American Murder: The Family Next Door is more like a bone-chilling horror movie than a true-crime docuseries

The Muse

"Some movies, like Park Chan-wook’s endlessly twisting The Handmaiden, practically dare you to look again," says Rich Juzwiak. "Jenny Popplewell’s American Murder: The Family Next Door, which debuted last week on Netflix, has a similar effect, even upon first viewing. So publicized was Chris Watts’ senseless 2018 murder of his wife, Shanann Watts, and two small children, Bella and Celeste, that it’s hard to imagine much of the film’s audience going in cold. And in fact, knowing what he did makes the experience of watching the events unfold that much more terrifying, as American Murder is largely comprised of pre-existing material. Popplewell has said that most of what viewers see and hear in the movie was made public by Weld County. This includes the responding police officer’s bodycam footage, which captures Watts’s first discussion with authorities regarding the disappearance of his wife and daughters and his interrogation, as well as his polygraph test ('If you did have something to do with their disappearance, it would be really stupid for you to come in and take a polygraph today…It would be really dumb,' its administrator tells him). As such, American Murder is the stillest, most bone-chilling found footage horror movie I’ve ever seen."