This article contains spoilers for Netflix's The Watcher
It’s fair to say American filmmaker Ryan Murphy is one of the most prolific names in horror. From American Horror Stories to Ratched to this year’s most controversial docu-series Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, it’s no wonder Netflix has turned to him to take the helm of one of their newest spooky offerings.
The Watcher has all the earmarks of a classic Ryan Murphy series: slick production, head-whipping whodunnit-ery and teeth-grinding suspense, all set against the innocuous backdrop of wholesome small-town America.
Disappointingly, though, this is one projects of Murphy's which hasn't left viewers desperate for more.
Spoilers for the ending of The Watcher ahead...
Much like aspects of Ratched and American Horror Stories before it, the bulk of The Watcher is, chillingly, based on a true story. In the Netflix adaptation, well-to-do WASP family Dean and Nora Brannock and their two kids move into a sprawling million-dollar home in a New Jersey suburb, Westfield, to raise their kids away from the perils of New York City. But it’s not long before their plan backfires spectacularly with the arrival of a series of creepy AF letters from an anonymous neighbour calling themselves The Watcher. As with any dramatization of a true crime story, there’s plenty of made up bits thrown in for theatrical effect, but loads of it, including some of the content of the letters themselves, comes straight from the real life family’s experience. One letter read, ‘I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming.
‘My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time.’
Recurrent mentions of the family’s children as ‘young blood’ and the renovations making the house ‘unhappy’ also made into the Netflix version from the original letters.
Like the Brannocks, the real-life Broaddus family did buy a large house in Westfield, New Jersey in a bid to escape the city and raise their children in a tight-knit suburban community. But unlike the Brannocks, Derek and Maria Broaddus didn’t actually ever live in the cursed house. Instead, they commuted to and from their new property whilst continuing to live in New York to oversee renovations. Once the weird letters started arriving, they didn’t stick around to find out if the mysterious Watcher would act on their threats.
Who is the watcher? Who was writing the letters?
The eerie tale was first picked up by a New York Times journalist, Reeves Weidman, in his 2014 expose The Haunting of a Dream House. Since then there has been very little progress on the case and, as in the Netflix adaptation, the mystery remains unsolved.
Which was a disappointing turn of events for those of us who committed seven consecutive hours of our lives to binging the series in a single sitting.
The series' closing credit confirms that 'The Watcher case remains unsolved' which, though may be true, isn't exactly the satisfyingly chilling conclusion we signed up to. If producers could take liberties with some of the more far-fetched elements of the story - like the discovery of a labyrinth of secret passageways under the house, the mass-murdering former tenant and the blood-drinking sex cult next door, surely they could have given us a fabricated ending?
Netflix's choice to stick to the facts when it came to the most important part of the story has had most viewers mourning the seven hours of their lives that they'll never get back.
What happened to the Broaddus family?
According to The Cut, Derek and Maria Broaddus did end up living in Westfield, just in a different house that wasn’t plagued by a creepy stalker.
What happened to 657 Boulevard?
After making the wise decision not to move into the house themselves, the Broaddus family decided against renting out the property and instead put it back on the market. It took five years but, incredibly, it was sold in 2019. The Broaddus’ passed on the information of the letters but apparently the new owners to this day have never received a single letter from The Watcher.
And what of the previous owners? It was reported by Reeves Weidman that when the Broaddus’ got in touch, they were told that the previous homeowners had received one letter from The Watcher just before they moved out – but that they hadn’t in the two-plus decades they lived there before that.