(2024) American Nightmare: This Documentary Peels Back A Curtain of the World That I Wish I Hadn’t Known Existed
In the land before seeing Jeffrey Epstein’s face every time you turn on Netflix, there was a Blockbuster and a pizza place that would be frequented every Friday night.
For all the wrong reasons, this might be the scariest documentary you will ever watch. Whatever faith you may have in law enforcement will be put through the ringer in this 3-part series about a couple that had to defend their hellacious story to the very people that should have been protecting them.
There used to be a time where we were actually protected from knowing about how sick the world truly is. In the land before seeing Jeffrey Epstein’s face every time you turn on Netflix, there was a Blockbuster and a pizza place that would be frequented every Friday night. We’d go home to our pets and live blissfully while the dark side of the world went on outside of our little bubble. If you wanted to watch the leaked video of Alex Jones attending Bohemian grove—a video we all knew existed but didn’t dare to watch—you’d have to tread outside of the bubble to do so. The further you went, you’d find plenty more deeply disturbing conspiracy theories at your disposal. But thankfully for the public school system, I think it’s safe to say there is at least one kid per grade with an older brother who is allocated to each classroom just so they could poke through the bubbles and feed us dark and twisted information. Whether it’s something you want to hear or not.
Sometime around 2015, our bubble began to dramatically deflate. Whatever darkness we chose to hide from until that point was slowly starting to get shoved in our faces against our will through the explosion of social media. That year, Making a Murderer was released on Netflix, and our world was never the same. It had generated so much buzz that the conversation about police corruption ignited a political debate in the United States about whether or not Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, were set up by the boys in blue. The topic had become such a big story that it was literally swaying elections across the country. To this day, depending on what you believe, you’re either a liberal cuck or a mouth-breathing patriot.
Now, it may be entirely by coincidence, but something tells me this has only fueled the desire for filmmakers to dig deeper into that dark side in order to get the world talking. Whether it’s about aliens, sick bastards who used power and fame to get away with heinous crimes (the pervert I mentioned earlier, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, R Kelly and Larry Nassar, just to name a few) or sadistic crime stories, there is no limit to where these documentaries will go to because we simply eat them up. Even if they risk damaging our own mental states in the process.
Exhibit Don’t F*ck with Cats; a tale about a downright putrid individual who would cut up his victims and send their body parts to the parents. (Maybe this should have gone underneath the warning below).
(Spoilers and triggering topics ahead)
The concoction of let's-destroy-the-youthful-minds-of-those-consuming-our-product culminated into one of the most disturbing Netflix films I have ever watched. Unlike the other documentaries, there’s no real debate about what happens in American Nightmare. When a woman is miraculously released from captivity after 48 hours in hell, she returns to a town that has already formed their own versions of the truth, thanks to an incompetent police department and faulty reporting.
The film walks us through the night that Denise Huskins was kidnapped and driven out to a cabin in the woods by a home invader. Her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, awakes several hours later after being drugged with an unknown sedative and reports the events to the police. Not long after he goes into their office for questioning, he is gaslit by the lead detective who has begun to create his own story in just a short amount of time with the little amount of knowledge that he has been given.
Once their version of events are obviously disproven by Denise’s reemergence, the Vallejo Police Department then holds a press conference where they say that both Denise and Aaron have wasted everybody’s time and created a sense of fear amongst the members of the community. It is at this time that the police and media begin to refer to the events as the ‘Gone Girl case’, suggesting that Denise had faked her own murder to get revenge on her boyfriend, as though she had borrowed the idea from the 2014 film with Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.
“The statement that Mr. Quinn provided was such an incredible story, we initially had a hard time believing it, and upon further investigation, we were not able to substantiate any of the things that he was saying.”
Lieutenant Kenny Park.
Before we are ever introduced to Denise, this idea is pretty captivating. And because she’s not dead, and she has arrived home safe and sound, then sure, let the media have their fun as they devise whatever the hell could have possibly happened 2 nights ago.
But as the 2nd episode begins, and we sit through 22 minutes of Denise’s agonizing testimony, that theory is not only insulting but also terrifying once you realize it was invented by the police while she was getting r*ped by the kidnapper that they chose to ignore. The gut-wrenching story recounts how she survived the last 48 hours in a cabin while blindfolded, in an empty room that had been locked and boarded up from the outside world. Though she was assured by her kidnapper that he wouldn’t kill her, she was also assured that she wouldn’t be dehumanized. But on 2 separate occasions, she was told that she would have to have sex with him on film, so it could be used as collateral in the event that she speaks with the police. So, for the next two days, thoughts of being murdered played over and over in her head.
In what could only be described as a miracle, Denise was spared and sent back home to Vallejo. Albeit, with a chilling reminder from her abductor that she and her boyfriend will be under constant surveillance. And if they choose to “speak” it won’t be just them he will go after, but their families too.
