The new Netflix film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile tells the well-trodden story of serial killer Ted Bundy (played by Zac Efron)—but from a brand-new perspective: that of his long-time girlfriend, Elizabeth Kendall (played by Lily Collins). In 1981, Kendall wrote a little-known memoir called The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy. It was published by a small Seattle press, and was only in print for a few years before the publisher shut down down in 1988.
The script, written by Michael Werwie, is pretty faithful to the book, from Kendall meeting Bundy at a Seattle bar to them discussing marriage to the descriptions of the crimes Bundy committed. But there are a few notable exceptions where the movie diverges from the real story. Here’s what the producers changed:
The real Elizabeth Kendall had found clues before Ted Bundy was arrested.
NetflixTed Bundy murdered dozens of young women in the 1970s.
There was a series of unsolved kidnappings in Washington state in 1974. When Kendall first saw in the Seattle Times a police composite of the suspect who was named “Ted,” she noticed he looked like her boyfriend, and they both drove a Volkswagen. When it was described in news reports that the suspect used a crutch to knock out a victim, Kendall recalled seeing crutches in Bundy’s home.
The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy
Those clues inspired her to make her first call to the police in 1974, she explains in her memoir. While she was on the phone, she lost her nerve and hung up. One month later, when the abductions began happening in Utah as soon as Bundy moved to Salt Lake City, Kendall called the cops again. The police said they’d already cleared Bundy—but Kendall continued to think back on clues which pointed to Bundy's involvement, from the crowbar he took from her house, to a hatchet under the passenger seat of his car, to plaster of Paris she once found in Bundy’s desk drawer which would explain the suspect’s arm cast.
But in the movie, Kendall believes Bundy when he insists he has nothing to do with the crimes being committed—until the very end of the film.
“In the book there were a few clues along the way that made her scratch her head, as it would anybody,” the film’s producer Joe Berlinger tells me. “I want the audience to invest in the relationship between Zac and Lily, and to believe that relationship so that by the end of the film, when she finally holds him accountable, I wanted the audience to also feel the same level of disgust that she's feeling because, for the first half of the movie, you were almost lulled into a sense of, well, maybe he's not such a bad guy. I want people to feel revolted at the end and I think that would have been impossible to do if, in the first 10 or 15 minutes, she finds a knife in the glove compartment.”
The dog barking at Bundy.
Instead of Kendall noticing clues, the filmmakers made the warning signs a little more subtle. When Bundy and Kendall go dog shopping, for example, the dog begins barking viciously at Bundy—which the couple later jokes about. In real life, there were no warnings from pets.
NetflixTed Bundy and his long-time girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall, who wrote a memoir about their relationship.
“To me, it's about animals know,” Berlinger says. “When the dog did not get along with Bundy, that's a clue, but it's not like finding a knife. I did my own interpretation of having some clues along the way.”
The significance of the French prison-escape novel Papillon.
In the movie, Bundy is constantly telling Kendall to read the book Papillon. The novel by Henri Charrière details a man’s incarceration for murder and his obsession with escaping, which gives Ted hope that he will eventually get out of prison. When Kendall comes to visit him after his first escape from an Aspen courthouse, Bundy gives her a copy of Papillon as a gift, saying he’s read it four times.
As symbolic as the book is, Kendall makes no mention of Papillon in her memoir.
Kendall dating her colleague.
Brian Douglas//NetflixEfron as Bundy, Collins as Kendall, and Kaya Scodelario as Carol Ann Boone, the woman who Bundy married in prison.
In the film, as Bundy’s relationship with Carol Ann Boone gets more serious, Kendall begins spending more time with her colleague Jerry (played by Haley Joel Osment). In the book, Kendall turns to a man she calls Hank (likely a pseudonym) who she met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
The scene with the hacksaw at the end of the movie.
At the end of the movie, Kendall visits Bundy as he awaits his execution, after being sentenced to Death Row in 1979. She brings a photo to the prison of a victim with her head cut off, demanding: “You need to release me, Ted. Tell me what happened to her head.”
At first Bundy says he doesn’t know, and suggests that animals attacked the victim. But finally, in an incredibly powerful scene, Bundy breathes on the glass separating them and writes with his finger the word, “hacksaw.”
Getty ImagesBundy waves at TV cameras during his murder trial.
In the book, however, Bundy hints at his guilt in a final phone conversation with Kendall, saying, “There is something the matter with me … I just couldn’t contain it. I found it for a long, long time … it was just too strong.” But he never directly admitted to the murders to Kendall.
“We're in an era of accountability, I wanted Liz's character to really hold him accountable at the end and make him say those words to her face,” Berlinger says. “That was a bit of a departure from the book.”
Bundy tried to kill Kendall.
Another significant moment happens in Kendall and Bundy’s final phone call which was cut from the film. After Bundy hints at his guilt during that conversation, Kendall asks if he ever tried to kill her. Bundy admits that he once closed the damper at Kendall’s house while she was sleeping so the smoke couldn’t go up the chimney, then he left after putting a towel under a door so the smoke wouldn’t escape. Kendall writes that she remembers waking up coughing after a night of drinking.
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