American Nightmare docu-series is coming to Netflix


Trailer: the three-part docu-series American Nightmare, about a case referred to as the Gone Girl kidnapping, reaches Netflix this month

The true crime documentary series American Nightmare is set to reach the Netflix streaming service on January 17th, and with exactly two weeks to go until this one is available to watch a trailer for the show has arrived online. You can check it out in the embed above.

Directed by Bernadette Higgins (who previously produced the Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler) and Felicity Morris (who directed The Tinder Swindler), American Nightmare has the following synopsis: After a home invasion and abduction, a young couple’s recounting of the events is too far fetched for the police to believe. Why did the victims seem so calm? Was it all a hoax? From the filmmakers behind The Tinder Swindler, this three-part docuseries unravels the consequences of our cultural rush to judgment, and the damage done when law enforcement decides the truth can’t possibly be true.

According to People, a press release said the documentary is a damning indictment of the confirmation bias too often at play in our criminal justice system. American Nightmare will challenge the assumptions of any true crime fan: How can we trust a news media so thirsty for clicks? Why are we still so reluctant to believe women? And what happens to victims when the institutions that are sworn to protect them… don’t?

More details on the true crime the documentary series covers can be found at the People link. While authorities were doubting the couple’s story, some started referring to the case as the “Gone Girl kidnapping, referencing the popular book and movie about a woman who faked her own kidnapping.”

Morris told Variety that she felt this case was worth making a documentary series about because, “It has this amazing woman who fell victim to a horrendous crime. But it’s about more than that. It’s about victims not being believed, about the institutions that are meant to protect us and yet they fall short. For her, in a terrible, terrible way.

Are you interested in true crime documentaries, and will you be watching American Nightmare when it starts streaming on Netflix? What did you think of the trailer? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

I hadn’t heard of this case before, but I will probably be watching American Nightmare to learn more about it later this month.

American Nightmare Netflix

About the Author

Some kids want to be outside, riding bikes and playing sports. When he was a kid, Cody Hamman preferred to stay indoors, reading novels and comic books or watching movies and TV shows. A passionate fan of the horror genre since the age of 3 (which was way back in the 1980s), Cody is now a news editor and film critic for Arrow in the Head, the horror arm of JoBlo.com, and writes scripts for videos that are released through the JoBlo Originals and JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channels. In his spare time, he’s a globe-trotting digital nomad, runs a personal blog called Life Between Frames, and writes novels and screenplays. So basically, he’s usually busy writing something, and when he’s not writing he can probably be found watching or reading something. He can tolerate spending some time outdoors, but soon enough he’ll be eager to get back to typing on the keyboard.