For years, people have been fascinated by the criminal mind. We want to know what factors drive someone to do the unthinkable; we want to understand the human mind to such a degree that we often platform the wrong people or the wrong things in the pursuit of insight. True crime, while it can be used as a tool to learn about the psychology of a criminal, is also meant to teach advocacy to victims and survivors of violent crimes. However, it doesn’t always get used that way. People will usually think of Ted Bundy before they think of the names of the lives he took. The glorification of a killer and the overlooking of victims and survivors alike have become more emphasized in the last few years, such as the case of Ryan Murphy, the creator and producer of the Netflix anthology series, Monsters. The show has received a wide range of applause and criticisms, from the quality of the writing to the unsavory liberties each season has taken. This raises the question of ethical storytelling. When does “telling the truth” become exploitation? At its core, true crime is meant to balance accountability, accuracy, and empathy, and Monsters has blurred those lines for three seasons straight.
Ethical storytelling can take on different forms, but within true crime, it looks like showing respect for victims, survivors, and their families. It’s holding responsibility to truth and context; not sensationalism, accolades, and the monetization of trauma. It’s having self-awareness of power dynamics and understanding the privilege to tell these stories in the first place. The problem that exists within true crime now is the jump from having journalistic integrity to an entertainment spectacle. Victims are reduced to tokens in the killer’s narrative, used as a way to understand the murderer’s psyche. True crime has become dramatized to evoke understanding, even sympathy, for perpetrators and abusers or to create TV prestige.
The very first season of Monsters is focused on Jeffrey Dahmer, a convicted serial killer and cannibal known for targeting young men of color. Although the creators did highlight how systemic racism and homophobia from law enforcement allowed him to go unchecked for years the show’s ethics are questionable when we learned that the victims’ families were not warned, consulted, or compensated. Rita Isbell, the sister of Errol Lindsey, one of Dahmer’s victims, spoke against the show, calling it “harsh and careless.” Other family members of the victims called it “retraumatizing.” The series ultimately humanizes the killer more than it respects the dead. It’s voyeuristic to aestheticize violence and then pawn it off as artistic expression.
In the second season, all eyes were on the Menendez brothers, who had always sat in a moral gray area. In August 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez murdered their parents in their Beverly Hills home. The case was quickly sensationalized when it was confirmed that they were both perpetrators of the crime and survivors of abuse at the hands of their parents. The second season uses the brothers to, ironically, critique media sensationalism and courtroom celebrity, all the while portraying the brothers as caricatures of who they actually were. As a result, viewers questioned the dramatic portrayal of the Menendez family and, through research, began to understand how inaccurate the season was. Audiences began to call for the case to be reviewed in hopes of the brothers getting released. Their parole was denied, and they have to remain incarcerated. True crime creators claim to “give voice” to complex figures, but the portrayal itself can distort and glamorize morally ambiguous individuals. It risks romanticizing criminals while real victims and survivors fade from focus.
Season three was all about Ed Gein, known as the Plainfield Ghoul. His crimes involved murder and the desecration of deceased women’s bodies, which became the inspiration for some of Hollywood’s most famous horror movies, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. By retelling Gein’s story, Murphy doesn’t just dramatize a murderer and grave robber; it also dramatizes the birth of modern horror films themselves and America’s fascination with true crime and the horror genre. It takes trauma and recycles it into myth and exposes how gendered violence, or the disproportionate violence against someone based on gender, has been aestheticized as an art. It solidifies horror’s tradition of brutalizing young men and women for the sake of a spooky story. And so the question becomes: why do we watch such exaggerated takes on decades-old stories? Is it the fear? Is it for relaxation? A twisted fascination? The appeal of exposing evil? Whichever the case, the ethical responsibility isn’t just up to the creators; it’s ours, the audience.
Regardless of the reasons why we watch true crime and horror, the bingeing of shows like Monsters commodifies trauma. Ethical storytelling demands that one look without consuming, to witness without turning it into spectacle.
Ryan Murphy’s Monsters opens important conversations about systemic failure, justice, gendered violence, the glorification of killers, and the silencing of victims. Ethical storytelling requires collaboration and consent, not objectification. Perhaps our willingness to consume pain as entertainment is one of the many real horrors that exist in the world, alongside Dahmer and Gein. With Lizzie Borden being Murphy’s fourth project, I have little doubt that he won’t go above and beyond in creating a spectacle of such an ambiguous case.