Two scary films, for very different reasons

I’ve been on paternity leave for the last couple of weeks, which has mostly involved being awake at hours I didn’t know existed and remembering that a newborn has roughly the same sleep schedule as a cartel lookout. But Zandland never stops, and while I’ve been changing nappies the team has been lining up a huge amount of new content. So this week’s dispatch is a double bill, and both films are scary, just in completely different ways.

Tonight at 1pm ET / 6pm UK: Kingpins Mexico

At 1pm ET, 6pm UK time tonight, Kingpins Mexico goes live on our YouTube.

Kingpins is a series we created in collaboration with BBC Studios and Channel 4 in the UK, and it’s one of the craziest shows we’ve made as a documentary studio. The idea was basically MTV Cribs, but for drug lords. I’ve spent a lot of my career meeting drug lords, terrorists and gang members, but those meetings are always brief, because the danger means you get in and get out fast. With Kingpins I wanted to do the opposite and properly get behind the scenes of their world. Spend real time with some of the most dangerous men on the planet, see their homes, their families, their cars, their money, and ask the question I’d never had the chance to ask properly, which is whether they’d give it all back for a life on the right side of the law. We did it in Mexico, Lebanon and the UK, and every single one of them was nuts in its own way.

If you’ve never filmed one of these, it’s hard to describe what they’re actually like. They’re frenetic. Nothing happens when it’s supposed to, then everything happens at once, usually at 2am. You spend most of the time waiting for a phone call from someone whose name you don’t know, and then you’re suddenly in the back of a car with no idea where you’re going. It’s scary in a way that’s hard to admit to while it’s happening, because the people you’re with can smell nerves and the whole thing only works if they trust you.

The Mexico episode is the one I still can’t quite believe we managed to film. I spent two weeks in Culiacan, home of the Sinaloa cartel and the city that produced El Chapo, with a 28-year-old trafficker called Luis who’d worked his way up from lookout to hitman to one of the cartel’s main drug traffickers. He owned seventeen properties. He showed me round a fentanyl operation where thirty thousand dollars of product on a table became two hundred thousand once it crossed the border. He kept tigers. To get to his house I had to crouch in the back of a car with my head on my knees, because if I’d looked up during the journey I’d have been in serious trouble. We got interrupted mid-tour by someone higher up the chain who wanted us gone, and at one point we were told that if we ever revealed a location we wouldn’t be leaving the country.

And the truth is, these guys are brutal. That story is laid horrifyingly bare when I meet Maria, a mother who set up an organisation of 130 families searching for loved ones the cartels have disappeared. Her son went missing in 2017. She’s still looking, with a shovel. Mexico has over a hundred thousand missing people, and the same city that idolises narcos as rock stars is full of people quietly digging for their children. That contrast is the whole film.

This is the first time Kingpins has been available on our own channel, and we’re really pleased to be able to bring it to the Zandland audience. If you’ve only known us for the HUMAN films, this is a very similar concept, trying to understand someone in a world most people don’t get access to, and I think you’ll like it.

Tuesday: a Halloween special

And then on Tuesday we release something that’s scary for an entirely different reason, which is that it involves me secretly extracting my best friend’s DNA.

Across the world more and more people are turning to witchcraft, and I wanted to know whether any of it actually works. So I went to see a professional witch called Nina, who used to be an asset manager in finance and now earns significantly more selling spells and potions online. Her most popular product is an obsession spell. I bought one. And I had it cast on Ben Lister, who works with us, shoots on our documentaries, and is one of my best mates, mainly because I assumed he’d be the least risky person to make obsessed with me.

What followed was two months of an elaborate scheme that involved a bull’s heart, a buried box, a cup of enchanted tea, hidden cameras in coffee cups, and a fake interview set up purely to monitor him for signs of obsession. He had no idea about any of it. Whether it worked, and what happened when he found out, you’ll have to watch. It’s our Halloween special and it’s the most fun we’ve had making a film in a long time.

Some good news

HUMAN has been nominated for Creator Media: Creator-Led Content at the Realscreen Awards, which are the big international awards for unscripted and documentary, and the ones the people who commission this stuff in America actually pay attention to. What I like about that category is that it’s for work built by creators rather than broadcasters, which is exactly what HUMAN is: a fully independent, self-financed series with no commissioner shaping it, built on individual human stories and, as the tagline goes, stories without sides. For it to be recognised a year in means a lot. Very proud of the team, and of Josh Reynolds in particular, who exec produced it.

So that’s the week. A cartel tonight, a witch on Tuesday, and a lot more on the way, because it turns out the best way to spend paternity leave is watching your team release things without you. Links to both below, and I’ll be in the comments between feeds.

Ben Z