Mindhunter's second season, premiering next month, will focus on the Atlanta child murders

By Randall Colburn | July 12, 2019 | 2:35pm

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Mindhunter's second season, premiering next month, will focus on the Atlanta child murders

Photo: Merrick Morton

Mindhunter, David Fincher’s unnerving, impactful Netflix series about the early days of the FBI’s criminal psychology and criminal profiling division, is coming back to softly tap on your window next month. In a new interview on KCRW’s The Treatment podcast (via Indiewire), Fincher has unveiled a whole host of details about the anticipated second season. Specifically, the season will delve into the cases of Charles Manson, Son Of Sam, and the Atlanta child murders, the latter of which left 28 African-Americans dead between 1979 and 1981. Its history and cultural impact was recently explored in depth on the Atlanta Monster podcast.

“You could probably do three seasons on the Atlanta child murders,” Fincher told host Elvis Mitchell. “It’s a huge and sweeping and tragic story. We couldn’t do it justice in the background of our nine hours. We had to choose to dramatize. …[The FBI] are the last guys in, they’re trying to help out something that has its own momentum and politics. It’s a divided battlefield. They’re coming in to throw this federal umbrella over everything to make everyone feel OK about sharing information.”

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Fincher also discussed the general vibe of the second seaso, which will find the phenomenon of the serial killer infiltrating the media. “In the 70s, post-Manson, post-Son of Sam, post-Zodiac, there really was, I don’t think you can say it was an epidemic, but there was definitely the feeling that the notion of this has gotten away from us. There was this transition. I remember it happening with Son of Sam. When I left the Bay Area in the mid 1970s and our parents moved to Oregon, you go 300 miles north and nobody talked about Zodiac. It had been this festering thing that had never been brought to any kind of closure but no one cared about it [outside of the Bay Area]. Then Son of Sam came, and it was Newsweek and Time, the cover.”

Listen to the interview in full below.

Fincher, who also described the show as being “about narcissism” and “needing to be seen,” revealed that the second season will hit Netflix on August 16. We’ll be over here gearing up for more BTK cameos.