{"id":172888,"date":"2025-11-10T09:34:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T09:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/172888\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T09:34:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T09:34:12","slug":"the-raw-footage-made-me-feel-disgusted-horrified-really-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/172888\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The raw footage made me feel disgusted … Horrified, really\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When To Catch a Predator first aired, in 2004, as part of NBC\u2019s Dateline news magazine show<\/a>, it became a sensation. Equal parts news, moral crusade and shock television, the series gripped audiences with a soon-familiar ritual: a man walks into a suburban home expecting an inappropriate encounter with a minor, only to be met by Chris Hansen, the show\u2019s host, and his camera crew.<\/p>\n

The resulting marriage of panicked perpetrators and vigilante justice, with entertainment and a public-service element thrown in, spawned internet memes and parodies on Saturday Night Live, on 30 Rock and at Hollywood award ceremonies.<\/p>\n

Hansen, a heavily decorated journalist<\/a> with 10 Emmys and five Edward R Murrow Awards, became a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show and featured on The Simpsons. Arrests were made, and generations of teenagers were warned about a new breed of internet predator.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a moment when the show came out in the early 2000s,\u201d says David Osit, the director of Predators, a new film revisiting the series. \u201cIt was a very specific moment in the internet\u2019s history. Everyone was online, but not everyone understood the internet. That fear created a space for public-service announcements and shows like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Predators shares an intersecting theme, yet very little DNA, with the vogue for chronicling the wild west of early reality television, projects including Apple TV\u2019s Dark Side of Reality TV and Netflix\u2019s Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser. Osit\u2019s uneasy and contemplative exploration of To Catch a Predator is neither a drive-by nor nostalgia-driven but a reckoning with the show\u2019s enduring appeal.<\/p>\n

\u201cI watched it, but back then it wasn\u2019t a show you were a fan of,\u201d he says. \u201cThere weren\u2019t T-shirts or message boards. It was still a news programme. I watched it and then forgot about it. What\u2019s unique is that it only aired under 20 times over three years, yet it still has name recognition in the United States across generations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Osit, previously best known for Mayor, a 2020 documentary portrait of Musa Hadid, an elected official in Ramallah<\/a>, didn\u2019t set out to make this kind of film.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never expected to make a true-crime documentary, let alone one about To Catch a Predator,\u201d he says. \u201cI stumbled on to the raw footage that the online fandom community had been preserving for about 20 years. They\u2019d been collecting it through Freedom of Information Act requests: raw footage, defence packages, depositions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DavidDavid Osit: ‘It\u2019s not a film about predators so much as it\u2019s a film about how shows like this make us feel.’ Photograph: Andreas Rentz\/Getty\/ZFF <\/p>\n

That material does not make for easy viewing. Lengthy footage of men caught in sting operations \u2013 pleading, crying, begging to go free \u2013 is juxtaposed with chilling chat logs of them seeking victims online. That dichotomy is murkier than the neat, cathartic and sometimes comical gotcha moments of To Catch a Predator.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started watching this material, and that\u2019s what sparked my interest,\u201d Osit says. \u201cI remembered the show as this sensational thing. And then suddenly I was watching 75- or 80-minute single-shot takes of someone\u2019s life ending in slow motion. If you\u2019re human it\u2019s hard not to feel something watching that, regardless of what someone\u2019s done or might have done.\u201d<\/p>\n

That acute discomfort \u2013 the impulse to look away and the compulsion to keep watching regardless \u2013 forms the spine of his film. \u201cI kept thinking, I don\u2019t know how to feel about this,\u201d Osit says. \u201cThat was such a strange sentiment that I thought, What if I made a film about that feeling? So it\u2019s not a film about predators so much as it\u2019s a film about how shows like this make us feel. Or stop us from feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Predators also chronicles the queasy relationship between broadcast television and law enforcement in one key incident. In arguably the most controversial episode, a sting in Texas went horribly wrong: Bill Conradt, an assistant district attorney, died by suicide as police, accompanied by an NBC camera crew, attempted to serve a search warrant on him.<\/p>\n

Osit includes unaired footage and producer interviews, outlining the alliances between the police and the network, and demonstrates how the quest for ratings could eclipse any duty of care.<\/p>\n

