escalate when Amy disappears and Nick is the prime suspect. The guide has a shocking ending; the movie might not.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.take away(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” top=”930″ width=”1400″ loading=’lazy’/>The overt connection to “Gone Woman” makes “American Nightmare” extra distinctive, however stylistically it’s removed from distinctive. Certainly, there was a powerful temptation to each develop actuality reveals primarily based on film ideas – see Netflix’s “Squid Game: The Challenge” as a latest instance – and churn out docuseries that unfold just like the sort of homicide mysteries one may discover on NBC’s “Dateline,” Oxygen or Investigation Discovery.
Within the trendy period of actuality TV, the technique has produced some memorable excesses. In 2007, for instance, CBS aired “Child Nation,” a collection modeled after the book-turned-movie “The Lord of the Flies,” situating youngsters in a distant New Mexico location and seeing if they may construct a society. The controversial program was canceled after one season.
“American Nightmare” notably, comes from the producers of “The Tinder Swindler,” which targeted on a person who seduced ladies after which fleeced them out of their cash, a plot featured on one other docuseries, “Love Fraud.” Additional blurring the traces, each employed dramatic reenactments to flesh out the interviews, with one of many former’s victims, Cecilie Fjellhøy, at one level making the connection overt, saying, “What occurred to me felt like a film.”
Films and TV do, certainly, present a useful sort of shorthand for processing uncommon occasions, which in days of previous would often immediate folks to ask (or not less than marvel) in the event that they had been on “Candid Digital camera,” a present that staged elaborate pranks, when one thing odd was taking place to them.
At the moment, the cameras are in all places – together with the palms of our palms – however the way in which we course of issues via dramatic storytelling stays largely the identical. What makes “American Nightmare” so unsettling is that on this case, versus believing a lady who stated she’d been assaulted, the police appeared to rapidly pivot to that strategy too.
“American Nightmare” is enjoying on Netflix.