Netflix's Conversations with a Killer review: The Charles Manson Tapes sits with the horror, and asks why

A page of a 1969 newspaper shows three stories. Two are about unresolved murders. One involves a famous actress. Next to the story is a shorter article about a raid on an auto theft ring. 26 people have been arrested.

You start picturing a person living in 1960s LA, reading that paper after bolting the door frantically, and sitting with their newly acquired guard dogs. You imagine them keeping their eyes peeled, reading the news, praying that the culprits behind the most grotesque murders are caught, barely noticing the article about the auto theft ring. Little would you imagine, in that moment, that the two are deviously, insidiously connected.

The story of Charles Manson and his cult is, to put it in safe terms, a deeply unsettling, uncomfortable one, owing to the sheer horror of the violence, fear and paranoia that his murders created in America in the 1960s. To be sure, it was always particularly difficult to read too much about him in one go, perhaps it was that photo of his, splattered everywhere, eyes brazen and wide. Or, if I ever attempted any docuseries, just the sight of the women under him, flashing smiles at the camera in court, the ones who committed the ghastly atrocities, would be enough for me to turn away.

Yet, I went through with Netflix's latest docuseries, Conversations with a Killer: The Manson Tapes. The documentary begins with the eerie, bloodied and all-too-familiar territory that everyone knows too well: Sharon Tate's house. A slaughterhouse, as one of the policemen recalls. It's an image they remember all too vividly, even 50 years on. The trail of blood begins in the driveway.

What was the motive? Why were nine people murdered on two separate nights, people who had nothing to do with Manson or his cult?

In order to answer this miserable question, the documentary pulls you away from the sights of 1969, turns back the clock to a few years earlier, and traces the life of Manson himself, and his peculiar, magnetic aura. It picks apart the "tiny, 5-foot-2" man, with the unkempt, lank hair—a man who had already begun a life of petty crimes, then had a moment of thwarted redemption, before going on the run and leaving any chance of goodness behind.

Along the way, he attracted his "family."

After all, it's a question most people ask: How did this man, with practically nothing to his name, build an entire "family" so devoted to him? But he did. He found the lost women. Many of the former members have shared their testimony, and the thread is similar: they were on the run themselves. They needed a home, love, and care of sorts. Some were even 14 and 15. And Manson promised them what they needed. He became what they wanted him to be: a saviour. He was their family.

Yet the documentary goes on to show the violent streaks in Manson surging like bile, with one of the turning points being a failed record deal. Music producer Terry Melcher had once considered signing Manson, then backed out, and Manson, according to the documentary's own reconstruction, began to seethe.

As one former member notes, everything somehow snapped after that episode. He becomes more frenzied; a sudden paranoia around race wars sets in, and you finally see what the documentary is showing you: a man building an argument only he can see. The thoughts are presented like mangled remains, stripped of any humanity or rationality, just a frenzy. What emerges is the "Helter Skelter" theory: Manson's belief, borrowed and warped from a Beatles song title, that an apocalyptic race war was coming, one he could hasten by staging murders designed to look like they'd been committed by militants.

One murder leads to the murder of the nine on August 8 and 10, with motivations that are frazzled, melded, and fused together: the race-war, and spite toward Melcher, the man who had rejected him and who, as far as Manson knew, still lived at 10050 Cielo Drive. The connection is made, and he lays out the plans.

This was at least, the prosecution's version, laid out by Vincent Bugliosi at trial and in his book. It's the most widely cited account, but it's contested — journalist Tom O'Neill's research (in Chaos) found evidence Melcher may have kept seeing Manson after the murders, which undercuts the "instilling fear in Melcher" logic, and some former Family members have offered different explanations over the years.

The documentary bares it all: The escape from Spahn Ranch, auto theft crimes, to an even more desolate surrounding Death Valley, this time, without a roof over their heads. Yet, they're arrested at first, ironically due to vandalism, not murder, and then the pieces start falling together, owing to one member's cold boasting in jail. You're taken to the scenes of the trial, where even the police officers and lawyers appearing apprehensive as they recall the case. The contrasting images keep flashing in front of you, the bloodied letters on a door, juxtaposed with a radiant Sharon Tate after her marriage.

In such cases, it's hard to say whether a documentary is "worth" watching. If you've followed the Manson case closely, the documentary might have little new to tell you. But if you, too, skirted around it because of the discomfort the subject causes, then this documentary is a searing look at one of the most notorious killers of all time.

His victims got a grave.

Yet it's Charles Manson who lived on, till the age of 83, and died of natural causes.

He got what he wanted.

Undeserved fame.