The effect is typical of Osit\u2019s careful, contextualising use of out-takes. The unedited footage forced him to confront what the show had obscured.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t remember any details, just that it had that train-wreck energy,\u201d he says. \u201cWatching the raw footage made me feel disgusted. Horrified, really. The original show was edited to make you want to watch more. It was built on a formula. The humour in the interactions between Chris Hansen and the men. That humour is gone in the raw footage. It\u2019s hard to find anything funny in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Predators:Predators: David Osit and Chris Hansen <\/p>\n

Reruns of To Catch a Predator continue to attract global viewers. Chris Hansen, whose interview for Predators provides the film\u2019s considered denouement, maintains a dedicated following through TruBlu, the true-crime-oriented platform he cofounded in 2020. A year earlier he resurrected the To Catch a Predator format for a syndicated segment called Hansen vs Predator. About 435,000 subscribers tune into his YouTube channel for adjacent content, including Predators I\u2019ve Caught.<\/p>\n

\u201cI approached him early in production,\u201d Osit says. \u201cI told him the truth: that I was interested in how he, in many ways, seemed like the godfather of this genre where journalism and law enforcement merge to create entertainment. He agreed with that assessment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hansen\u2019s willingness to collaborate, Osit explains, came partly from his continuing mission. \u201cI was also interested in the fact that he was still doing the show. He\u2019d rebooted it on his own network, free from the constraints of broadcast standards. He was going direct to consumer, which wasn\u2019t possible 20 years ago but is now almost the norm. I wanted to follow him doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hansen\u2019s work was only the beginning, however. Across the United States and Europe, self-styled \u201cpredator catchers\u201d have replicated the To Catch a Predator format on YouTube, TikTok and livestreaming platforms. <\/p>\n

In common with the NBC original, groups such as Predator Exposure, in England, Creep Catchers, in Canada, and Dads Against Predators, in the United States, stage amateur sting operations, luring potential offenders into filmed encounters, often showing names, faces and chat logs. That information can potentially reach millions of viewers before authorities intervene.<\/p>\n

Osit\u2019s film tags along with one such activist: Skeeter Jean, a self-styled \u201cChris Hansen impersonator\u201d who has attracted more than two million YouTube subscribers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Ireland and the UK, amateur predator-hunting is a huge phenomenon, maybe even more per capita than in the States,\u201d Osit says. \u201cThere\u2019s a direct lineage between To Catch a Predator and that. My film tries to get at the in-between. And that in-between is us. At some point we decided we enjoy entertainment that straddles the line between empathy and cruelty.\u201d<\/p>\n

He approached everyone with curiosity, he says. \u201cI may disagree with them, but I wasn\u2019t trying to caricature anyone. I wanted to do what To Catch a Predator never did: look beyond archetypes and understand what drives people. That sincerity helped me build trust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Skeeter Jean has responded positively to the finished work. \u201cHe even posted about it on social media,\u201d Osit says.<\/p>\n

Since it premiered at Sundance Film Festival, Predators has amassed a 98 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Not everyone is a fan, though. \u201cIt has run the gamut,\u201d the film-maker says. \u201cSome people think I\u2019m asking them to have sympathy for child predators. I\u2019m not. But it\u2019s fascinating that people react that way. It shows how afraid we are of seeing humanity in people we\u2019ve decided are monsters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Predators forced Osit, who has previously worked as an editor on true-crime expos\u00e9s of the NXIVM cult (in The Vow) and 4Chan (in The Antisocial Network), to confront his own complicity as a documentarian.<\/p>\n

\u201cChris and I actually have things in common,\u2019 he says. \u201cWe\u2019re both film-makers using reality to create stories, both incentivised to make them more entertaining. That\u2019s really what brought the film to life: understanding that what I was doing sometimes mirrored what I was criticising.\u201d<\/p>\n

Predators is an impressively intelligent project.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of righteous documentary film-making, especially from the left, where films are made to affirm or anger rather than to question. I wanted to make something more challenging than that.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn some ways this film is an indictment of what I do for a living. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll ever make certain films the same way again. It really changed me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Predators is in cinemas and available from dogwoof.com<\/a> from Friday, November 14th; it streams on Paramount+ from Monday, December 8th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When To Catch a Predator first aired, in 2004, as part of NBC\u2019s Dateline news magazine show, it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[18,117,19,17,327,16999,384],"class_list":{"0":"post-172888","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-sundance-film-festival","14":"tag-united-states"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115524722326350402","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}