You may already be familiar with the horrific and captivating story of mother-daughter pair Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, but if not, Erin Lee Carr’s forthcoming HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest will bring it to your attention. A refresher per HBO: “Child abuse, mental illness and forbidden love converge in this mystery of a mother and daughter who were thought to be living a fairy tale life that turned out to be a living nightmare.”
Carr’s last film, as she explained to Fusion’s Dan Ilic at SXSW, where Mommy Dead and Dearest premiered this week, also tackled a case of true crime that captivated readers—and she first discovered the story on Gawker, Jezebel’s former sister site. Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop also went deeper into a scandalous story that dominated headlines, with new interviews from the misunderstood subjects themselves.
Carr discovered the topic of her new film similarly, through a post on Thought Catalog. “I just was completely obsessed with it and thought, I have to go talk to this woman,” Carr said, eventually managing to interview Gypsy Rose in prison, where she is currently incarcerated.
