‘The Hillside Strangler’s’ Tim Walsh on Bringing A Scripted Horror Aesthetic To True Crime Docu-Series

Executive producer Tim Walsh opens up about MGM+’s new Hillside Strangler docu-series and how it breathes fresh life into the infamous serial killer’s story.

True-crime docu-series have reached a deafening fever pitch in which the world’s worst offenders have their sordid stories reexamined and dissected. There’s a steady wave of true-crime content that continues to wash up on streamers’ shores, where harrowing horror stories attack with newfound intensity. Los Angeles has been subjected to abhorrent serial killers, and the Hillside Strangler – Kenneth Bianchi – kept the West Coast community terrified for years. Many details about the Hillside Strangler have come to light following Bianchi’s conviction, but never with the same insight and access as what’s provided in MGM+’s four-episode docu-series, The Hillside Strangler.

MGM+’s The Hillside Strangler thoroughly breaks down the cruel crimes that rocked Los Angeles during the late 1970s. Tim Walsh, an executive producer on The Hillside Strangler and a horror aficionado in his own right, gets candid regarding his unique entrypoint into the true-crime genre, approaching this docu-series like a psychological horror film, the importance of victim-forward storytelling, and how his scripted serial killer stories gave him unusual leverage that helped him gain access to Bianchi.

BLOODY DISGUSTING: This isn’t your first time working in the docu-series realm — you previously worked on a Night Stalker series for Netflix — but how did you end up in this true-crime space?

TIM WALSH: So, I was on Chicago P.D. I did the first four seasons of that. That’s a Dick Wolf show on NBC, which is still running in its 13th season. And I think it was season four — it was my last season — I was tasked with writing a serial killer episode. One of my good friends is a former sheriff’s deputy, and he’s also a television writer. He said, “Hey man, do you want to sit down with Gil Carrillo? He’s the guy who helped catch the Night Stalker. You want to pick his brain about serial killers?” Whether scripted or unscripted, I’ve always approached my work like a journalist. I don’t Google stuff as research. I go out and talk to people. I try to get out in front of people. So I went and had dinner with Gil Carrillo, thinking I knew everything there was to know about the Night Stalker case.

I wasn’t that interested in it, but then he laid out this entire kind of tapestry of Los Angeles from that time period that was so fascinating. It was this take that I had never really seen before. I walked away from that, and one of my fellow writers on the show, Tiller Russell, was a pretty established documentary director.

I remember walking into his office and giving him the one-liner: It’s the hottest summer. It’s essentially Freddy Krueger going into your home when you’re asleep. It’s an ’80s slasher film. My instinct was to pitch it as a scripted series. He saw it as a doc. I followed his lead, and we went out and pitched it, which ultimately landed at Netflix. That’s how I got into true-crime.

That’s so interesting. So it really was just kind of trying to crack this scripted serial killer story that opened up all these doors.

TW: Yeah, it was an episode that was tailored around a serial killer. We were doing a crossover with SVU, and the serial killer was going to start in Chicago and go to New York. I just wanted to pick this homicide detective’s brain, but then he wound up just blowing my mind with the whole story of Ramirez in ’84 and the summer in LA. I was like, “This is a series, man.”

We went with it as a doc series and made it that way, but took a very scripted approach to it all. So we set out to make an ’80s slasher film. I live and breathe horror. So I’m like, “This is A Nightmare on Elm Street. He is Freddy Krueger.” He comes into your home when you’re asleep and gets you when you’re asleep. So we tried to make it as cinematically scary as possible.

That feeling is very much present in The Hillside Strangler, too. One of my favorite things about this series is that it begins with this lost-in-time quality. It puts the viewer in the mindset of the general public from the late ’70s, and almost captures this gritty Texas Chainsaw Massacre or John Carpenter type of atmosphere.

TW: I have to say, John Carpenter is the reason that I’m here. When I was six years old and in Chicago, everybody else wanted to be Walter Payton or Michael Jordan, but I wanted to be John Carpenter. So I’m happy to hear you say that. If Night Stalker was an ’80s slasher film, then Hillside Strangler was always supposed to be a psychological thriller. The Silence of the Lambs was very inspirational because we have the killer, and the audience is kind of like Clarice, on the sidelines, hearing from the killer. The director, Peter LoGreco, and I talked a lot about grindhouse horror. The Toolbox Murders was very influential. Hollywood Strangler was also really big for us.

I come from the scripted world, so I’m always approaching things from my movie influences, and most of my influences are old horror films. The score should be reflective of that, too. It should sound a little bit like John Carpenter, and like you’re in a horror movie because it was like living in a horror movie during the late ’70s, especially for women.

A major privilege in this docu-series is that it actually includes interviews from Kenneth Bianchi himself. What was the process like going through that material and introducing new evidence, so to speak?

TW: We wanted to do Frank Salerno‘s origin story. It’s remarkable for a homicide detective to catch one serial killer in their career, and he caught two of the biggest in LA history, if not the country’s history. We naturally always wanted to tell that story, but we didn’t have access to Bianchi right away. That baton was handed off to me in 2020. Right after Night Stalker premiered, David Monaghan told me that he had been speaking to Bianchi for years and could put me in touch with him.

