The Murderous Seduction of American Pop Culture

by Lauren Boyer

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Once upon a time, serial killers were feared and despised. Now, they seem to be romanticized and adored.

 There is something to be said for the positive media representation of criminals. From Monte Christo to Shawshank Redemption, storytelling can remind us of the humanity behind bars that often gets forgotten or ignored. However, in recent years it often feels as though there’s been a rise in the public’s fascination with violence. The couch has become the new Colosseum as American viewers look at reenactments of real murders on their television screens, only to post thirst videos and jokes on TikTok about the events that have traumatized real people. They feel just as removed from the violence as the onlookers in Ancient Rome once did. How safe are we in a society where everyone wants to watch murder? Yet that is where we find ourselves.  America is drunk on horror movies, and it’s not an absorbance in the mechanics of make up and special effects that attracts them. 

We blanket our bloodlust with excuses of psychological fascination. We pretend we want to be well informed or understand the human mind better. But by surrounding ourselves with the bloody images of horrific anomalies, we distort our perception of human nature instead of deepening it. If you spend all your time in a mental asylum, you might go crazy. Now the asylum is easy to find, it is on our televisions, our TikToks, and it is embedded in our culture. 

We have surpassed a public interest in a national news story about the murder of a healthcare CEO. In fact, it’s likely that more people know the name Luigi Mangione than the name of the man he murdered, Brian Thompson. Luigi is perceived as the interesting, attractive one. We care less about why he did it and more that he doesn’t get punished for it. Because when someone is seen as attractive, we are more likely to sympathize with them—and possibly humanize the atrocities they commit. We should therefore think twice before using attractive actors to represent serial killers and murders, especially in works of fiction. 

While TikTok and Netflix may be reviving our interest in gore, it’s as old as our instinct to hunt. The public’s love of serial killer Ted Bundy has been replaced with a television show on Jeffrey Dahmer, where the cannibal is played by a man many recognize from Disney channel. Even now, my screen is filled with Instagram reels romanticizing Penn Badgley in You. Netflix itself describes the character’s serial killer tendencies by calling him “a dangerously charming, obsessive man [who] goes to extreme measures to insert himself into the lives of women who fascinate him.” By description alone, viewers would have no idea the amount of violence at their door with a single click. 

What does it say about our laws that we market murder? For one, it says that we want it. We hold interest in the pain of others. And as we normalize our blood lust, we give ourselves room to bring it off the screen. It becomes closer than it looks. We create a culture that celebrates the killer, and therefore, despises the victim.

Some may argue that drooling over a fictional murderer has no real-world implications, but a line is crossed when real killers are romanticized. Media coverage makes a difference. While video games have not been linked to school shootings, media coverage of real-life shootings has been found to create a copycat effect. How sad is the reach of that copycat effect that “Despite being home to only 5% of the world’s population, roughly 31% of the world’s mass shootings have occurred in the United States.” 

The violence induced by the copy-cat effect is not limited to school-shootings. Children as young as five have been known to imitate the suicides they see onscreen, without any other known motivation. Additionally, we should fear the fate of Mark Twitchell’s victims, whose attacker drew inspiration from Dexter, a fictional serial killer. 

When watching action shows from the 1980s, my Gen-Z self has been surprised by the lack of blood. In middle school, my friends were obsessed with Criminal Minds. My own first weeks at the University of Delaware were spent watching “TMZ Investigates: Luigi Mangione: The Mind of a Killer” and Netflix’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.” None of us are immune to our fascination with the horrible and abnormal. What matters is whether we fight against our tendency to warp justice and seek to remember the real-life victims and help restore their peace.