HBO has released the first trailer for Alex Gibney’s “Crazy, Not Insane,” which delves into the minds of serial killers, including Ted Bundy and Arthur Shawcross.
The documentary follows Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist who has studied murderers throughout her career, trying to figure out why people kill.
“I have now seen 22 serial killers,” Lewis says in the trailer. “It’s fascinating to me — I think any of us, myself included, could kill. Don’t you ever wonder why you don’t murder?”
The documentary, which follows Lewis’ lifelong attempts to unravel the hearts and minds of these killers, was an official selection at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival and will be available on HBO and HBO Max on Nov. 18.
Dr. Lewis began her career working with children including violent juvenile offenders, and she was exposed to testimony of children who experienced physical and sexual abuse, which led her to explore the way trauma in childhood can lead to murderous impulses in adults. Since then, she has become an expert in dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Her findings were often dismissed by others.
Two of her most famous cases were Arthur Shawcross, who was convicted in 1991 for the murder of 11 women, and Ted Bundy. Shawcross in his videotaped exchanges with Dr. Lewis showed him inhabiting alters of his vengeful mother and a 13th-century cannibal, while in Bundy’s audiotapes, he was unusually candid with the psychiatrist, and she was one of the last people to speak to Bundy before he was executed.
Watch the trailer above.
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