Bianchi was just about to be up for parole. He was wanting to talk, but he hadn’t spoken to anybody on record for decades. The very first conversation I had with him, he was like, “I want to tell you something…I’m a huge fan of Chicago P.D. I’m a huge fan of the episodes you wrote.” I say that to say that this was the entry point for us to have something else to talk about outside the case and investigation. It helped me earn his trust.

My whole thing was that I entered this like a journalist. He’s my subject, and I need to get to the truth. I need to get close to this subject so we can get the full story, so this documentary series is as three-dimensional as possible. That took a number of years, but it all started with Bianchi being a fan of some of the work I had done, and that bought me credibility with him. Then, a number of years later, he opened up. He really started to open up.

Beyond Bianchi, how did you decide upon the interview subjects that were included? You cast such an effective broad net when it comes to the people and experts connected to these tragedies, with none of them really feeling superfluous.

TW: That credit goes to Peter LoGreco, who I ultimately handed the baton off to, and then he saw through production. He did such a great job with it all. My biggest fear was the same thing that I felt with Night Stalker. There have been so many series, docs, and one-offs that have been done about that subject matter. I never wanted to repeat any of that. A big part of this was thinking about who we could get that had never really spoken before. Well, we had one of the convicted killers, and then we had Frank Salerno.

However, our North Star through all this was always victim-centric. You have to go into this understanding that people’s lives were forever altered in the most horrific way possible. You have to respect that, and that needs to be your North Star throughout the whole thing, which it was for us. Figuring out who to speak to was more about trying to stay away from those who have already spoken in four or five other series. We were looking for new takes and angles.

Pacing and padding can be such an issue with these types of true-crime docu-series, but The Hillside Strangler doesn’t overstay its welcome or ever feel gratuitous. How was the four-episode structure reached, and how did you figure out the skeleton of each episode to determine the proper pacing?

TW: That goes back to my scripted training and being on Chicago P.D. A lot of people thumb their noses at network television, and that it’s this genre for people who are 65 and over. However, if you’re working in network TV, then you know it’s a runaway freight train. Once that train leaves the station, you need to know how to break a story fast and how to rewrite fast so that you can move into production. I also learned an essential lesson from Dick Wolf himself, who would always say, “Eat your dessert first.”

I did a series with his son, Elliot Wolf, called On Call. We wanted every episode to feel like you were shot out of a cannon. I took a lot of those lessons that I learned from network TV, especially the Dick Wolf procedurals, and applied them to unscripted television. This should never feel like paint drying on the wall. Docu-series can be very dry and slow with this whole “Just wait until episode three and it gets better…” mentality. I’m of the mindset that I don’t have that luxury. You have ten minutes or five minutes to hook the audience, and we’re trying to hook them right away. I apply that to my scripted work, and I apply that to my unscripted work.

This side of the series really unpacks the psychological aspect of the defense and the popular tactics that were used back in the day, like hypnosis and insanity pleas. The whole “Steve” persona that emerges during the hypnosis is such a fascinating element here that I don’t think a lot of the general public knew about, or at least have never witnessed like you’re able to highlight here. It’s really powerful.

TW: I’m happy you mentioned that because those hypnosis tapes have never been seen before. I believe that’s the first time we’ve unearthed them, and it’s fascinating. It’s almost like psychiatry and psychology are on trial, along with Buono, his cousin. It’s fascinating to watch that. I’m going to leave my opinions out of it because I want the audience to come to their own conclusions on it all. It took a lot of work to get those released, and I’m happy we did because it really tells an angle of this story that’s never been told before.

I think one of the most interesting moments from the whole series is in the final episode, where you have Frank, Peter, and David – these opposed parties – who are debating over whether Bianchi deserves parole or not, and they’re all so convinced of their contrasting perspectives. It’s such a raw moment towards the end of the series. Why was that such an important moment to include?

TW: I was on set that day for the filming of that, and you could hear a pin drop when those three guys were at the table and going back and forth. David is a very interesting guy. He’s a very bright guy. He’s a journalist in his own right. He’s done a lot of good work in the past, and he really believes. He’s done a lot of investigating on his own, and he really believes that Bianchi is innocent. We wanted to give him a chance to get out there and to show that, because for me, as a producer, I knew that it would illuminate parts of the investigation that the cops did. He’s an interesting character, isn’t he?

I really think you accomplish the victim-forward message that you’re going for in The Hillside Strangler. It’s so effective how the series lingers on the victims at the end, and it really feels like the series’ heart is in the right place.

TW: That was very important to us when we made Night Stalker. This is a bit of a different team on Hillside Strangler, but it was very important on this production, too. In my opinion, if you’re not going to honor the people and the families who were victimized by this, then there’s no point in doing it. There’s enough out there about the case that I have no desire to put a serial killer out there and give him a platform. I don’t think we did that here, but it just goes back to where your own moral compass lies. We were always going to honor these women and their families because their families, to this day, are still feeling the void that’s left.

I do think there are more scripted series that sensationalize real-life stories and take such creative license with them.

TW: Yeah, it’s baffling that it doesn’t get called out more, and it’s baffling that the people who put this sort of material out there — and consistently put it out there — don’t have the frame of mind to understand that it’s hurting people. There are real lives that are affected by it. I’m not interested in that at all.

The Hillside Strangler premiered on MGM+ on January 18, with new episodes dropping Sundays. The finale arrives on February 8.