The romanticisation and fascination for serial killers

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The romanticisation and fascination for serial killers.

Introduction:

Recently, the glasses of the famous Jeffrey Dahmer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, have been sold for 150 000 dollars. This was partially made possible with the recent release of “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” on Netflix (2022), which is a biopic on the man who killed seventeen people and ate some of them. Following the release of this very graphic and disturbing series and the renewed fascination for the serial killer, numerous debates surrounding True Crime and its ethics have resurfaced. The fascination with murder and deviant behaviours seems have taken root long before psychologists even took an interest in it. Shakespeare and Edgard Allan Poe, for instance, have used deviant heroes or disturbing behaviours in their work and they still fascinate today. Although these heroes are fictional, this goes to show that the admiration if not the obsession for deviant behaviours is not a recent phenomenon.                                         The question is why do humans love to fear? Why are they so interested in the gruesome details of murders? This is a question a lot of psychologists have wanted to answer. Some psychologists believe that Freud’s “death drive” is the answer to this question while others think it is due to catharsis. However, the other question this issue raises is whether it is ethical or not to make True Crime a consumer product. Indeed, there are a lot of different domains that are relevant to the study of True Crime, and many experts, from – psychologists to criminologists to sociologists, and even historians, have attempted to unpack both audiences’ ongoing attraction to dark subjects and the broader implications of “crime entertainment” for society.                                                                          In this paper, the birth and marketisation of True Crime will be studied, before adopting a more psychological and sociological approach to the issue, with a specific focus on themes of hybristophilia (sexual interest in and attraction to those who commit crimes), anomie (a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals), and catharsis (the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions, especially through art). This survey of academic approaches to understanding True Crime as a genre will lead us to the question of ethics and whether True Crime should have its place in society, this will be discussed in the third and last part of this paper focusing on the victims and the impact that True Crime has. Whilst this paper focuses on serial killers specifically, much of the forthcoming analysis is applicable to other types of criminals. Looking specifically at the Dahmer case and other relevant entertainment forms, this research will ultimately explore the extent to which True Crime is romanticised and examine its ethics and impact on society.

1. The birth and marketisation of true crime

1. The birth of the true crime genre

As mentioned in the introduction, the fascination for crime and deviant behaviours is not a recent phenomenon. This is also the case for the True Crime genre. It is possible to trace the birth of True Crime to the 16th century in the form of pamphlets. “As literacy rates expanded and new prints technology […] hundreds of crime pamphlets […] usually describing horrific murders […] circulated” Pamela Burger explains in her article “The Bloody History of the True Crime Genre”. Indeed, the more people were able to read and the more the True Crime genre expanded and was read mainly by the working class. The fascination for deviance and murder is also well illustrated by the public executions which attracted hundreds of people and the Freak Shows of the Victorian Era.                                                Jack the Ripper is one of the first and most notorious serial killers, Michelle Burns explains that “It is the rarity of his grotesque crimes and the various reactions to them that have added to the Ripper’s infamy, and the fact that this mystery has remained unsolved, has created a legend” in her article “Rippermania: Fear and Fascination in Victoria London”. The mystery that still hangs around this case participates in its notoriety and he has introduced the idea of murderers who do not kill for personal reasons but just for the sake of killing. However, the notion of serial killer has only emerged in the 1960’s, in the United States.

1. The marketisation of true crime

True crime has slowly expanded from pamphlets to other media. From magazines to movies, it is a genre that has seen a burst in popularity in the 70’s and is still very popular now. This part will focus on the strategies used to sell True Crime and the way the media turned serial killers into celebrities. The arrival of the notion of serial killer was particularly striking in the USA and it happened progressively. Serge Chazal argues that “l’émergence du serial killer dans l’imaginaire collectif Américain s’est faite lentement, par étapes, à travers un nombre de plus en plus important de médias”(“the emergence of the serial killer in the American collective imagination happened slowly, step by step, through a growing diversity of media forms ”) in his book « Meurtre et séréalité: l’émergence du serial killer » (page 72). Serge Chazal explains that a lot of different strategies were used to turn serial killers into celebrities, giving a nickname to serial killers for example, Jack the Ripper, the Milwaukee Cannibal (Jeffrey Dahmer), and more.                         Another strategy is the different adjectives attributed to the serial killers and the victims by the media. Serge Chazal claims that serial killers are often related to adjectives like intelligent, evil, sadistic, weird, fascinating, and even seductive while the victims are qualified as mutilated, tortured, or raped. Most serial killers are men and most of the time the victims are women. This is a pattern that is present in literature and especially the Gothic genre, where the deviant is a man who kills a pure and young woman. What is also interesting is that women watch or listen to more True Crime shows or podcasts than men.

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