See No Evil: The Moors Murders on Screen

Cummins, ID; Foley, M; King, M

Abstract

This chapter discusses the TV dramatisation
of the Moors Murders, See No Evil (2006). The two-part original drama was made by Granada TV to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of Brady and Hindley’s trial, and it remains the only dramatisation of the case and it was made with the support of victims’ relatives. The drama uses the techniques and
tropes of the British kitchen sink dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s, that is, film dramas made about the lives of working people, mainly set in the North of England.Influenced by the realist approach of the French New Wave, the films marked a radical departure for British cinema, with a focus on the minutiae of ordinary life.In See No Evil, the influence of this approach serves to contextualise the case in time, space and place, and avoids the dramatic cliches often found in the dramatisation of true crime. In doing so, it produces a chilling portrait of the killers and their crimes.

• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jan 13, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 2, 2024
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 163-185
• Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture
• Book Title: Serial Killing on Screen : Adaptation, True Crime and Popular Culture
• ISBN: 9783031178122
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17812-2
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17812-2