American Nightmare Is Entertaining, but at What Cost?

Resembling a movie star can be a calamity, as Denise Huskins could surely attest. Huskins—along with her boyfriend Aaron Quinn—was the victim of a nocturnal home intrusion in 2015, the subject of the aptly named new Netflix docuseries American Nightmare. The intruder, who claimed to be part of a “black market” team seeking money, forced Huskins to bind and blindfold Quinn and made both drink a sedative. Leaving Quinn tied up, he abducted Huskins, placed her in the trunk of a car, and drove several hours to an apparently remote location, where he kept her captive for two days. When Quinn finally overcame the drug and his fear that Huskins would be harmed if he contacted law enforcement, he struggled out of the zip ties and called the police.

Quinn’s description of what happened that night struck investigators at the police department of Vallejo, California, as outlandish: A strangely polite kidnapper in a wetsuit offered Quinn a blanket and plugged his ears with headphones playing the sound of wind chimes? When police found out that the couple had quarreled earlier that day over texts Quinn had exchanged with an ex-girlfriend, they came to that time-honored conclusion whenever a woman goes missing: It’s always the partner or spouse. As American Nightmare shows—the three-part docuseries makes ample use of footage from videotaped interrogations—Quinn was harangued for hours on end before he had the sense to ask for a lawyer. He was told, falsely, that he’d failed a polygraph test, and accused by an appalling detective named Mathew Mustard of killing his girlfriend and hiding her body. No wonder he ended up curled in the fetal position in a corner, keening, “What the fuck is happening?”

Then, Huskins materialized 400 miles away, miraculously released on the very Southern California street where she’d grown up and where her parents still lived. She seconded Quinn’s account of the attack. The Vallejo PD and the FBI abruptly pivoted from one premature conclusion to another: Huskins had faked the kidnapping to get back at Quinn for texting his ex. The news media that first reported the kidnapping news then got an even juicier story to feed on: Huskins had to be a real-life version of Amy Dunne, the character played by Rosamund Pike in the David Fincher film Gone Girl, released the year before. Based on the 2012 novel by Gillian Flynn, the movie tells the story of a wife’s fiendishly clever plot to frame her cheating husband (Ben Affleck) for her murder. “None of the claims have been substantiated,” said a police spokesman of the kidnapping story at a press conference, “and I will go further to say that Mr. Quinn and Ms. Huskins have plundered valuable resources away from our community.” The pair became instant pariahs.

It didn’t help Huskins and Quinn—who was somehow also considered guilty of this “Gone Girl” hoax—that Huskins bears a resemblance to Pike. Both women are blond and pretty, but even more damning in the eyes of many observers was Huskins’ composure. The marmoreal serenity of Pike’s performance made her seem even more sinister in Fincher’s film; she becomes a fantasy of implacable feminine iciness and guile. In Huskins’ case, she’s merely trying to hold on to her dignity; it was later revealed that her abductor raped her twice, videotaping both assaults and threatening to release them on the internet if she told authorities too much.

But though the diligent work of a rookie detective investigating a similar crime in another town caught Huskins’ kidnapper—a former U.S. Marine named Matthew Muller—and uncovered evidence proving Huskins’ account of the crime, you can still find people on Reddit claiming anew that they just know that Huskins is lying about something. She didn’t walk the right way on security camera footage after she was released. She doesn’t show the correct emotions when describing what happened to her—just like Amber Heard! Her voice is too calm in the audio recording she was forced to make as proof of life. The latter complaint is voiced even by several professionals interviewed in the docuseries. People who have never been kidnapped and raped have suddenly become experts on how anyone would behave when being kidnapped and raped. And if, instead, you look and act like Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl, then obviously you must be a conniving liar.

This is the second docuseries in the past year to recount a notorious true-crime story in which a movie has supplied part of the plot. In the Investigation Discovery production The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, an Indiana couple that had adopted a Ukrainian orphan with dwarfism claimed that the child was in fact an adult sociopath planning to murder them, a scenario borrowed from the 2009 horror film Orphan.* They succeeded in having her legal age changed from 8 to 22. American Nightmare is a more ethical production, eschewing the many sleazy and misleading tricks employed by The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, but it still abides by the increasingly common true-crime series formula of fostering a set of conclusions in one episode, only to serve up a manufactured “twist” in the next to overturn those conclusions. He’s lying and he killed her! No, she’s alive and she’s lying to frame him! No, they’re both lying to waste the resources of the Vallejo Police Department! No, the police are the bad guys!

This storytelling method, lifted from thriller movies and novels, provides maximum entertainment at the expense of crime victims, casting doubt over the veracity of people like Quinn and Huskins, for whom her kidnapping was a horrific ordeal followed by the further ordeal of being disbelieved and demonized by the people charged with protecting her. The news media seized upon this story (as they did with Natalia Grace’s) largely because it replicated a movie plot, a feature that made it at once incredible and familiar. Astonishing as it is to be told that someone is a “real-life Gone Girl,” the persuasiveness of the well-known fictional story rubs off on the real people and events. People believe that they’re good at separating fact from fiction, but a dive into the Reddit discussions spawned by American Nightmare—a farrago of preposterous conspiracy theories—reveals how much fiction has colonized the way we think about reality.

True crime doesn’t have to be like this. For Atavist Magazine in 2022, journalist Katia Savchuk wrote a lengthy feature on Huskins’ kidnapping and the tortured history of its perpetrator. It is every bit as gripping as American Nightmare, and it answers the “so many questions!!!!” Redditors claim that they’ve been left with after watching the docuseries. How many of them will read it, though, when the thriller version allows them to fantasize about further shocking twists waiting to be revealed? Where’s the fun in admitting that the wild details of this story were themselves little more than the products of a deranged mind? What Huskins’ lawyer says of the officials promoting the Gone Girl theory of his client applies to more than just law enforcement. “How could this person, who’s charged with investigating crime, think that this is a Ben Affleck movie?” he asks. “That’s Hollywood! This is real life.”