Zac Efron Looks Impossibly Creepy In The First Trailer For His New Ted Bundy Movie
This definitely isn't High School Musical.
Just in case you haven’t got enough Ted Bundy swimming around in your psyche following the release of Netflix’s four-part docu-series Conversation with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, the trailer for a new fiction film about Bundy has just hit the web starring Zac Efron (yes, that Zac Efron) as the most notorious serial killer in American history.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile is told from the perspective of Liz Kloepfer (played by Lily Collins), who dated Bundy even as he murdered dozens of other young women between 1974 and 1978. According to director Joe Berlinger, who helmed both Extremely Wicked and the Netflix series, the idea is to put audiences in the position of Bundy’s loved ones, who had no idea the charming young man was actually a murderous sociopath.
“I made the conscious decision to not really show any murder or any criminality on Bundy’s part because the whole movie is experienced through the POV of the people who loved him, especially his longtime girlfriend,” Berlinger told Thrillist. “So by the time you get to the trial and finally at the end of the movie when you realize what a horrible person he is, I wanted to give the audience the same experience that the real character was having.”
Berlinger said the same idea applied to the casting of Efron. “[Efron] still is a heartthrob to a certain segment of the population, and that’s what Bundy was,” explained the director. “Playing with his real-life image, turning it on its head just as I was turning the whole convention of the serial killer film on its head to me was a very attractive idea.”
Based on the trailer, it definitely seems to have worked.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival later today. It does not yet have a release date.