The serial killer is one of the world’s least-appreciated cultural artifacts.
Yes, the murder part is unfortunate. Really nasty, sometimes. No one wants to watch the dismembered parts of the body being pulled out of the river. No one wants to hear the victim impact statements from the agonised families. Most of us do everything we can to take a peek at the crime-scene photos. But once the serial killer is captured and all the home invasions, kidnappings, strangulations, and death blows cease, that same killer becomes a prototype, a product, full of potential. As they rot in jail, waiting to die, we take their image and run wild and free with it.
The desire to see into the mind of a serial killer can be a powerful attraction. When spoken about serial killers, the infamous criminals of history are brought into the conversation. The handsome Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, Jaffrey Dahmer, and the list goes on. The amount of exposure the media has given to them has made them the center of attention, leading the audience to
ask themselves the question of “Why did they do it?”. Thus, making them explore the darkness of the world, some even become gleeful when discussing them.
The precise definition of who a serial killer is:
A person who commits several murders, typically with no apparent motive and typically following a characteristic, anticipated behaviour pattern, there is a cooling-off period in between the murders that usually depends on the killer.
An inescapable part of the entertainment and news industry since the early 1970s and the ridiculous amount of coverage and headlines they have made makes me believe I am not alone when it comes to being fascinated by murderers.
The entertainment industry, News, law enforcement agencies have given them an image of being ‘Monster celebrities.’ According to Scott Bonn, who is a criminologist; they are portrayed by the crimes they committed which leads them to make the headlines, therefore feeding people’s hunger of morbidity.
Usually, being indulged in the ways of how a serial killer thinks is often referred to as a guilty pleasure; how can one be fascinated by an individual that has committed heinous crimes consistently and is proud of it?
It is the curiosity that eats the individual up, an average person who has been socialised into ‘ordinary’ life and can process emotions they have been taught such as love, shame, happiness, sadness, and remorse but they cannot comprehend the brutality that a psychopath’s mind depicts.
A serial killer has the instinct of survival, this is exactly why they choose the weakest victims to kill because they always want to win. This shocks us beyond the core as it trespasses the beliefs of what we have been inculcated with, their total disregard of life and hurting a stranger, makes us feel unsafe, and questions our security as we could be potential victims as well.
I believe that the reasons why people are fascinated by serial killers could be interconnected.
Firstly, they are one in every twenty-five to thirty murders existing altogether. What they do is not an everyday job, it takes one of the most twisted minds to commit the extreme crimes they have done. We can define their crimes as exotic and detrimental to people such as natural disasters for instance. Serial killers are so unnatural in their behaviours that it only seems understandable as to why people would be curious to understand their ways of life.
Secondly, people would want to prepare for the worst if they were ever caught up in the situations the victims had been in. They would instantly know what to do to protect themselves. As serial killers act on random urges and motivation to commit a murder, they choose a victim on personal attraction. Thus, making everyone a potential victim, although chances of encountering the horrific scenes would be close to null but never zero. It would make sense that people would, according to Dr. Bonn, would do extra research to make them understand how a mind of a psychopath works.
Thirdly, they are driven by their inner demons, making it hard to justify their killings in sense of acts of anger or jealousy. Sometimes they would not be able to understand the reasons behind the gruesome acts they commit. Some people are drawn to violence naturally as they are compelled to understand the actions of these monsters.
Lastly, humans tend to humanise the serial killer to make him seem less scary such as done in news channels. However, humans dehumanise serial killers to set moral boundaries and understand between right and evil. The attraction to understand what goes on inside the serial killer’s head is an unhealthy obsession because what we may find could scare us, yet we still do
so. They may also help us learn about ourselves if we look past the image that mass media has given them.
Our childhood has always been the same fairy tales of princesses being saved by princes. Fairytales have always had conflicts that eventually led to happy endings, maybe we are tired of the happy endings trying to look for other alternatives to find different aspects of life to understand the darkness of the world since we have always been protected from it.
As Manson once said
Why aren’t we in wonderland anymore, Alice?