The “unbearably suspenseful” thriller that captivated Stephen King: “Not for the faint of heart”
In moviemaking, the idiom, “If you build it, they will come”, could not be further from the truth. Unfortunately, good movies fall into the abyss every year, often through no fault of the filmmakers or actors involved. Thankfully, though, Stephen King is around to give some of these films a second chance.
There are several reasons a film could fail to find its audience upon release. If it is distributed into cinemas, for example, but the marketing isn’t up to snuff, the chances are that most people won’t even know it’s there. Similarly, if a film is released on streaming or video-on-demand, it can easily get lost in the shuffle with hundreds of other releases if people aren’t pointed in the right direction by interviews, podcasts, reviews, etc.
Sadly, this is precisely what happened to a chillingly low-key thriller originally released in 2018, but which failed to truly find an audience until it came to Netflix in 2021. At that point, King himself sang its praises, tweeting, “Sometimes an excellent small movie falls through the cracks. That’s the case with The Clovehitch Killer. I found it unbearably suspenseful. Your mileage may vary, but be warned. Not for the faint of heart.”
Reading that the ‘King of Horror’ found his low-budget indie movie “unbearably suspenseful” must have been a real career high-point for director Duncan Skiles, who made his feature directorial debut with the film. It told the story of a teenage boy in Kentucky who begins to suspect that his father, a well-respected man in the local community and a Boy Scout troop leader, is actually the notorious ‘Clovehitch’ serial killer who once terrorised the area, but hasn’t killed for ten years.
The killer, played with unsettling restraint and hidden malevolence by Dylan McDermott, was closely based on the real-life BTK killer, Dennis Rader. There are many parallels in the movie, which give it extra resonance if you know Rader’s story. However, it’s sure to make any viewer’s skin crawl, even if they don’t know anything about the man.
The film beautifully illustrates the dichotomy within a character like ‘Clovehitch’, whose real name is Don Burnside and who received his nickname after the type of knot he used to bind his victims. On the surface, he is a dedicated husband and father, a hard worker, and a mild-mannered guy who looks like he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Beneath the surface, though, he has dark, psychosexual urges that build within him until they have to be unleashed, after which he can go back into a “cooling off period.” This is exactly how Rader operated, as he could go as long as a decade without killing, and masqueraded as a devout Christian, loving family man, and pillar of the community in between murders.
At its core, Skiles’ film is a slow-burning character study of an evil man, yet simultaneously a coming-of-age story for his son, whose illusions are shattered when he discovers the monster his father truly is. It’s deliberate in its pacing, preferring dread over jump scares, and treats its violence in a soberly realistic manner, which makes it all the more terrifying.
Ultimately, Skiles was happy that his movie finally found an audience on Netflix, although he certainly would have preferred if its release in 2018 hadn’t been so under the radar in the first place. After all, that may have delayed his ability to get his second film, Neighbourhood Watch, off the ground. That thriller, which starred Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jack Quaid, didn’t come out until 2025, although Skiles revealed in an interview that he spent much of his time between the films honing his craft like a certain horror master.
“The conclusion I’ve come to is I have to write my own stuff,” Skiles revealed. “That means co-writing, and that means just sitting my butt down and doing what Stephen King and so many other writers say: treat it like a job. So, that’s what I’m doing.”
