This is a time of great entertainment. Of sitting on the couch and binge-watching over the weekend — it’s too expensive to do anything else. In the last couple of weeks, online streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have been rolling out one new release after another.

And our to-watch list is piling up with intriguing productions such as Bling Ring, Jamtara, a new series on the Thai Cave Rescue (there is one already on Amazon Prime titled Thirteen Lives), Athena, Broad Peak — all on Netflix — while continuing to watch the latest Lord of the Rings series, Rings of Power on Amazon Prime along with The Scandi Flick, Goodnight Mommy, Private Affair and Flight/Risk on the same platform. Nevertheless, we have a few productions, all on Netflix, to highly recommend watching right now.

Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee

This one comes across off the bat as very intriguing, since it deals with the person behind a software almost all of us have used at some point in our lives in the ’90s and early noughties — the McAfee antivirus. It also has a decent 67 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so you know this won’t be a complete waste of time.

Dubbed as ‘the original computer genius gone rogue’ John McAfee, the inventor of one of the most successful (and disliked) softwares of all time, is a fugitive on the run. Wanted by the cops ever since his neighbour in Belize turned up dead, in a bizarre move, he invited an entire camera crew to follow him as he did the craziest things to make his escape from the authorities that kept tracking him down and following him throughout South America.

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The whole film is fascinating, like watching a slow-moving train crash. You know this won’t end well with him but, somehow, McAfee believes he’s untouchable and always ahead of everyone (he’s not) and his antics get more and more ‘out there’.

Running with the Devil is the definitive story of a larger-than-life character, a man who ran for US president, escaped from prison many times, and made wild claims of having hacked the world.

DAHMER — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

Perhaps this series was released too soon for the victims’ families. Netflix’s latest true-crime production, based on infamous serial killer Jeffery Dahmer, has been in the news lately for upsetting and re-traumatising his victims’ families. There’s also an accusation that his role is being ‘glamourised’, because the serial killer and, as a result, his on-screen depiction, is of a handsome, charismatic man.

The same critique was levelled about the brutal serial killer Ted Bundy as well, on whom numerous productions — fiction and documentary — have been made over the years.

DAHMER — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is a slickly produced, gruesome-yet-based-on-reality documentary about Jeffery Lioner Dahmer, otherwise also known as Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster. He was an American serial killer and sex offender who murdered and dismembered around 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991.

It’s not just the series that’s fascinating and the incredible details that are uncovered about Dahmer’s life, but the buzz around Dahmer is generating many articles about him and his victims — new angles, new previously unexplored perspectives that keep adding to the persona of this man who committed some of the most heinous acts in recent history.

Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi & The Diary of a Serial Killer

One of the genres that’s really taken off on Netflix is true crime. And the true crime series released across the border are really striking a chord with local audiences, possibly because they’re so close and similar to home.

The first instalment of Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi opens with the news of three nude, headless and decapitated bodies, packed inside gunny bags and disguised inside fruit baskets, dumped outside Tihar Jail in New Delhi. The audacity of the crime is shocking — this is presumably India’s most secure, heavily surveilled jail.

The murderer wanted to be found. He left handwritten notes for the police. One of them read: “Till date, I have endured the punishment for crimes I did not commit, but now I have murdered for real. I challenge you to catch me. More gifts are coming… Your daddy.”

The series is gruesome yet gripping. Chandrakant Jha’s conviction in 2013 made headlines. In the series, we see a man who taunted the cops as he went on a killing spree. He kept a photo album of his victims, full of photos taken right before he murdered them. Jha is currently serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Tihar Jail, the same jail outside which he dumped his victims’ bodies.

Both the first and second series interviews the first cops on the scene of crimes, the investigating officers, criminal psychologists, witnesses, journalists, experts and family members — of both victims and perpetrator.

The same is true for the second series, titled Indian Predator: Diary of a Serial Killer but the trump card in the second series is an interview with the murderer, Ram Niranjan, himself. The second instalment is a morbidly fascinating three-part series centred around Ram Niranjan, aka Raja Kolander, who the Uttar Pradesh police allege not only killed 14 people but also ate some of them, though the latter claim was never proven in court.

Niranjan was convicted in three murders (he has appealed the convictions). What’s fascinating is that he considers himself to be the victim. This series, both The Butcher of Delhi (July 2022) and Diary of a Serial Killer (September 2022), provide a fascinating insight into the minds of serial killers, but they are not for the faint of heart.

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 2nd, 2022