How healthy is our obsession with murder documentaries?

If you’re a sucker for Netflix latest and greatest crime documentary series AND you spend the remainder of your evenings looking up all about the culprit, the victim, their psyche, where they are now, etc… then this blog post is for you. 

I love crime documentaries, especially the ones that come in series that are designed to hook you and reel you in to the mind of a murderer. My Mam loves them too, I guess it's turned into this warped family get-together… bonding over murderers.

What?!
You think this is a little odd?

True crime is only one of the most watched genres on Netflix (not to mention generally on tv). Next in-line are the fictional crime dramas such as CSI, Criminal Minds, and my personal favourite, Law and Order. What is it about these programmes that literally leave me wanting more? It’s murder for crying out loud! 

The Documentary Abyss 

I watched Dirty John on Netflix a couple of months ago, this con artist who was psychologically and criminally insane and tried to kill multiple people whilst living a double life. 

After many hours of researching the many questions I had surrounding the documentary, I went to bed that night wondering… why has this taken over my whole evening? What am I going to be talking about at work tomorrow? Am I watching these documentaries out of human interest or could it potentially in the future have a larger impact on our psyche and society as a whole? Could this be a contribution to the drastic increase in shootings, murders, bullying levels, anxiety, depression, behavioral attitudes in the last decade?

It got me thinking… and you guessed it… I researched that too!

In my googling I was realising that each and every psychological website I was combing for answers all said the same thing and what I got from it was one sentence: “People desire to watch such programmes to gain a sense of satisfaction with their own lives”. 

Wow… it could be true. 

You know when you’ve had a long day at work or college and you just want to binge watch something, so you have two options… watch a reality-like tv show that will more than likely leave you feeling worse than you were when you walked in the door, or a crime documentary that will probably leave you feeling like ‘well at least I’m not that bad!’ 

When looking more into the research I started to ask myself, how healthy is it having such extremes to watch? How healthy is it that I can get obsessed with these murderers and what sparked their fury? 

I came across a comment by a psychologist who explained that they felt like people were obsessed with murders or sex crimes because they know that it is morally wrong and disgusting, but that its possible that we all could be capable of such crimes at some point and it makes you think about how you must have to feel or think to commit something so disturbing.

Sooooo true! 

Why do WE watch them?

A study in 2010 that I came across showed that women are more likely to consume true crime as a means to process violence and misogyny, as they provide information highly relevant in terms of preventing or surviving a crime. 

In 2017 Jes Skolnik, a survivor of domestic abuse, wrote an article in the New York Times where she explained that true crime can help victims reflect on the violence they have experienced and find empathy. 

It truly was disheartening for me to read these comments and articles. Imagine that we have a percentage of the world out there watching these documentaries to make their lives seem good, others that just like the genre and then others who use it as a sort of coping mechanism or a means to process violence they may have experienced. 

This changed my view on these documentaries. I no longer just watched for fun or for the cool plot twists thrown in to shock me but now also keeping in mind that this is actually real, real issues, about real people and about families of these people that are still around seeing their business go global. 

Netflix’ Empire vs. The Public

One documentary that is probably one of Netflix most controversial real-crime shows was Making a Murderer. It was designed in a specific way to be watched by the world. It gives people a sense that they have a certain amount of ownership or control over the narratives, that their own investigation can result in some change. Netflix’s Making A Murderer caused hundreds of thousands of people to sign petitions for the release of convicts Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey. What this tells us is that the perception of a viewer is of paramount importance. 

We have documentaries on school massacres, 13 Reasons Why which highlighted the process of a high schooler’s process over time in becoming a potential school shooter, and another high schoolers process of reasoning for their ultimate suicide bringing every person they met down with them in a series of guilt-tripping tapes. 

These shows are great, and really do help us to understand the minds of these people, but I come back to my earlier question, are we watching these documentaries out of human interest or could it potentially in the future have a larger impact on our psyche and society as a whole?

I’ll leave it up to you to decide for yourself, but the dominant opinion appears to be that true crime alone does not lead to criminal activity. If you are aware of the creators' intentions and the realities of the justice system, true crime is arguably a nice way of relaxing and can even be educational