Netflix’s new documentary depicts the antivirus founder turned fugitive John McAfee and his life on the run after becoming a suspect in the 2012 murder of his neighbor in Belize (via Deadline). McAfee asked a film crew to document his experience as he evaded the authorities — and the Mexican cartel, apparently.
The documentary, called Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee, has video journalists thrown into the whirlwind that is McAfee’s life. With guns, drugs, and alcohol in tow, the group traverses through Belize and Guatemala and somehow winds up on a boat headed to the Bahamas.
To say McAfee had an interesting history would be an understatement. After making a name for himself as the creator of the McAfee antivirus software company — which Intel acquired in 2021 — things started to go downhill when police in Belize pegged him as a person of interest in the murder of his neighbor, Gregory Faull. From then on, McAfee’s actions just got more bizarre: he got into crypto; attempted to run for president; and even developed a “hack-proof” phone. In 2020, he was arrested in Spain for tax evasion and was later found dead in his prison cell before he was extradited to the US. His death was ruled a suicide.
Running with the Devil will arrive on Netflix on August 24th. It’s produced by the British studio Curious Films, whose co-founder, Dov Freedman, told Deadline that the film has been “10 years in the making.” This isn’t the first time John McAfee became the subject of a documentary; in 2016, Showtime produced Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee.
