After four years, the peak of the genre’s renaissance has passed, but have we really learned anything?
You may or may not consider it a telling indication of what stage we’re at culturally that the first victims in the shiny new Halloween reboot are a pair of true crime podcasters. Before meeting their end at the hands of slasher icon Michael Myers, the film pokes subtle fun at their desire to wring narrative value and meaning out of a slew of senseless spree murders (“I’m an investigative journalist,” one of them says self-assuredly, hours before getting their head kicked in by a serial killer.) This winking satire reflects a growing malaise among audiences of the phenomenally popular true crime revival: does any of this really have a point beyond lurid entertainment? Does it really matter, in the way the creators tell us it does?
Part of that feeling comes down to oversaturation. Since the new wave of true crime kicked into gear with podcasts like Serial and TV shows like Making a Murderer, there has been an absolute glut of content to churn through, across basically every medium we have at our collective disposal. It’s all a bit of a blur at this point. The thread that ties them together (and distinguishes them from the Forensic Files-era of true crime) is a commitment to being higher-brow, and providing more than just raw titillation. The creators of these shows pitch themselves not just as storytellers, but also as activists and critics of the system at large.
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