When the Screaming Starts

• The film is a horror-comedy mockumentary that had its World Premiere at FrightFest 2021.
• Co-writer Ed Hartland got the idea for the film while reviewing The Ted Bundy Tapes for the London Horror Society, and found himself questioning what his own fascination with the case said about him — and society.
• Director/co-writer Conor Boru cited What We Do in the Shadows as a visual touchstone for the film's stylized mockumentary look, alongside comedy influences like This Is Spinal Tap and The Office.
• The film's now-fan-favorite "Cannibal Death March" sequence replaced an earlier woods-set murder-attempt scene that wasn't working in the edit.
• Production shot in 2020 around Sunbury-on-Thames, wrapping its first block of filming just before COVID-19 disrupted the industry.

Norman's descent mirrors the killer he's filming: by chasing a career-saving story out of Aidan's violence, the documentarian becomes complicit in creating the exact monster he claims to merely observe.

Aidan's obsession with building a "legacy" and a twisted family of his own reads as a dark satire of true-crime culture's tendency to mythologize killers into celebrities — he's less hunting infamy through murder than performing for an audience the genre itself trained him to want.

The mockumentary form is itself the joke and the indictment: by presenting Norman's camera as a neutral witness, the film needles viewers for treating true-crime footage as innocent entertainment rather than participation.

Documentary filmmaker Norman Graysmith, desperate to save his flailing career, thinks he's struck gold when self-styled aspiring serial killer Aidan Mendle invites him to film his "journey." Norman treats it as the exclusive that will make him again, rolling camera as Aidan talks openly about his hunger to kill and his dream of building a twisted family of his own. But when Aidan's first real murder attempt goes catastrophically wrong, the documentary curdles into something much darker — and much funnier — as Norman realizes he's not just chronicling a killer, he might be creating one. Director Conor Boru plays the true-crime-obsession premise for pitch-black comedy as much as horror, skewering an industry that turns real violence into content.