I’ve been consuming true crime documentaries and movies all my life. My conclusion is that the genre is exhausted

The true crime shows no signs of commercial exhaustion. The recent ‘DAHMER – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story‘, based on the adventures of one of the serial killers most famous in the United States, has swept Netflix. Beat, for example, the record for the number of hours viewed in its third week, surpassing hits like ‘Los Bridgertons’ with 205.3 million hours, ‘Stranger Things’ or ‘The Witcher’. After seven weeks in the Top 10, in the global calculation (which Netflix classifies counting only the first month) it is only below ‘Stranger Things 4’.

However, I am fed up. For years (decades rather), starting years before the platforms of streaming restart the morbid cycle of collective fascination with serial killers, I have been one more of the crowd hypnotized by the amoral abyss of the most twisted psychopaths. But when the most terrible criminals of popular culture become the white mark of terror, it is time to say enough.

my first kills

My initial contacts with crime superstars were possibly the same as those of any kid from the eighties: I was fascinated by all the mythology surrounding Jack the Ripper (at a time when the thesis defended by ‘From Hell’ was already took for granted), as well as adaptations of the lives of real criminals. Movies like ‘Psycho’ or ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, inspired by the real outrages of Ed Gein, for instance. That, by the way, he is a much less “modern” killer than Dahmer or Ted Bundy, and possibly that is because he is fury redneck chaotic, unleashed and indomitable, which also explains why it remains one of my favorites.

In the nineties I was a young fanzine very aware of everything that generated the alternative culture of that time, so I got carried away by all the waves of consecration of the serial killer as a pop icon. Some worked in a more ironic way, such as the devotion that the great John Waters has always had for the subject and that he jelled in films such as ‘Female Thing’ or ‘The Mommy Murders’. And we also had others in a tremendous and traditional key, such as the controversial Spanish fanzine ‘Espanis Sico’ and its gloss on Spanish serial killers.

But the movie that changed everything was ‘Henry, portrait of a murderer‘, an extremely cheap production from 1986 that began to gain fame from 1990, when its distribution was normalized. In Spain it caused a great impact that year at the Sitges festival and soon this film by John McNaughton could be seen on VHS and television, gaining an instant cult following. His chronicle of the outrages of the savage Henry Lee Lucas (played by an incredible Michael Rooker)portrayed with cold and terrifying aloofness, became the Rosetta Stone of movies based on true criminals.

Henry, portrait of a murderer.

During the 1990s and until the next wave of real serial killer movies, there were phenomena in underground cinema that I avidly consumed: Eastern cinema experienced a fever for movies based on real cases, such as the landmark Category III Hong Kong (adults only) ‘Dr. Lamb’, yeah the time movies like ‘Nekromantik’ or ‘Guinea Pig’ played with the texture of extreme verismo, and to sell that the crimes that were shown on the screen were very close to being real. No one believed it, of course, but with the most sensationalist media fueling the urban legend of the snuff moviesthe jump to the mainstream of documentary aesthetics was sung.

That verista aesthetic caught on in mainstream cinema thanks to hits like ‘The Blair Witch Project‘ or, more ambitiously, ‘Natural Born Killers’, which brought together pop devotion to real killers (in conversation at the time mainstream thanks to cases like the Columbine murders) with the texture inherited from documentaries and television. All this materialized in a new wave of movies based on real serial killers, in titles like ‘Citizen X’ (based on the crimes of Andrei Chikatilo), ‘Ed Gein’ or ‘Ted Bundy’.

As I say, I consumed all of it in my formative years as a movie buff, and I sprinkled it with all the information I was able to get from books and fanzines about people like Charles Manson or Reverend Jim Jones. I recovered semi-unknown films like ‘Guyana: The Crime of the Century’, I immersed myself in our very particular vision of the Spanish murderers (from the crimes of Puerto Hurraco to those of Alcàsser, passing through the murder of the Marquises of Urquijo or those known as “role crimes”, some of them in a contemporary way), and I never detached myself from this original vision of the narrative true crime.

The second advent of true crime

If I recount all these antecedents, it is not to brag about everything I have seen (who can brag about being old), but so that we understand that I have not gotten tired of seeing true crime after a series and a half on Netflix. The genre has a very diverse and enriching history, which goes from exploit pure art and sordid essay (take a look at ‘Caniba’, a docufiction about the Japanese Issei Sagawa, who is left with the finest body), and I have picked almost all of it because I like stories of authentic criminals by many ( and sometimes contradictory) reasons.

