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True crime books, podcasts, and shows: Why are we so interested?
While some people walk into cozy cottages and beautiful forests, others walk into a crime scene with an unsolved mystery. Crime stories seem more popular than ever. Bookshop shelves and TV schedules are heaving with murder mysteries and whodunnits. And the ‘true crime’ genre has been given a new lease of life in recent years, with smash-hit documentaries such as Making a Murderer, The Jinx, and The Keepers, and there’s even been a rise in the popularity of podcasts. The podcast Serial – season one of which investigated a real-life murder – has attracted hundreds of millions of downloads.
Evolutionary psychologists say that we’re drawn to these tales because murder, rape, and theft have played a significant part in human society since our hunter-gatherer days. It’s in our nature to be highly attuned to criminal misdemeanors, and we instinctively want to discover the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ so that we can find out what makes criminals tick, and to better protect ourselves and our kin.
True crime has all the basics of good storytelling: Interesting characters, a sense of urgency, and tension that is (in most cases) released when the mystery is solved at the end. The genre also has another selling point: catharsis. Normally, we experience emotions like sadness or anger in real-world situations that are much more serious and that negatively impact us. Engaging with those emotions in a safe, contained, and chosen environment – like on your couch – can be therapeutic for some people. Emily Dworkin, a trauma researcher and assistant professor in the UW School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences says that “It’s really common and normal to enjoy things that involve experiencing difficult emotions in safe ways, like rollercoasters and horror movies and sad films”.
Another reason we are so interested in true crime is the eagerness that many feel in trying to understand what goes on inside the minds of these horrible criminals. What could possibly motivate people to commit such heinous acts? “We all possess a dark side, although I would say most are light gray as opposed to inky black, and maybe that’s why so many of us are obsessed with the sinister doings of others”, offers Janice Holly Booth, author of “A Voice out Nowhere: Inside the Mind of a Mass Murderer”. Marc Lamber, attorney at Fennemore Craig, P.C., points to the fact that most people are regular, law-abiding citizens. “Because crime is foreign to most, the fascination with it and similar genres stem from the public’s curiosity regarding what would possess others to engage in criminal conduct, what it looks like, and what happens as a consequence”, he explains.
There are various reasons why we are so interested in true crime: the fascination, the longing for justice, or the curiosity of what goes through the minds of criminals. Every true crime story comes with the potential for sensationalizing, othering, and dehumanizing. Be aware to not dive so deep into true crime and the mindset of criminals.
