What If Your Dad Was a Serial Killer? Revisiting ‘The Clovehitch Killer’ Starring Dylan McDermott

Many of us were shocked when we found out the serial killer “BTK” (short for bind, torture, kill) was by all accounts a normal, suburban family man. He was also a Boy Scout troop leader and active member of his church. Though history has shown us these are positions often used by nefarious human beings to cloak their evil, the idea that Dennis Rader was an active and allegedly loving father and husband at the time of his capture still haunts us.

It’s the sort of thing that makes all of us wonder what the poor family members left in the wake of the monster must be feeling. Having their entire lives turned upside down in one earth-shattering moment. Not only is the child losing a parent but also having their past and childhood deformed and manipulated into the cruelest of things.

The Clovehitch Killer is a story about being that child in that situation as it actively unravels.

Dylan McDermott (American Horror Story) plays against type in the 2018 movie from director Duncan Skiles as a dorky, middle-aged dad with a bad back and an even worse goatee. His idea of breaking the rules consists of having a soda pop in the garage where his wife can’t see. Or so it seems. In truth, when he’s not tickling kids at the local community fundraiser (ugh), he’s dealing with an insatiable blood lust to bind, torture, and murder women.

As many serial killer films tend to do, The Clovehitch Killer uses the actual killer as more of a peripheral character. We watch Clovehitch through the eyes of his timid teenage son Tyler (Charlie Plummer), as his awkward father transforms into a horrific murderer fueled by sexual deviance.

It’s fascinating just to watch Don (McDermott) in his normal habitat. Loading canned goods from the garage or cracking Dad jokes as they play Rummy together. This guy is repressed. This guy has dark secrets. And it’s so obvious that it isn’t obvious at all. It’s hiding in plain sight. Tyler’s mother (Samantha Mathis) is a dutiful wife, devoted Christian, and strict mom. And under the surface, deeply unhappy. It’s almost as if she knows deep down there is something awful hiding just beneath her nose. In this case, it’s a secret room in their crawl space that houses a shower, toilet, and a box of BDSM porn magazines and trophies from the many victims of her husband.

The community they live in plays a major role in the film. The simple, yet cold backdrop of a small Kentucky town living in the wake of a heinous serial killer who has haunted them for years. Yet, they have no choice but to move on, go to church, and act as a normal, forgotten community just the same. Save for a once-a-year memorial to the victims that feels so depressingly minimalist it could have taken place in Napoleon Dynamite. If only there were anything funny about it.

The teenagers that surround Tyler are perhaps the most depressingly repressed of everyone. For example, when Tyler goes to his friend after discovering his father could be Clovehitch, the friend is only concerned with the thought that Tyler was about to confess he was homosexual. It’s in places like this where evil can most easily hide by simply going through the motions among the other shuffling members of an antiquated community. Or maybe, where going through these motions can repress someone into an abyss of their own evil. This is what makes The Clovehitch Killer so unsettling throughout even the most mundane moments. We are watching these characters live this life that feels like the thinnest of veils for something horrific underneath.

While the “coming of age” aspect of Clovehitch is admittedly undercooked by the lack of personality in Tyler’s character, that’s sort of the point. We’re watching a repressed teenager walk through one of the most shocking life events imaginable. It begins with a girl he’s awkwardly making out with finding a piece of torn BDSM porn wedged in the seat of his dad’s truck and believing it was his. It’s a microcosm of the entire idea of the film: two teens, joylessly going through the motions of what teens do in a small town, suddenly receiving a rip in the fabric of their rural Truman Show-like existence. Only instead of Ed Harris with a headset, it’s Tyler’s dad wearing a dress and choking himself in the living room while the family is on vacation.

When Clovehitch finally gets to the unveiling of its killer at work and we witness awkward dad become a serial killer in action, it remains uncomfortable and surreal. He hurts his back crawling in the basement window and breathes heavily through his ski mask, manipulating his victim that he’s just a bank robber looking for a car to steal. The authenticity of the layout of the victim’s small Kentucky neighborhood home adds to the moment in a way that most films don’t. It’s almost as if sometimes Hollywood forgets that horrible things happen in everyday places. Set decorator Emily Blevins did a fantastic job of keeping the look of the homes as minimalist as the film itself and in doing so only added to the haunting realism of the moment. A disconcerting moment where something profoundly evil appears somewhere profoundly ordinary.

This all leads to the moment Tyler enters the room with the gun on his dad, who is sitting and watching his victim suffocate to death beneath the hold of an everyday grocery store bag. And it kind of feels like we’re there with all three of them. The last place we’d ever wish to be.

From here, Clovehitch tries to do perhaps a bit too much. There’s a twist with some plot holes and an ending that sort of overreaches the natural flow of what came before. Still, The Clovehitch Killer checks a lot of boxes for fans of multiple horror movie subgenres. There’s a true crime element, a fascinating serial killer story (that involves both suburban and psychological horrors), and one more time for the cheap seats… an extremely underrated and ultimately mean performance from Dylan McDermott. One that successfully shows off the dark side of how easy it is to provide society with exactly what it wants to see as a “safe” human being.

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