“For the last 48 hours I had been living moment to moment trying to survive. The last fucking thing that you’re thinking about is if I do survive, I really got to make sure that all of this is believable.”
Denise Huskins.
The moment that Denise returns home, she is at the mercy of a media frenzy and an embarrassed police force. Because they are unable to come up with an explanation for their own incompetence, Vallejo PD’s only choice is to create the ‘Gone Girl’ facade and convince the town that they were duped in the process of their investigation. Not long after, both Denise and Aaron begin to receive hate mail and death threats on their social media accounts.
If we have learned anything from Making a Murderer and the explosion of social media over the years, it’s that we should always be careful of where we absorb our news. Surely, the way that this documentary was going, there was plenty of room for controversy. If you’re solely relying on Netflix—who, let’s be honest, are not innocent from producing one-sided docs—then you’re not bringing enough to the table. If you would have asked me 9 years ago, whether or not Steven Avery was set up by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department, I would have taken it to the grave that he was. But, over the years, as more information about the filmmaking bias came out, it became pretty clear that the entire series was partial to only one side of the story.
And maybe that was the route we would have gone down. And this would have been just another story. The Vallejo Police Department would have been just another police department accused of corruption. And Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn would have been just another case of not having enough evidence to convince the world what is really going on outside of our bubble.
But by some insane string of luck, the story takes a complete turn thanks to the relentless efforts of an up-and-coming detective, Misty Carausu, who was assigned to her first case as a detective chasing none other than the man who abducted Denise Huskins.
After a cell phone is left behind in an attempted break and enter just 33 miles away from Vallejo, in a town called Dublin, the police are led to a cabin in the woods where they find a man hiding out by himself. Amongst the many obvious murdery things that are found (zip ties, duct tape, fake guns, boarded up windows, syringe filled with Nyquil, etc.), the biggest piece of evidence is a blind fold with a piece of blond hair attached. As we learn throughout the episode, Carausu had ultimately become a police officer after her close friend was sexually assaulted. And though it seem like a one-in-a-trillion longshot, she holds onto the small hair follicle in hopes that she will find its owner and put the monster behind bars.
During her investigation, Carausu finds similar stories in surrounding areas of Northern California of unsolved crimes involving a man named Matt Muller. And in one way or another, they all include some sort of break and entry, being awoken with a laser pointer, being injected with Nyquil, or an attempted r*pe. Due to the lack of evidence, however, the cases remain open and Matt Muller remains a free man.
The biggest break in the case comes when Carausu discovers that the vehicle in the kidnapper’s driveway had been stolen in the town of Vallejo. When she calls the registered owner of the vehicle, she is given a tip about a man in the area that locals refer to as “The Mare Island creeper”. Though he was reported several times to the police, his crimes ultimately went unsolved due to the Vallejo Police Department never following up, or chasing the obvious leads in front of them.
As she digs more into the neighbourhood in Vallejo, Carausu discovers the infamous ‘Gone Girl case’. And not long after watching news stories, she is able to link the piece of hair to Denise.
After the entire case has been spoon fed to them, the Vallejo Police Department is given no other option than to re-open the investigation so they can pin the crime on Matt Muller—and as if they had pulled up to a red light beside the car they just flipped off, they have to begrudgingly face the music and meet with the couple that they just accused of fabricating a crime.
But of course, even passing in the homework that was already done for them becomes a challenge. And Aaron and Denise are forced to witness yet another fumbling of their investigation. The first thing they do is throw out any possibility that Muller wasn’t working alone—even though Aaron insists that there were others, the so-called expert investigators that nearly made him a public enemy for life decide that’s not a lead worth chasing. Why? Oh, probably the same reason that they decide against following up on all of the additional evidence that was found in that cabin. Remember all that really murdery stuff…well, the Police Department decides to ignore it.
The most shocking and aggravating part of the documentary is when Denise and Aaron’s lawyers are given the affidavit to be used in court. It’s at this time where they learn that Aaron’s phone had been shut off by the investigators during his interrogation. Had it been on, he would have not only been able to learn that Denise was alive and okay, but the police officers would have been able to trace the caller’s location and potentially stop an additional sexual assault from taking place.
If they had actually monitored his phone, they could have saved me from the second r*pe.
-Denise Huskins.
In the end, Matt Muller is charged with just one crime for 40 years. Thanks to Carausu and her unwillingness to ignore the evidence, we can be thankful that one less monster is on the streets.
But due to the mockery that the Vallejo police department made of what seemed to be a black and white, straightforward investigation, I can’t help but wonder just how many innocent people are currently locked up for lazy mishandlings of justice. And as much as I fear the monsters crawling around outside, I’ve had my whole life to worry about them. But ultimately, they have no power. It’s the corrupt police force who take no accountability and don’t have to answer to anybody, and can destroy your lives in the snap of a finger, that you truly have to worry about.