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

The true crime does not show signs of commercial exhaustion. The recent ‘DAHMER – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story‘, based on the adventures of one of the serial killer most famous in the United States, has swept Netflix. He beat, for example, the record number of hours watched in its third week, surpassing hits like ‘Los Bridgerton’ with 205.3 million hours, ‘Stranger Things’ or ‘The Witcher’. After seven weeks in the Top 10, in the global calculation (which Netflix ranks 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 set the morbid cycle of collective fascination with serial killers back in motion, I have been one 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 is 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 (in times when the thesis defended by ‘From Hell’ was already considered good), 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 because he is fury redneck chaotic, wild and untamable, which also explains why it remains one of my favorites.

In the nineties I was a young fanzineer very aware of everything that the alternative culture of that time generated, so I let myself be 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 curdled in films like ‘A Thing for Females’ or ‘The Mommy Murders’. And we also had others in a tremendous and pure key, like 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 made a big impact that year at the Sitges festival and soon this John McNaughton film was on VHS and television, gaining an instant cult following. His chronicle of the outrages of the wild Henry Lee Lucas (played by an incredible Michael Rooker)portrayed with a cold and terrifying detachment, became the Rosetta Stone of movies based on real criminals.

Henry, portrait of a murderer.

During the 1990s and until the next wave of real serial killer films, there were phenomena in underground cinema that I consumed avidly: Oriental cinema experienced a fever for films based on authentic cases, such as the milestone Category III Hong Kong (adults only) ‘Dr. Lamb’, yeah At the same time, films 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. Nobody believed it, of course, but with the most sensationalist media feeding the urban legend of the snuff moviesthe leap into 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, ‘Born Assassins’, which brought together the pop devotion to real murderers (at that time in the conversation mainstream thanks to cases like the Columbine murders) with the texture inherited from documentaries and television. All this materialized in a new wave of films based on real serial killers, in titles such as ‘Citizen X’ (based on the crimes of Andrei Chikatilo), ‘Ed Gein’ or ‘Ted Bundy’.

As I say, I consumed all of it in my years of film training, and I seasoned it with all the information I was able to get in books and zines about people like Charles Manson or the Reverend Jim Jones. I recovered semi-unknown films such as ‘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, going through the murder of the Marquises of Urquijo or those known as “role crimes”, some of them contemporary), and I never detached myself from this original vision of narrative true crime.

The second advent of true crime

If I tell all this background it is not to brag about everything I have seen (who can want to brag about being old), but so that we understand that I have not 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 docu-fiction about the Japanese Issei Sagawa, who stays with a very fine body), and I have pecked at almost all of it because I like the stories of authentic criminals for many ( and sometimes contradictory) reasons.

that’s why me too I ran to get on the new car true crimefirst with films like the sensational ‘Paradise Lost’ trilogy, about the three from Memphis, and which we already talked about in 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 on the horizon? true crime?

It certainly seemed that way, and I have excellent memories of the founding ‘Serial’ podcast, which undoubtedly paved the way for the United States in this new era of true crime. And I thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Jinx‘, an HBO production that in many respects has not yet been surpassed: not only were we more innocent viewers 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 that 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 was playing to hide information to create suspense, which is perfectly logical in a movie, but a little more irritating if we’re talking about a documentary. Of course, and like every neighbor’s son, I put my reservations 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 being part of that conversation.

I rode that wave with joy: at last a subject that had obsessed me since my teens was finding mass acceptance. And also, and although saturation began, 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, have not stopped arriving more and more samples of true crimeand even an addict like me has had to start selecting. Tired of the lives of famous criminals I already know by heart (if I see Ted Bundy breaking his leg escaping through a jail library window again, someone is going to lose something more valuable than an ankle), I I immersed myself in the new sub-trend of the genre: toxic cults. Those of us who knew the Reverend Jim Jones – still 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 his approach quite a bit. Not too long ago, in fact, in the excellent movie ‘My friend Dahmer’, which 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 entertaining himself in the preamble to each crime. The invoice is exceptional, or it would not have met with such success, but as true crimeno longer surprising.

Ryan Murphy is a high-quality and extremely versatile producer, but very prolific, which means that not all its products have the same touch of distinction. His devotion to narrative 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 those largely responsible for this hasty massification of the genre.

And ‘Dahmer’ is just the canary in the mine. With few exceptions, we haven’t 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 criminals that have been outdated for decades. The surprise is long gone, and 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 peeking into an abyss, into the dark night of the soul, as the other said. Reflections, sometimes brutal and on the edge, other times sophisticated and full of nuancesabout the terrible and enigmatic extremes to which a human being can go.

However, the massification of true crime has led to smoothing out 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 extremely accessible. His vision of crimes, criminals and investigations, by necessity, has to be softened -which also makes us enter 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 highly fictional chronicle of a true crime, full of detours into fantasy and digressions in a comic and melodramatic key. Perhaps that is the way, once the documentary style is exhausted: loosen the ties, let the genre reinvent itself, allow it to disturb us again as before. I wish.