David Fincher's serial killer chat 'em up MINDHUNTER

That clarification... does not affect the lol

it is still called MINDHUNTER

I'm guessing this (not very good) British comedy is on nobody's radar

http://empireonline.media/jpg/70/0/0/640/480/aspectfit/0/0/0/0/0/0/c/articles/58c908747c5c5bdd3ca6791b/Mindhorn%20poster.jpeg

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Harris never wrote anything called "Manhunter" anyway, Michael Mann did.

Harris's Jack Crawford character was partially based on Douglas, which is presumably why he semi-borrowed the title back off Mann for his book. It's a rich tapestry

Available on Netflix from today, really looking forward to this.

I'll reserve judgment until I finish the season but halfway in I will say Holt McCallany as Fred Ward is A+

pvmic i just finshed binging the whole thing

omg so good

I HAVE THOUGHTS

- I was skeptical that having Groff as Douglas’s substitute would mean Douglas would aggrandize himself & his achievements bc that’s the way he is, but he does not come off well by the end & i really like that, that really put it over the top for me

- the slow burn of neuroses between the three of them is fantastic, because a job like that cant not eat away at the very fabric of yr “self”

- casting of all the criminal subjects was incredible, and the actors were a+. from kemper to speck, not a bum note in any of them

- groff’s transition from ep 1 to ep 10, physically, emotionally, is SO good. anna torv is magical and i love her forever

love it

kinda want to watch it again? #saddo

oh and holt mccallany was grizzled tv cop PERFECT

3 eps to go here...

Veg said everything I was gonna say. Really enjoyed the hell out of this. The lead actors and the guys playing all the killers are all excellent.

I’m not hugely fascinated by serial killers themselves but I love the detecting and psychology angle so this was squarely in my wheelhouse. It felt like Zodiac: the Series in a lot of ways.

Ha I obviously didn’t see the post st the top of the thread

oh and holt mccallany was grizzled tv cop PERFECT

I'm only 2 eps in but man is it nice to see McCallany again. Lights Out was a fine little series.

don't think i've seen Groff play hetero before

that was a little weird at first, not gonna lie

I've really hardened my heart against this because I'm not much of a fan of Fincher, serial killer fic and stuff where the FBI are the good guys. But I suspect from what I'm reading it will probably win me over and become a mucho guilty pleasure watch.

how bloody/disturbing is this show

How violent/gory is this? The premise seems pretty bloodless, but are there reenactments or flashbacks or even just autopsies/ lots of photos?

ha xp

ha weird

basically I want to watch this (loved Zodiac) but my partner is an automatic no on serial killer shit, and I'm squeamish enough myself these days to not necessarily want to spend 10 hours marinating in murder naturalism.

99% of “gore” is crime scene photographs. there’s no dramatization of the murders themselves vis flashbacks or anything - the horrors are mostly communicated through conversation

there is one v shocking moment in ep1 that is quite gory but passes by v quickly

It’s not very gory overall. There is a scene in the first episode with some brief gore but it’s not serial killer-related.

Apart from that it’s mostly just crime scene photos and graphic verbal descriptions of crimes.

*LOTS* of ookiness and creepy shit though.

X-post

yeah, and the crime scene photos are not lingered upon & are faintly colored or black & white
often by the time you realize what you are seeing it’s already off camera

def not for the faint hearted but nowhere near the gorefest you might expect

fincher himself has described the show as mainly being about conversations & that def bears out

perfect, thanks!

One of my favorite bits was the looks Anna Torv kept shooting at Groff during their first meeting when he'd interject. Close up as he writes in notebook: "BOOK?"

enjoying this so far but Brandy is otm here

Fincher: this is Debbie, she's a real human woman
Me: lmaoooo oh for sure man

— BranDIE Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) October 15, 2017

on put more simply Debbie is basically the Cool Girl from the Gone Girl rant

Otherwise this has been v enjoyable

*quickly crosses off “looking for my Debbie (watch Mindhunter!!)” from my dating profile*

great we've established that this drama contains fictional characters

idk man some characters resemble types of people you find out there in the world, some are more like narrative devices with legs

Debbie’s introductory scenes are silly maybe but she didn’t strike me as unrealistic past that?

I've been re-watching Fringe so it's mildly amusing to see Anna Torv play a Boston-based FBI consultant. Am glad she's getting regular work again too.

I'm about two-thirds in and this is pretty good! And despite the dour subject matter, it's genuinely funny at points - that one killer who couldn't stop crying, the seat-switching scene in the airplane, Holt McCallany in general.

yeah the quippy dialogue is good and I'm glad that they weren't afraid to allow some humor in -- for a show that's pretty tense it's also got a nice contrasting relaxed vibe about it

oh and the music cues are great. the Exile 'I Wanna Kiss You All Over' cue at the end of the shoe fetish episode was so good

I wanted to single out a really excellent shot, when Monte Rissell is talking about how it all could have been different for him if he'd stayed where he wanted to, and the camera tracks in on the back of his head. The combination of his words and the shot was inexplicably moving.

