With so many murderers in the world why do we keep going back to the same ones?

Dennis Nilsen was a Scottish serial killer who murdered a handful of men and boys in London between the 70s and 80s. There have been countless podcasts, YouTube videos, and even a TV show starring David Tennant about him, so watching this documentary I gained no new info.

The selling point for this documentary much like the Ted Bundy tapes was the fact that you could hear him speak for himself, however unlike the Ted Bundy tapes, Nilsen seems quite boring. Some of the people being interviewed even said that he seemed like a normal person, you weren’t expecting him to be the serial killer because he just looked like any other normal man. To hear him on the tapes was like you were listening to anyone on a podcast and so was really not that exciting.

I like the inclusion of speaking to his family members and family members of the victims because it gave you a different look at the crimes at hand, especially as a lot of the time the victims become quite distorted, in that you don’t know them so you don’t feel too much for them but you still know it was a horrible thing that happened.

But it makes me wonder, these crimes happened 40 years ago and yet we are still talking about them, we’re still giving them this glamorisation and the time of day…so why are we not talking about other crime cases as well? Maybe because in that time these sorts of killers were so prominent and others aren’t that, that’s why we talk about them, but that makes it so boring because we’ve heard it all before. There’s always a new crime to be talked about and I feel we need to give different stories that time of day because otherwise you just end up in a cycle of the same person again and again.

I am done with the Ed Geins, the Dennis Nilsens, the Ted Bundys of the world. I want to move onto more modern horrors, more recent true crime and I want to move onto more stories that don’t get as much attention, because maybe they’re not as crazy, but at the same time that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be told. If there were victims involved those victims deserve to have their story told and their family deserves, if they want to, to share their stories so that other people can notice the signs of someone possibly planning to kidnap or murder them.

If you don’t know Dennis Nilsen then I highly recommend this documentary because it does give you a lot of information about him, but if you do know about him then maybe you can skip this one because it’s nothing that new and just goes over the same old stuff that we already know as true crime junkies. I would just love to see this time and effort put into different cases that maybe we don’t know as much about.

What do you think of The Nilsen Tapes?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding