For centuries, the public has had a morbid fascination with true crime, the dark and distressing stories detailing real life criminal acts.
From podcasts, streaming documentaries, TV shows, books, YouTube channels and much more, true crime has recently skyrocketed into a massive multimedia cultural phenomenon. True crime has hooked modern audiences, a majority of the demographic being women, with an addictive blend of entertainment, and real life investigations.
The roots of true crime as a form of entertainment are as old as the development of criminal justice and the invention of the printing press, all the way back in the 16th century. As literacy grew amongst the common people, pamphlets and leaflets began circulating, detailing shocking capital crimes.
Beyond print, ballads were passed down, recounting the bloody murders of the era with more emphasis on the criminal and their acts than their victims. These ballads would often be told from the point of view of the perpetrator, in an attempt to understand or even sympathize with the psychology of a killer, a common aspect of even modern true crime.
Crime pamphlets
Famous cases like the Jack the Ripper murders received widespread coverage, creating a public obsession with crime stories. These stories were often either sensational or moralistic in order to impart lessons or warnings upon the readers.
The 1800s kept up the widespread circulation of these crime pamphlets across Britain and America, and penny press news provided a popular and affordable vehicle for widespread crime journalism.
This interest in crime and true crime inspired many prominent authors of the time to contribute, with classic authors like Charles Dickens and William Thackeray penning and publishing essays on real life crimes. Thomas De Quincey published a satirical essay in 1827 called “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”, examining the public’s morbid fascination with true crime.
Detective stories
This period also saw the rise of detective stories, which fed into and benefited from the public interest in true crime. In 1811, a French criminal turned criminalist, whose autobiographical memoirs directly inspired many of fiction’s greatest detectives, such as Victor Hugo’s Inspector Javert and Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, who in turn inspired Sherlock Holmes, the uber example of the fictional detective.
In 1889, William Roughead, a vital figure in the world of modern true crime as a literary genre, would begin publishing essays on British murders for sixty years.
Though true crime would continue its trend of popularity well into the 20th century, it wouldn’t be until 1965, with the publishing of ‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote that true crime would reach new heights of popularity amongst the mainstream.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the true crime genre began to take shape on television. Programs like “Dragnet” and “The Untouchables” dramatized real-life cases and police investigations, providing its viewers a highly sensational taste of real world law enforcement.
Digital age
However, it wasn’t until the digital age that true crime experienced a significant surge in popularity, thanks to popular TV shows, streaming, and podcasts. Streaming platforms like Netflix were especially influential in contributing to the surge in true crime popularity.
True crime documentaries, such as “Making a Murderer,” “The Jinx,” and “Tiger King,” reached viral popularity across the internet. Netflix’s specific brand of documentary storytelling left a lot to the viewer, keeping things open ended so as to prompt discussions, leading to further propagation online.
Podcasts also play a huge role in keeping up interest in true crime, as audiences have access to near endless hours of easily bingeable content.
There are many reasons as to why people find true crime to be so appealing, mainly that the stories being real inspire a certain kind of fear and paranoia that isn’t present with fictional horror. However, there is also an inherent fascination with learning about the psychology and behaviors of serial killers and other sensational criminals, which has kept figures like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy in public discussion, decades after their convictions.
Women, especially, seem to have special interest in learning about true crime, with most citing an interest in keeping informed on how to protect themselves and what to look out for. But while true crime has had real advantages, sensationalizing violence or exploiting real life victims’ suffering for entertainment purposes is a concern that needs to be addressed.
