Why Are We So Fascinated by True Crime?


 I'm not quite sure what I mean to accomplish by asking this question, it's just a legitimate question. Why do we love True Crime so much?

One would think that learning of the most atrocious, disgusting, gruesome acts that people can commit on one another would turn people away. The horror genre of film has been relatively niche until recently, and even then it turns people away. Something seems to be different with True Crime, though. Most horror films are fictitious, even fantastical at times. True Crime, as the name would suggest, is real. Mostly filmed in a mystery/documentary style, it consists mostly of actual events that affected real people, so why is it that finding a genre that focuses on things that actually happened intrigues so many?

My best idea of why is that True Crime is often more grounded than horror. As stated previously, horror has a tendency to branch into the supernatural. Whether it's the devil, another miscellaneous ancient evil, magic, or whatever else, it's very often not realistic. True Crime, on the other hand, is based solely on reality. I imagine it inspires the same phenomenon as when a car crash happens and everyone on the highway slows down to inspect the situation. That morbid curiosity makes us compelled to watch even if we know it's going to be bad. 

I also think that it engages us more than other fictitious genres because it is real, and there's no suspension of disbelief. You can't disbelieve it. It happened. Unless you assume the creators of whatever you're watching are lying to you, you have to take what they say at face value. It sticks with you, the horrors that the narrator describes because if they happened to the people on the screen, they could happen to you as well.

Those are my thoughts. Comment below if you think differently or would like to further the conversation.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Thought We Had Learned Our Lesson, Guys

Image
Suicide Squad, The Justice League, The Eternals, and Black Adam. What do these films have in common? Apart from the fact they're all superhero films and pretty poorly made, they all have one fatal flaw. They're all films that try to use an ensemble cast without properly establishing each character first. The first time we had seen an ensemble film in the superhero genre with any presence was 2012's the Avengers, the at-the-time penultimate Marvel film that brought together characters from five different franchises released over four years and epicly showed them working together onscreen. Since then, many have tried to replicate this effect however, none of them seem to realize that in order to have the film be as compelling and entertaining as Avengers (2012) is, we need to care about the characters. Suicide Squad wasn't the first film to make this mistake but it indeed serves as a fantastic example of why not to make it. The film is begging, pleading for its audience t...
Read more

Guys... Let's Really Look At This and Think About It For a Second

Image
  You saw the title. You clicked on this post. You know it's going to be bad. We need to talk. So, with the release of Netflix's Dahmer, many audiences are being introduced or reintroduced to the story of Jeffrey Dahmer and the atrocities that he committed in the 90s. While the film has been rather influential, it's arguable if that influence is positive or negative. Due to the unfortunate proximity of the release date of the film and Halloween, there are those who thought it appropriate to dress themselves and their children as Dahmer for Halloween. Alright. Full stop. Let's get one thing straight. That is messed up, it should not have happened, and those who thought it was a good idea should be ashamed of themselves. With that out of the way, let's talk about what this means. I don't think that the people who did this should automatically be labelled idiots or monsters or whatever. Was what they did incredibly insensitive? Yes. But there's more nuance than...
Read more

The Modern Horror Renaissance

Image
  The horror genre has had a strenuous run throughout the decades. It is, of course, going to be a niche genre by design. Everyone can enjoy a good comedy but not everyone resonates with seeing someone get cut in half with a chainsaw. Horror was a staple genre of film in the 1920s with the likes of Universal Studios' classic monster movies and Murnau's Nosferatu, and it had a notable resurgence in the 1970s with Halloween and the rise of the Slasher subgenre, but after Scream in the 90s the horror genre as a whole sort of became niche again. Sure, there have been some big franchises like the Conjuring or Saw, but neither of those had quite the same mass appeal some something like Star Wars or Titanic or what have you. That is, of course, until very recently. It all began in 2017 with a film called It . It set several box office records, but most notably it set the record for the highest-grossing opening weekend for an R-rated horror film. The previous record holder was Paranorm...
Read more