From serial killers to cults, I’ve heard it all. In depth. And so have many others. Is that bad?
When I was in high school, people used to give me funny looks for knowing who Ed Gein was. I used to spend hours watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, to get a not-so-healthy dose of violence, murder, and sexually based offenses that are considered especially heinous. I loved horror movies and would often go down rabbit holes on famous abduction cases and murders. Does that sound demented? Well, I’m not alone.
In the past ten years, being fascinated by true crime has joined the zeitgeist. Conspiracies that could only be found in the seediest parts of the internet are now mainstream news. Podcasts and primetime broadcast networks are chock-full of the latest monsters that live down your street. We may not know them all by name –well, chances are I do– but if the Netflix documentary exists, it’s being watched.
I don’t know what has changed within me just in the past month, but thinking back on the exploitative nature of the true crime genre has made me feel a little uncomfortable. I think I was triggered by watching Don’t F*** with Cats last week. Spoiler alert: a monster uploaded videos of himself committing violent crimes, and internet sleuths helped international crime investigators track him down and put him in jail. The documentary concludes with one of the most influential sleuths in the case reflecting on her involvement. She openly asks herself if by dedicating all that time and energy into finding him fed into the criminal’s clear desire for an audience. Is it her fault his crimes escalated? She then looks dead into the camera, addressing the audience of the documentary, and asks how much of a part do we think we played, by watching this documentary.
Homegirl has a point. Our sick fascination with the macabre has gone so massive that it’s almost normalized. There are girls on TikTok making fan-cams of Ted Bundy and Dylan Klebold. Casey Anthony is making her OWN documentary. Casey Anthony, who objectively killed her daughter, will be making money off a documentary that none of us ACTUALLY want to give money to, but will watch every second of without question. It is sick. At a point, you have to ask: is it what we deserve? By watching and regularly consuming both fiction and nonfiction stories of sex and violence, does it serve us right to have them be idolized, and given a platform? It wouldn’t surprise me to see a co-conspirator of a murderer get their own TLC show. How long until we get a Real Housewives of Serial Killers?
I mean… I would watch that. Isn’t that sick?