Michael Bay's Born Evil is a queasy mismatch of director and genre
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Per Max's promotional materials for Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior: "Meet Hadden Clark, the most vicious serial killer you've never heard of – who confessed his crimes to his cellmate because he thought the convicted murderer was Jesus."
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The story
You might not have heard of Hadden Clark, but you've probably heard about Born Evil, at least in passing – because ID's latest docuseries "event" is directed by Michael Bay, who's best known for summer-movie "product" like the Bad Boys and Transformer franchises.
Bay is probably better described as a project manager of action-sequence pageantry than as an auteur – but there's nothing wrong with that.
We've talked on Best Evidence more than a few times about what it would look like if the true-crime genre drafted authors and directors from other genres, and while Michael Bay isn't the first name that would have sprung to my mind in that regard – or the thirty-first, tbh – it did occur to me once I started getting PR notices about Born Evil that Bay's particular brand of crunchy spectacle could work well for a handful of major cases.
It could comment on the "infotainment" aspect of true crime that many of us uneasily accept as part of consumption of the genre. It could also comment on how creators and consumers treat with the crasser elements of true crime: gore for gore's sake; scare-mongering (about the internet, or Satan); narratives that reflexively center cops and charismatic killers over victims.
I guess you could say Born Evil gets meta about genre tropes, overdirection that serves no purpose except to fill screentime, and other vulgarities of the basic-cable genre trade…if you think that merely using those elements is a form of commentary. I don't think it's that deep on Bay's part, and I'll try to explain why in a second. First, let me give you a quick rundown of the garbage decisions Born Evil makes just in its first episode:
Putting Jack Truitt, the cellie/confessor in the logline, in a prison van for a talking-head interview
Multiple shots of Truitt posing on a church set, usually with thunder on the soundtrack
A b-roll knife flash, followed immediately by a rabbit fleeing in slow motion, during an overview of the kidnapping of 6-year-old Michele Dorr
The knife/sword sound cue paired with on-the-nose street signs ("STOP")
Semi-prurient shots of the child actor playing Michele in her bikini and/or cowering with a stuffed animal
Repeated overhead shots of the Dorrs' and Clarks' block
Superimposing a drawing of a devil's head on a photo of Hadden Clark's mother
A repellent and superfluous reenactment of Clark's claim that he "ate body parts" – which the actor then washes down with "blood" he drinks from a massive underbed-storage Tupperware
This list is, I regret to inform you, not complete, so it is possible that, by cramming three hours of tacky into a 41-minute bag, Bay is remarking on the ugliness of most true-crime content. At the very least, Born Evil isn't pretending a somber reverence, or a scholarly interest – Hadden Clark is a vile monster; Born Evil wants your attention on that, by any and all AV means necessary, and I have some respect for that unvarnished approach.
With that said, Born Evil often reads like a GalaxyQuest imagining of a true-crime doc, worked up from "historical documents" for which Bay lacks context. For those of you who have never seen GalaxyQuest, think of an AI group photo that looks normal at first, but then you realize a couple people have three left elbows – it's almost right, but a couple of things are missing, or in the wrong place. Timelines zigzag confusingly. Investigations have ellipses or leaps where warrants or lab tests would normally go. Interviewees' relationships with substances are implied, but not explained. From a storytelling standpoint, I tend to prefer oblique to painstaking, but if the topline claim is that I've never heard the story, you should…tell the story, then, especially if your brand is, uh, not associated with artfulness.
Again, I've got no kick with Michael Bay's usual output; I hate it when critics slam Bay for, basically, not making the Bergman picture they'd rather have seen, but that's not what I'm getting at here. I think Bay could bring something to the true-crime space, in theory, some unexpected energy or bluntness that could shake up conventional wisdom on a major case.
But I also think Bay doesn't know the genre and its rhythms as well as he thinks he does, and freelanced the parts of the recipe he should have followed more closely, so in practice, Born Evil doesn't work. It's not bad, exactly, and Bay clearly worked hard on it, but it's weird, in a way that's less thought-provoking than disorienting. If he takes another run at the genre, I'll give it a look. This one, I'm out.