Hulu’s Ted Bundy: Dialogue with the Devil gives true-crime docs a Silence of the Lambs-esque twist

Few movies have freaked yours truly out quite like The Silence of the Lambs—in case you somehow missed it these past four decades, the 1991 Jonathan Demme-directed horror classic stars a spine-chilling Anthony Hopkins as the captured cannibalistic murderer Hannibal Lecter, whose homicidal insights are sought out by young FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) to help hunt down a serial killer known as “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine). While the psychological thriller is filled with terrifying scenes, none are quite as hair-raising as the one-on-one interrogations between Starling and Lecter, with the former bravely trying to get inside the mind of a monster.

And the only thing scarier than fiction is real life. At the center of Hulu‘s new true-crime docuseries Ted Bundy: Dialogue with the Devil is a very The Silence of the Lambs-esque premise: A series of conversations between the notorious American serial killer Ted Bundy and investigator Robert Keppel that took place while the murderer was serving on death row in Florida from 1984 to 1989, in the hopes of catching the Green River Killer, a phantom who murdered 49 women in the same Seattle area where Bundy claimed many of his victims a decade earlier.