The public’s fascination with the 1996 murder of child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey is macabre in the extreme.
There were no less than three features (two documentaries and a lifetime movie) released about the unsolved murder last year, including CBS‘s ‘Who Killed JonBenét?‘, which strongly suggested her brother Burke was responsible. (Two lawsuits are pending as a result.) And that’s not to mention the multiple docos and television specials dedicated to the case over the past two decades. We can’t get enough of child murder.
Netflix‘s new documentary, ‘Casting JonBenét‘, gives us a eerie glimpse into our own obsession with the murdered six-year-old. Filmmakers spent 15 months in the Ramsey’s Colorado hometown to elicit responses, reflections and even performances from the local community.
The film promises to be a “documentary hybrid”, which doesn’t just explore the whodunnit case but “examines how this crime and its resulting mythologies have shaped the attitudes and behaviour of successive generations of parents and children.”
It premiers at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, before launching on Netflix in Autumn.
Photo: Netflix.
