In short: When the Screaming Starts (2021)

Norman Graysmith (Jared Rogers) is a low-rent documentary filmmaker with delusional hopes for greatness. He believes he has found the perfect subject for becoming a bigshot when he gets wind of a guy who has clearly just as delusional hopes of becoming a serial killer. Aidan Mendle (Ed Hartland) is not much of a creep, clearly lacking in the negative qualities that make a true killer instead of a sad shlub like you or me, and it’s pretty clear that much of his ambition comes from his dead-eyed girlfriend Claire (Kaitlin Reynell). Attempts at actually killing somebody go sideways, so Aidan, always pushed on by creepy Claire and the ever exploitative Norman, decides to become a serial killer cult leader like Charles Manson instead.

He does manage to recruit a group of creeps and weirdos, but once the group is assembled and actually starts to do some killing, it turns out that Aidan might have found an actual monster among the idiots willing to join a cult lead by him. The kind of monster even Norman’s supreme egotism might not be able to exploit.

When the Screaming Starts’s main thematic pull about the exploitative documentary filmmaker/internet personality/whatever who is actually a greater monster than those monsters he tries to exploit is not exactly news in the realm of the fake documentary (I’m not a fan of the word mockumentary for its suggestion of parody of the form), but Conor Boru’s film, as co-written by Boru and Hartland, is making the point well enough that originality isn’t too much of a concern for me.

Particularly since there’s a lot more going on in the film than that: this is also a film about the absurdity of aspirations one doesn’t have the least bit of talent for – obvious with Aidan but also in Norman’s case –, hilariously unhealthy relationships, and also the ridiculousness and unpleasantness of serial killer fan culture. It does talk about all of these things with humour that reaches from the silly, the awkward and the grotesque to moments of surprising subtlety. The humour can, obviously, get rather dark indeed, but the film knows when not to be funny as well, so the murder set pieces could mostly run in a non-comedic film in the same accomplished way they do here, which makes scenes like the party the killer team get up to after their first mass slaughter all the more funny by contrast.

There’s quite a bit of good character work happening here, too. Even though When the Screaming does of course use comedic caricatures, it knows quite well which characters not to overdraw too much to keep character relations as more than elements of comedy bits, thus providing a much more satisfying emotional connection than it would otherwise.