The episode, I think it’s the sixth or seventh, where it’s about the characters coming to terms with their new roles and we see a glimpse of their lives and the toll this is all taking and the ways they’re dealing with the work, was really well timed

i love how flat & deadeyed & sarcastic Ford is in the final episode, compared to his wide-eyed enthusiam in ep 1

oh and the music cues are great.

Eh I don't know... some of them are little too on-the-nose. "Psycho Killer" and "I Don't Like Mondays" come to mind.

"Psycho Killer" seemed pretty bad tbh

this show still rules

i like on the nose

*makes note on little pad*

POST

is this all fincher or is it one of those 'he sets the parameters in e01' deals where they bring in working tv directors for the remainder to ape his style

he directed 4 of the 10 eps

Asif Kapadia, at least, was an inspired choice.

idk man some characters resemble types of people you find out there in the world, some are more like narrative devices with legs

yeah i get that, i guess i didn't think that character is badly written so much as dormant. i'm only three episodes in and her scenes have been p well done and indicative of character imo but she doesn't do anything and hasn't got much purpose, so far. that feels different from a character who is a cipher or a plot device.

i watched one ep and her role seemed to be mainly to ensure that the show isn't literally all men which is.. laudable i guess as a gesture but hardly enough really

one of the leads is also a woman

she doesn't turn up til later though

fair enough.

this is a photo of fbi agents in 1977. note the shaggy hairstyles, the sideburns, the mustache. NOT NEARLY ENOUGH MUSTACHES IN THIS SHOW

https://mikemcclaughry.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/fbi_agents_raiding_cedars_complex_-_scientology.png

it is p amazing who the alarm systems dude with the moustache was. promises an interesting storyline.

Damn, this is great.

Watching S1E2, and, above all else, I’m just so happy that Holt McCallany got to play a role like this.

Sorry, I meant S1E5

I had no idea he'd been around for so long till I looked at his IMDB page. He's in one of my favourite movies, Casualties of War; must be a small part, not listed on the main cast page.

i got a little bit of my Mindhunter jones from the Apple series Black Bird, which is another true crime serial killer profiling-type story. Similarly not exploitative, the only violence onscreen is during a prison riot when it's visited upon some prisoners and a couple of vv unlucky guards. It's a bit more pulpy but I thought it was very good. It features one of Ray Liotta's final performances and he's tough to watch, knowing what happens IRL soon and how his character's body is also failing him. Taron Egerton is pretty exceptional in the lead role, Paul Walter Hauser even better as real-life killer Larry Hall.

yeah Black Bird was a+
Hauser was so good! i only knew him from comedy roles before that

Greg Kinnear, also good! His early scenes, interrogating Hall and faced with the inept local cops, were vv Mindhuntery.

yeah definitely!

Just watched a few of episodes of this. It's OK, but it's no "Zodiac," and knowing how perfect that movie is and how obsessive Fincher is about actors and period details and stuff I couldn't help but watch this and imagine him holding his nose when Netflix kept telling him this is a TV show with a limited budget and limited time for 100 takes and sometimes you just got to move on. I'm a little surprised by Groff's weird acting, and was wondering if he was doing an impression or just being ... weird. There's also a lot of on the nose stuff that felt pretty distracting, again, mostly because "Zodiac" sets a high bar. I suppose the surprising amount of sex in this is thematic, but at the same time, it also scans as the usual gratuitous "this ain't network TV" signifier.

Love McCallany, and whoever is playing Kemper. Wikipedia has a 2019 picture of Kemper, and it looks shockingly like McCallany! (Not going to post it here, because still creepy).

Agree Zodiac's better, but awfully high bar. There are a couple of videos on YouTube that have the real Kemper--interview footage--and the Mindhunter version side-by-side, and it's uncanny.

I'm pretty whatever about Zodiac and I don't know why, this (in contrast) is one of my favourite series and I'm sad it didn't get a third season.

I love reading about the real-life inspiration for Wendy Carr, (Ann Burgess, who is a nursing professor, not a psychologist), she seems extremely cool https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/sites/bc-magazine/bc-magazine-summer-2019-issue/features/mastermind.html

I prefer this to zodiac even though I really do love zodiac. it’s a genuinely unsettling show and a terrifying one, even though it does not depict a single act of violence, except for the very first scene in the first episode.

The three (I believe) episodes I saw were so queasily unbalanced in that regard - virtually no onscreen violence, lots of onscreen sex, lots of talk of sexual violence - that I imagine that effect was intentional, though as I said, still feeling a little on the nose and also a little gratuitous. A mix of show-don't-tell/tell-don't-show/show-and-tell.

I think like any of these shows its themes gather momentum as it goes on. I agree with everyone else - did a rewatch about two years ago and thought it was even better the second time. Wish they made more. It also looks amazing.

maybe this is just me but i never thought to compare them?

even though there’s obvious throughlines between the two it never occured to me to directly compare Zodiac with Mindhunter.

The skill of the Zodiac movie in its detail & storytelling & commitment to sources & victims is the reason i was confident that Mindhunter would be good

Zodiac the case is such a sprawling morass of endless threads leading to nowhere with no perpetrator & the movie is mainly led by character actors driving the plot

where Mindhunter is focused on crimes with endpoints AND perpetrators. Which makes for a very different animal storytelling wise, structurally etc

to me the main throughline or point of comparison is the effect these cases have on the people investigating them … and both are really successful at conveying that overall

i think the sex stuff in Mindhunter bears itself out by the end of the series …

and not to be sarcastic but Josh have you ever NOT confidently but wrongly summed up a show after 2 or 3 episodes LOL <3

re: period details, isn't there a making of where they show you how they obsessively cgi out loads of anachronistic modern-day detail that no-one would ever notice, like drop kerbs?

i thought season one was quite annoying, in a few ways but especially the murderer of the week

season two frankly incredible tbh

xpost There was this great one re: Zodiac:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW2xhBSfFps

xxxpost to Veg: I didn't mean to convey or imply any confidence in my summation, lol. I'm not even sure it was a summation, just a description! I do find it wild that you never considered "Zodiac." Also Fincher, also '70s, also serial killer, similar look, etc. Like I said, I loved the Kemper scenes, but superficially at least I also kept thinking of the John Carroll Lynch interview scenes in "Zodiac."

VG's differences are all valid; I think one thing they share is this fascinating triangle at their core, Graysmith/Toschi/Avery vs. Ford/Tench/Carr. (Why I thought the second season tailed off a bit once they pushed Carr to the background.) Love this shot after they get their funding.

https://i.postimg.cc/28NKv17M/funding.jpg

you guys are going to make me watch this again

That's another thing they have in common: every time either thread is revived, I feel this compulsion to rewatch!

agree with omar & fgti that I actually preferred the show to zodiac -- it felt like he improved on the clarity depicting something that says something about the subject matter

i think the show is similar to Zodiac in the respect it's about the haunting unknowable, like maybe you can close a case but you'll never really "get it".

There's a movie with Rami Malek coming out, The Amateur, that I want to see primarily for Holt McCallany (Tench).

I watched the second Tom Cruise Reacher movie recently and seeing Holt in it made me reminisce about this wonderful show

also very good as Fritz Von Erich in The Iron Claw

i think the show is similar to Zodiac in the respect it's about the haunting unknowable, like maybe you can close a case but you'll never really "get it".

― omar little, Thursday, February 13, 2025 12:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yeah when I say clarity I def dont mean about the cases themselves haha

i think what i appreciate about this show is its def not about the obsession of some dudes with finding a killer, but about this particular sickness permeating the culture, arguably getting into the territory of what's wrong with men, which would be maybe a bit of a tired concept if explicitly stated but it's more subtextual. the more obvious bits i actually do frequently like a lot though, the vv illuminating conversation Holden has in the bar with the visiting expert on this pathology was fascinating precisely because the characters are just talking it out, like they might IRL.

Bought this the other day:

https://i.postimg.cc/dtxmxfxw/shadow.jpg

I don't think it's the basis for Mindhunter--above the title there's a quote from John Douglas, author of Mindhunter--but there must be some connection.

Robert Ressler’s “Whoever Fights Monsters” would be my pick for direct inspiration imo - he was Douglas’s former partner (and v loose inspo for the character of Tench) they conducted the first series of interviews together at the BSU … and he helped create Vi-CAP (the book is more about Ressler than Douglas but thats mostly bc there’s beef between them & major egos lol)

anyway its a good read & highly recommend to anyone who dug the show

Reading John Douglas' book--more out of appreciation (Christmas gift from a friend) than genuine interest; how could it possibly be as good as the show--so I finished yet another rewatch. I've posted so much above, but:

1) was surprised, after checking, that both David Berkowitz and Wayne Williams are still alive (didn't check anybody else);

2) I think this is the Magnificent Ambersons--what could have been--of television. They spend so much time beautifully setting up the BTK story--and continue to, even after they veer off to Atlanta--and that's where they end. (Did they ever get any flak for the ending? Very Silence of the Lambs.) To just leave all that hanging, without a third season, is maddening.

got a little jump scare seeing this guy in an insurance tv ad the other day
https://d3q27bh1u24u2o.cloudfront.net/news/2026-01/2368x2.lt50nk2_.png

https://lbbonline.com/news/Progressive-Passive-Progressive