Evil Has a Name: The Untold Story of the Golden State Killer Investigation
Evil Has a Name: The Untold Story of the Golden State Killer Investigation is an Audible-original Audiobook by Paul Holes (Author, Narrator), Jim Clemente (Author, Narrator), and Peter McDonnell (Author). It documents the crime spree and eventual capture of Joseph James DeAngelo, who committed at least 13 murders, more than 50 rapes, and over 100 burglaries in California from 1976 to 1986. He was arrested in 2018 after DNA technology connected him to one of the crimes.
Because it’s an Audible original (a subscription-based audiobook service through Amazon), Evil Has a Name is an audiobook that never released in print. It is told through first-hand accounts of survivors, investigators, and others involved with the case. Even though it was never a print book, it has still remediated some of that medium’s qualities: it is divided into chapters, follows a basic plot structure, relies on narration, and has “authors.”
Audiobook affordances
The audiobook medium has its own affordances that make it unique from print books and that made the horror portrayed in Evil Has a Name especially gripping. As Iben Have and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen pointed out in Sonic mediatization of the book: affordances of the audiobook, “the voice can produce the effect of intimacy through vocal qualities and vocal performance…the audiobook can still, disembodied or not, produce the sense of presence — as an effect” (54). When you listen to an audiobook, the narrator (in this case a first-hand witness) is delivering the story directly into your ear, usually through headphones that create an individualized listening experience. Hearing a survivor’s voice as they talk about the time that the Golden State Killer attacked them, or hearing investigators through the course of the investigation heighten the emotional arousal of a listener because of the “parasocial company” the voices produce (Have & Stougaard Pedersen 135). Despite the lack of visual cues, it’s hard not to identify and empathize with the narrators. In this way, the voice acts as a rhetorical device that traditional print books do not benefit from. This excerpt is an example of a victim discussing the time that she was attacked.
Another affordance of the audiobook is mobility. As a medium that was traditionally rejected for being lazy, low-brow, and lacking control, this is something that has allowed audiobooks to enjoy a surge in popularity as portability “has become ever more important in modern society” (Have & Stougaard Pedersen 132). This mobility allows users to listen to audiobooks anywhere and while multitasking, something that print books do not allow for since they demand almost complete attention. Audiobooks are portable (they can even be downloaded and listened to when users don’t have service) and can be attended to while doing other things, such as exercising and commuting. Evil Has a Name is no exception; Audible allows subscribers to download titles and listen to them as they please. Personally, I listened to it while I was training for a marathon because I found it engaging and distracting from the task at hand (running). This mobility does not detract from the experience of the horror. If anything, experiencing the narrative on suburban streets that were likely similar to those prowled by the Golden State Killer made it even more unsettling. The intimate experience of listening to the horror is odd to attend to while in public when no one else can hear what’s playing in your headphones. To be terrified and isolated while in a crowded place is uncanny and mirrors the horror the Golden State Killer inflicted on his victims by attacking women while their husbands/families were home.
Transgression of Boundaries
Evil Has a Name transgresses the boundaries between good and evil, safe and dangerous. By creating a piece of horror through audiobook that can be experienced while attending to other things, the distinction between where the horror ends and “real life” begins is blurred. Similarly, the killer and the crimes “disrupts the social order by dissolving the basis of its signifying system, its network of differences” (Pinedo 21). The Golden State Killer would prey on women when he knew that their husbands and/or family were home, violating the pretense that there is safety in numbers, especially in domestic settings. He terrorized previously peaceful communities and created an atmosphere of distrust and panic. When he was caught, he was arrested in his suburban home. He had a wife and children and used to be a police officer, showing how evil can truly live among us and go undetected for years. By breaking into gated communities and into crowded homes, the killer became abject because he didn’t respect the borders between society and depravity.
For more on this production, see my Postmodern Horror Snapchat Story.
Conversations with a Killer: the Ted Bundy Tapes
Another true-crime example of postmodern horror is the Netflix original documentary series, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (Berlinger 2019). This four-part series advertises that it’s the true story of Ted Bundy, as told by the man himself through recorded audio tapes. The show documents the crimes he was found guilty of, and his escapes and arrests. Because it is a television series, it includes a lot of visual information to supplement the audio tapes.
