Kathy Kleiner Rubin, a survivor of Ted Bundy‘s attack on a Florida sorority, is addressing the controversy surrounding Zac Efron‘s portrayal of the convicted serial killer in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.
The film, which premiered over the weekend at Sundance Film Festival, drew criticism upon the Friday release of its trailer, which many on social media claimed of “romanticizing a monster” and of elevating Bundy, who confessed and was convicted of at least 30 murders, to a heartthrob.
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Speaking to TMZ, Rubin, who was just 20-years-old when Bundy carried out his 1978 attack on Florida State University’s Chi Omega house, during which he killed two young women, including her roommate, said she doesn’t have “a problem with people looking at it, and as long as they understand that what they’re watching wasn’t a normal person.”
“I believe that in order to show him exactly the way he was, it’s not really glorifying him, but it’s showing him,” she continued. “And when they do say positive and wonderful things about him…that’s what they saw, that’s what Bundy wanted you to see.”
Not everyone affected by Bundy’s crimes, which spanned several states, see the sudden surge of interest in the serial killer the same way. Belva Kent, the mother of Debra Jean Kent, who was just 17 when Bundy murdered her, told PEOPLE that it’s “disgusting.
“Why keep rubbing our face in it all the time? It’s very hard to deal with and when they keep bringing it up and putting it up,” she said. “It’s very disgusting to me…It’s kind of aggravating to me, but I just try to ignore it and move on.”
“[It] can happen to anybody,” she continued when speaking of what the film should stress. “You just never know when you can be in that position. You just want to let people know that it’s out there…No one’s immune.”
Although director Joe Berlinger has not directly responded to the backlash, he did cosign a tweet suggesting that people were “missing the point” and that the trailer painted Bundy as “the charismatic good guy” because he was “a very charasmastic, nice all American guy who no one suspected.”
Berlinger is also the name behind Netflix’s recently released Conversations with A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which features audio of Bundy recounting his crimes during his time in prison prior to his 1989 execution. The four-part documentary led Netflix to issue a PSA on Twitter reminding “everyone that there are literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service — almost all of whom are not convicted serial murderers.”
