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Watch American Nightmare — Season 1 with a subscription on Netflix. Equal parts infuriating and suspenseful, American Nightmare is an instructive chronicle of institutional bias making a ...
- (62)
- January 17, 2024
- Bernadette Higgins, Felicity Morris
Jan 22, 2024 · The answer is yes, American Nightmare on Netflix is based on the harrowing abduction and kidnapping story of Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn. The incident started on March 23, 2015, when the pair ...
- Monica Mercuri
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Jan 17, 2024 · Kids say ( 1 ): This series grows into an intriguing web of lies and betrayal. American Nightmare expertly brings viewers into this perplexing case, detail after harrowing detail. The story starts as a question of who to trust, but quickly brings the victims' point of view to the center.
- Denise Huskins, Aaron Quinn, Henry Lee
- A true-crime series that finds small ways to transcend a familiar setup
- American Nightmare Gallery
- What's the best Netflix true-crime documentary?
- Verdict
By Steve Greene
Updated: Jan 22, 2024 11:42 pm
Posted: Jan 22, 2024 10:31 pm
The central events depicted in American Nightmare took place in the spring of 2015. As the first season of Serial and HBO’s The Jinx urged a renewed interest in true crime (and Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” waited in the wings), an odd news story emerged from northern California. Initial news reports described an incident in the city of Vallejo, where a woman was kidnapped from her home, taken from the bed where she and her boyfriend were sleeping. An American public with a freshly developed taste for unsolved mysteries lapped up the coverage, which drew parallels between the hunt for Denise Huskins and one of the decade’s most popular fictional cases of a missing woman.
Knowing that any retelling of this story will be fraught with questions of a murky truth, series directors Bernadette Higgins and Felicity Morris first put their focus on Aaron Quinn, who went to local law enforcement after – in his words – being woken up by a team of kidnappers and then drugged as Denise was abducted from the home they shared. Aaron is framed in the way true-crime interview narrators so often are: sterile room, alternating camera angles, pregnant pauses while relaying details both horrific and bizarre (the alleged perpetrators disguised themselves in wetsuits, by Aaron’s telling). American Nightmare justifies its three-episode structure (it could have been roughly a 2-hour movie otherwise) by introducing new narrators as the story moves along the timeline.
Sprinkled in throughout are the dramatic reenactments that are standard for headline-grabbing stories like this one. Here, though, Higgins and Morris tone down the junky basic-cable aesthetics of their predecessors: Heavily-filtered, hazy flashbacks are replaced by something more visceral. A narrow, mostly point-of-view window into these recreations satisfyingly locks each chapter into a more personal perspective. An extreme close-up on an eyeball, repeated for effect through one extended stretch, is particularly chilling.
Tiger King
Making a Murderer
Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes
The Keepers
Amanda Knox
Other -- let us know in the comments.
The latest hit Netflix docuseries finds chilling and effective ways to go beyond the standard true-crime expectations. Yet, even as it ends up at a broader message beyond the unusual circumstances of a single kidnapping case, it’s hard to shake the idea that the overall structure of the show and its “twisty thriller” framing are working against wha...
- Steve Greene
Jan 17, 2024 · American Nightmare - Metacritic. Summary The three-part documentary from Felicity Morris and Bernadette Higgins centers on the 2015 kidnapping and sexual assault of Denise Huskins. The police accuse Denise and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn of a hoax when she reappears until a home invasion robbery turns up evidence of the kidnapping.
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- Denise Huskins
- TV-MA
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American Nightmare is the start of what could be a new age of true crime content. Only providing what you need to know about the kidnapper while laying out all the information in Denise and Aaron ...
Jan 23, 2024 · American Nightmare is compellingly made, with an odd and disturbing saga at its center. But what would feel in 2015 like a shock to the system is now an above-average addition to a subgenre that’s grown exponentially in the years since. Knowing that any retelling of this story will be fraught with questions of a murky truth, series directors ...