That’s why me too I ran to get in the new car true crimefirst with movies like the sensational ‘Paradise Lost’ trilogyabout the three from Memphis, and which we already talked about a collation of the last season of ‘Stranger Things’. Also with the late recovery of the incredible ‘The Thin Blue Line’, by Errol Morris. Or with the impact of ‘Capturing the Friedmans’, one of the most disturbing documentaries of all time, among many other things. Was a new golden age of true crime?

Of course, it seemed that way, and I have excellent memories of the foundational podcast ‘Serial’, which undoubtedly opened the way in the United States for this new era of true crime. And I thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Jinx‘, an HBO production that in many aspects has not yet been overcome: not only were we more innocent spectators and the tricks that have already been exploited ad nauseam caught us by surprise, but its intriguing protagonist was a moral black hole in the I really enjoyed letting myself fall.

The Jinx

The first series that made me raise an eyebrow, in a sense, was ‘Making a Murderer‘. I found him two essential problems: first, its plot was extraordinarily stretched; and second, he played hide information to create suspense, which is perfectly logical in a film, but a little more irritating in a documentary. Of course, and like every son of a neighbor, I put my objections aside and let myself be carried away by the indisputable attractiveness of any true crime of success: everyone was talking about it, and I loved participating in that conversation.

I rode that wave with joy: at last a subject that had obsessed me since adolescence met with mass acceptance. And furthermore, and although saturation was beginning, it gave rise to very interesting products, such as ‘mindhunter‘, which in just two seasons became one of the most exhilarating pseudo-fictions based on real serial killer cases in history.

And meanwhile, more and more samples of true crimeand even an addict like me has had to start selecting. Tired of the lives of famous criminals that I already know by heart (if I ever see Ted Bundy breaking his leg again escaping through the jail library window, someone is going to lose something more valuable than an ankle), I I immersed myself in the new sub-fashion of the genre: toxic cults. Those of us who knew Reverend Jim Jones -even today the greatest exponent of this variant- are no longer surprised by anything, but I have moderately enjoyed recent proposals such as the fascinating ‘The Vow‘.

Dead end

The curious thing is that, as we have already mentioned, ‘Dahmer’ has been a complete success, although we had already seen enough of its approach. Not too long ago, in fact, in the excellent film ‘my friend dahmer‘, that he did make a genuinely original bet. But here nothing is especially new: neither the empathy with the victims, nor the distance from the murderer, nor dwelling on the preambles of each crime. The bill is exceptional, or he would not have met with such success, but as true crimeno longer surprising.

Ryan Murphy is a high-quality, extremely versatile producer, but very prolific, which means that not all its products have the same touch of distinction. His devotion to storytelling true crime has become clear in series like this ‘Dahmer’ or, of course, in ‘american crime story‘, but also in plot elements of series as different as ‘American Horror Story’ or ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’. Murphy is one of the great responsible for this hasty massification of the genre.

And ‘Dahmer’ is just the canary in the mine. With few exceptions, we have not seen new approaches, surprising crimes or minimally exciting dramatic approaches for a long time. Most of the documentaries are talking heads of people very remotely related to the cases, and the fictions are recycling approaches to the criminals that have been out of date for decades. The surprise has long since disappeared, and the saturation is a fact.

But there is something else, and here we return to an eminently personal impression. When I discovered the pop approach to serial killers, immersing myself in their outrages was peering into an abyss, into the dark night of the soul, as the other said. Reflections, sometimes brutal and sharp, other times sophisticated and full of nuancesabout the terrible and enigmatic extremes to which a human being can reach.

However, the massification of true crime has led to smoothing those edges: the current genre does not come close to the crudeness and perversity of films like ‘Henry: Portrait of a murderer’ and, paradoxically, series like ‘Dahmer’ are made to please the greatest number of people and be highly accessible. His vision of crimes, criminals and investigations, by necessity, has to be softened – which also leads us into many other parallel debates about the morality of the genre, but that’s another story -: the true crime has been domesticated.

The true crime is no longer a reflection on our darkest side, but a digestive report of events: it is no longer the punk of the police genre, but the AOR for respectable gentlemen. And is there a solution? Recently, I watched the miniseries ‘How to get into a garden on HBO Max, a chronicle of a highly fictionalized true crime, full of deviations into fantasy and digressions in a comic and melodramatic key. Perhaps that is the way, once the documentary style is exhausted: let go of the bridles, let the genre reinvent itself, allow it to disturb us again as before. I wish.