
Interview with a Serial Killer
Arthur Shawcross, convicted of murdering eleven women in and around Rochester, New York, sits for an extended on-camera interview and describes his crimes in his own words. Known as the Genesee River Killer, Shawcross recounts the killings that took place along the riverbanks where he dumped his victims' bodies, walking through his methods and his state of mind with a flatness that becomes its own kind of evidence. The film intercuts his testimony with case details and the investigative work that eventually connected the murders to him, giving the documentary the structure of both confession and case file. There is little embellishment: the camera stays on Shawcross and lets him talk, occasionally pressing him on inconsistencies between his account and the record. It sits alongside other criminal-confession documentaries in treating the killer's own voice as the primary document, unfiltered by dramatization or reenactment, and leaves the viewer to weigh how much of what he says can be trusted.