Monsters Among us

Two cops set on catching a killer, a reoccurring shoe print, and a murderer lurking in the shadows. These are not gratuitous elements of a cheesy crime-thriller novel turned tv series. The Night Stalker was very real, and Netflix's docu-series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer delivers a gripping four-part tale that makes a truly horrifying story haunting in its reality.

True crime has always been an engaging genre, but serial killer stories have us enthralled today in a different way. We revel in their telling now more than ever before, albeit in front of a screen rather than ‘round the old campfire. We have always leaned in close to hear ghost stories, huddling together for comfort and shuddering at the spookiness of monsters in the dark. Horror has become a movie and television genre with a fanbase all its own.

There’s an excitement to scary stories. A tantalizing type of terror that we can’t seem to get enough of. We’ve become a culture fascinated by the darkest corners of the world, and more recently ourselves.

I don’t think we’ve ever had more documentaries or series featuring the killers among us. Have the repetitive violence and grotesque murdering made us numb to them. Sometimes, it feels that way.

Floating in the sea of true-crime, the story of the Night Stalker doesn’t flinch. It is confident in its own horror.

Night Stalker is a true story and its telling is theatrical and worth the watch. If curious, I’d recommend to take a look yourself. If not, continue forth.

Here I place the obligatory *SPOILER ALERT* as I may now discuss features of the show that you wish would have remained a surprise.

The show begins the story in a hurry, introducing a duo familiar to a good “catch the killer” storyline. Gil Carrillo is the younger partner with something to prove, eager for his chance to bring justice to the stranger murdering citizens of LA. Frank Salerno, famed for working as lead investigator in the case of the “Hillside Strangler”, is experienced and honest. These two combine forces to investigate a series of murders that eventually become linked to form the portfolio of a killer.

Night Stalker takes the type of plot line that you might expect. Detectives meet up to solve a case, they follow some clues, use some clever deduction, put the pieces together, and eventually catch the killer.

We all know how this ends, and yet seeing it retold in the right way still tickles the backs of our necks in a way we find terrifying and enchanting all at the same time. What makes these murder stories so mesmerizing?

The monster in the dark has been around as long as we have. There’s nothing like a good campfire ghost story to make the night seem blacker and the bumps in the night creepier. What makes tales like Night Stalker horrifying is that the monster is us.

Richard Ramirez had a cursed life. Drugs, violence, death, and tragedy appear littered throughout his childhood. When given the chance to speak, Ramirez hailed Satan. Perhaps the truth is that we all have kernels of evil within us when we’re born. Babies, they say, are pure potential. They can be anything. And we have enough history in our books to have seen them become everything - including evil.

The Night Stalker is our worst fear. Malevolence incarnate. It wakes in the night, when are at our most vulnerable. While we slumber, it glides from house to house and uses every item available to inflict death and torture upon its victims. Knives, bullets, whatever will get the job done. Its victim’s age range from 9 to nearly 90. It leaves no fingerprints, only a shoe print often found made of dirt or blood. It hints at a demonic origin, leaving the symbol of the pentagram behind. But more chilling than anything else, it is human. The Night Stalker is one of us. Intelligent, camouflaged in a crowd like a tree in the forest, it lurks among us.

The docu-series, despite documenting events from the ’80s, hits home today in a society where circumstances feel unstable. And yet we still watch.

Scary movies do funny things to us. Grown up as we might be, we all step a bit quicker after turning off the basement lights, even when we just left the empty space. We hastily hop to bed after turning out the lights, the darkness behind us growing more solid, as if pushing us forward with a warm breath on our neck. Long have humans been afraid of the dark.

As one watches Night Stalker a question begins to emerge from the mist of the mind.

What if this happened to me?

That question takes the gripping, entertaining thrill of a tv show and forges it into a very real fear. Because the Night Stalker was real. As are countless other killers.

Of course, it will never happen. The odds of getting struck by lightning are 1 in 500,000. Serial killers might be real, but it could never happen to us. Nobody would ever randomly select our house, lift up our kitchen window, leave footprints with dirt from our garden, and stalk up the stairs to our bedroom in the middle of a dark night. That could never happen to us…

Right?