Mediation of Horror
The show is incredibly multimedia as it pulls from audio tapes, videos, and photographs. Almost everything has been altered to look older: the videos are grainy and sped up, the photographs are black and white, the audio tapes are shown being played on cassettes. The show heavily depicts the mechanization of the tapes and other older technologies that were being used in the time of Ted Bundy’s crimes. The intro shows a cassette being put into a player and the transition scenes are often photo negatives sliding along a reel and audibly clicking into place. Because the Ted Bundy tapes were originally recorded to be made into a book, there is no video footage of them being made. Instead, the video footage appears to be borrowed stock video that’s been laid over with aging filters so as not to be anachronistic. The videos look like found footage or home videos rather than contemporary reenactments produced for the show. Even footage that could be modern (such as landscape shots of the settings) is still done in the same old-fashioned style. The confessional-style videos are the only ones without a grainy filter, but they are shakey and look almost homemade. This hypermediation that calls attention to the act of viewing is a hallmark of postmodern horror. The trailer below illustrates many of these examples of hypermediation, such as playing a cassette tape, showing old video clips, and presenting actual photographs of victims/suspects on polaroids.
Blurring Good and Evil
Ted Bundy is an example of a postmodern monster because he so successfully blurred the lines between good and evil. His hallmark charm and good looks were what enabled him to entice and kill so many young women, and also what allowed him to evade suspicion for so long. The show capitalizes on this, and within the first few minutes we’re reminded that he was politically active, a social worker, was well-liked by friends and family, and was religious. His physical depictions are also positive in the series; he looks attractive, calm, and speaks amicably to the camera. Even the production of the show itself blurs the boundaries between good and evil by setting out to give a voice to the convicted monster. The tapes were made because he wanted to tell his own story, even though he didn’t change anyone’s mind about his guilt. He is uncanny because he did all of the morally upstanding things that good citizens do, but killed at least 30 women in the process. The second episode’s title, “One of Us” really drives this point home.
The show is also self-reflexive in the way that it establishes some common true-crime tropes, almost begrudgingly. The theme of police incompetency comes up because there were so many close calls where they almost caught him but didn’t. The show also focuses heavily on appearance, not only of Ted but of his victims. They’re shown physically through descriptions, but not given much characterization of their own humanity.
Comparing the Two
Putting these two works into comparison shows how similar they are despite using vastly different mediums. First, they both use the power of voice to narrate a story through first-hand accounts. Evil Has a Name is narrated by survivors and investigators, and Conversations With a Killer is advertised as being told by the perpetrator.
Both also present their narratives as nonfiction, increasing the horror by claiming that it’s reality. The comfort of knowing that it’s “just a story” is taken away in the true-crime experience, making the horror more disturbing. The streamlined, single-sensory experience of an audiobook seems to achieve this to an even greater extent than the television series. There was more room for error in a visual and auditory medium, and the Netflix show was weakened by the inauthentic and hypermediated video segments. Hypothetically, an audiobook with Ted Bundy as the narrator would be incredibly chilling because the intimate voice talking right into your ear would be that of a notorious serial killer.
The mediums also contain similarities. Both Netflix and Audible are subscription-based services, and both of these productions were released exclusively on their respective platforms. This means that they were designed to be experienced individually, taking away the co-viewing atmosphere of traditional horror movies that came out in movie theaters. However, studies have shown that co-viewing through social media engagement can positively influence the emotional arousal experienced when consuming media, so platforms like Netflix and Audible where shows/audiobooks are perceived as being virally popular could make up for the lack of physical co-viewing. The productions were also released in their entirety instead of one episode at a time. This allows both productions to be binged, creating an engrossing experience of horror for the audience.
Both also use mediation, but one to a more obvious extent. Evil Has a Name remediates common elements of print books, but these elements seem fully integrated into the audiobook. Conversations With a Killer, on the other hand, blatantly remediates past technologies in an attempt to gain clout as a documentary. The more integrated approach was, in my opinion, more engrossing because there weren’t the distractions that hypermediation inevitably brings to the horror genre.
These two works of true-crime that explore the stories of two of the United State’s most prolific serial killers both do so by privelaging audio. They show how remediation is an inevitable part of growing the ever-developing storytelling channels. Putting the two in conversation shows just how similar two productions can be despite being from two completely different mediums.
Works Cited
Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Created by Joe Berlinger, Netflix, 2019.
Cui, Xi, et al. “From Immediate Community to Imagined Community: Social Identity and the Co-Viewing of Media Event.” Global Media and China, vol. 1, no. 4, 30 Nov. 2016, pp. 481–496., doi:10.1177/2059436416681177.
Have, I., & Pedersen, B. S. (2013). Sonic mediatization of the book: affordances of the audiobook. MedieKultur: Journal of Media & Communication Research, 29(54), 123–140. Retrieved from https://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/logi…
Holes, Paul et al.. Evil Has a Name: The Untold Story of the Golden State Killer Investigation, Audible, 2018, https://www.amazon.com/Evil-Has-Name-Untold-Investigation/dp/B07H7RYQ5P
Pinedo, Isabel. “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film & Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, Spring/Summer96 1996, p. 17. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=fah&AN=9704024333&site=ehost-live.