Thanks to the glut of wannabe prestige content, many might argue that the golden age of true crime-related media is over, and has been for a while now. But even if that’s the case, then Apple TV’s Black Bird is the exception to the rule. Based on a true story, Black Bird is told through the eyes of Jimmy Keene (played by Taron Egerton), a convicted felon who makes a deal with the FBI to obtain an early release from his 10-year sentence. In order to obtain an early release, he agrees to go undercover to a degree: by befriending Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser), a prison inmate suspected of murdering over a dozen young girls, in order to solicit a jailhouse confession backed by solid evidence.
Told over the course of six episodes, Black Bird is a perfect weekend watch if you’re looking for something with the poetic license of a fictional narrative but grounded in the terrifying reality of humanity’s capacity for evil. If anything, it could easily be described as a perfect mash-up of Jonathan Demme’s iconic 1991 horror film The Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher’s Netflix psychological masterpiece Mindhunter. At first, this descriptor could come across as an unconventional or far-fetched logline. But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. And if you’re a fan of either or both, Black Bird, an underappreciated and haunting miniseries, should be your next must-see.
‘Black Bird’s Real-Life Villain Larry Hall Is Just as Terrifying as Hannibal Lecter
On its face, Paul Walter Hauser’s portrayal of Larry Hall is arguably the diametric opposite of Anthony Hopkins’ unabashedly, flamboyantly evil Hannibal Lecter. Though Larry presents himself as a quiet, mild-mannered, and at times sympathetic prisoner, both characters present an innate shared savagery. Hannibal’s might be outré from the get-go, but Larry’s is a bit more of a slow burn in its reveal. His evil is equally innate and endemic, which makes it all the more sinister.
However, unlike Hannibal, Larry Hall was a real person, much like the slew of serial killers who make their own indelible cameos in Mindhunter — among them Richard Speck, Charles Manson, Ed Kemper, and a spectral-but-ever-present Dennis Rader (known best by the sensationalist self-styled moniker “BTK,” an acronym for “bind, torture, and kill”). This fact alone makes his character, and Hauser’s portrayal of him as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an insidious type of meta-horror for the viewer.
The Protagonists from ‘Mindhunter,’ ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ and ‘Black Bird’ Share Eerie Similarities
The unveiling of Larry’s true nature to both Jimmy and the audience is tonally Fincherian and extremely redolent of many of Mindhunter‘s interview subjects — specifically, the ones who are eventually caught, thanks to the ever-evolving methodology of the show’s version of the FBI’s real-life Behavioral Science Unit. Much like Mindhunter‘s Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), Black Bird’s Jimmy uses his own improvised techniques to slowly coax information from Larry. Much like Holden, Jimmy flies by the seat of his pants, but his approach paradoxically yields far greater tension imbued within the story than the audience would suspect.
Indeed, Jimmy lacks the same type of training as the BSU agents of Mindhunter. And strangely enough, this makes him a similar type of authorial stand-in to Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs, who, at the onset of the film, is an FBI academy student who must learn the lay of the land by hitting the ground and running. In this way, both Jimmy and Clarice possess a reluctant naïveté, one that translates as an authorial stand-in for the viewer. Though both characters are intelligent in their own unique, respective ways — Jimmy’s presents in the form of on-your-toes street smarts, while Clarice’s is more academically inclined — neither truly manages to have the upper hand, at least compared to the respective targets they’re meant to inveigle for information.
Indeed, the cat-and-mouse genre present in both The Silence of the Lambs and Mindhunter is also encoded in Black Bird‘s DNA, and all three invert or subvert a tried and true trope to wildly successful, inventively unnerving, and enduring results. So if you’re in the mood for a simmering and artful thrill, Black Bird won’t just hit the mark: It will leave a memorable scar.
