‘Mindhunter’: We Need To Talk About How Likable Co-Ed Killer Ed Kemper Is

The time has come for us to talk about the most disturbing part of Mindhunter: how gosh darn likable the co-ed killer, Ed Kemper, is in it.

Come on now. I surely can’t be the only one out there who is stuck on how much they were charmed by Big Ed’s adorkable facade: those nebbish glasses, that soft mustache, the bearing of a slightly less self-loathing Fozzie the Bear. (Guys, Fozzie the Bear hates himself. Wokka wokka.) No, Ed Kemper is polite. He likes TV shows. He’ll make sure you get yourself an egg salad sandwich. Not the tuna, okay? The egg salad is better. Ed is friends with the guards. He knows who’s who around the canteen. He wants to hear about your girl troubles. Ed will keep in touch. He’ll write letters. He’ll try to give you a hug. He thinks he’s good at hugs. He’s very good at hugs, you know, so long as he’s not murdering you.

Edmund Kemper is a sociopathic serial killer and rapist. He murdered his own mother and had sex with her skull. I should not keep thinking about him in the same terms as a teddy bear. I don’t know why, but he reminds me so much of a great, big teddy bear. You know, one of the massive, six-foot-tall ones perched inside the foyer of a toy store at Christmas time. It was the kind of bear that your little kid heart coveted like nothing else before. You wanted to rush to it, climb it, and bury your face in its soft, plush fur.

But Ed Kemper isn’t like a friendly, fuzzy bear. He’s like a real bear, starving and ready to rampage. As Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) reminds Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) after the very first interview: “He chopped off women’s heads and had sex with their corpses.” He’s the co-ed killer! One of the first in a new breed of terror. And Ed is so nice that it’s almost as though he feels the need to remind Holden of this on their second encounter. He starts off by switching from sweet, doddering Ed to a guy who callously says, “You got to make it with that young pussy real quick before it turns into Mom.” Soon, he’s explaining the biology behind why it’s harder to have sex with a severed neck than an anus.

Yeah, you’re charmed. You’re charmed until you are revolted. Which only makes the revulsion all the worse.

The bulk of Ed Kemper’s bizarre appeal has to be credited to actor Cameron Britton. There’s so much that Britton does to juggle the character’s apparent harmlessness along with his inherent menace. Some of this is all do to the particular way Britton talks as Kemper. He speaks in a clear, folksy way. Certain vowels are rounded into coziness so as to lull you into submission, but there’s also something discordant about each line delivery. A bit of phrasing is…off. Like a scale with a sharp note where a flat should be. Which is a good way of describing his overall demeanor. Lurking beneath every friendly exchange is a threat. Even when he insists on getting Holden a sandwich, he does so against the FBI agent’s protestations. An egg salad sandwich is not just an egg salad sandwich; it is a subtle act of dominance.

Ed Kemper’s likability factor makes him a new kind of terrifying onscreen murderer. It’s not that we’re unaccustomed to being seduced by danger. Great villains have always held us in their thrall. And thanks to the multiple adaptations of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, we’re used to the conceit of being lured in by a clever serial killer. But Ed Kemper is different because he uses our humanity against us. He plays with our ability to trust one another, to empathize with our fellow man, to discount someone’s threat-level. He’s aided in his crimes by his hulking size, but Ed Kemper’s biggest weapon is his ability to put us at ease.

And that’s utterly terrifying.

Stream Mindhunter on Netflix