The Dark Night

I recently wrote of a Netflix documentary series that I found to be excellent, about the Space Shuttle Challenger. I've also watched another series that I found to be rather less excellent, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. It's a 4-part look at the horrible 1985 crime spree of Richard Ramirez, the efforts of police detectives to identify him, and his ultimate capture.

It's not that Night Stalker is a bad documentary, but watching it does call attention to many ways in which a documentary about the Golden State Killer, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, was a superlative work. In comparison, there's something a little ghoulish about this Night Stalker documentary. That's an accusation you might have thought could be leveled against any examination of a serial killer -- and might well have been right otherwise.

The devil is in the details, or if not the devil, then a major difference in apparent intent. As Night Stalker chronicles the many crimes of its subject over the first three installments of the series, there seems to be a casual insensitivity to the victims. The filmmakers do interview both survivors of assault by Ramirez and family members whose loved ones were murdered by the monster. Still, there's an exploitative quality to the many crime scene photos displayed with only minor censoring in the documentary.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark focused largely on citizen detectives like author Michelle McNamara, who had taken up the cause of hunting a serial killer. Because these people aren't "professionals" as such, the cost of letting a touch of evil into their lives felt like it had more weight. Grizzled career detectives are not only the investigators in the case of Ramirez, they're the celebrated protagonists of the Night Stalker documentary. And without doubt, they done a good service to society in catching this killer -- making sacrifices to their own psyches and families as also made clear in this series.

But the Night Stalker documentary is more interested in making heroes of these detectives than it is observing the loss of the victims. On occasion, the filmmakers are so dogged in this pursuit that they obliviously include some decidedly unheroic actions on the part of the detectives. It doesn't feel like directors James Carroll and Tiller Russell are aware of how potent a moment it is when a San Francisco detective proudly explains how he physically beat information out of an informant. One could well probe whether such behavior is ever right for the police, or if here it's in a difficult-to-weigh area when the information led directly to the identification of Ramirez. But the documentary neither casts judgment nor invites any; it's "just the facts."

It isn't usually content to let those facts speak for themselves, however; the documentary is definitely crafted to invoke a particular mood. To exaggerate the creeping dread of already-horrible circumstances, we get slow-motion footage of gnawing rats, firing guns, and shadowed footsteps. To exaggerate the sense that the killer could strike anywhere, the on-screen maps of Los Angeles feel deliberately unhelpful, whipping around in 3D at ground level in a way that makes it impossible to tell where any one event takes place relative to any other.

This Night Stalker documentary did hold my attention, and I powered through all four parts at a pace I rarely set for streaming TV. But at the end... I didn't feel especially good about it, and felt that a more informative, better-told account of the crimes of Richard Ramirez is still out there. If you're a true crime junkie, perhaps this is the show for you. I'd say for me, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is only a C+.