Everywhere you look these days, there seems to be a new – and wildly successful – film, series or podcast centered around true crime. Our collective obsession has become a curious psychological and social phenomenon. It’s almost like witnessing a car crash – it’s so visually and brutally disturbing – but do we dare look away?

While we are aware that these cases are usually moments of tragedy and pain, mostly with explicit and gruesome details, it ignites the sadistic part of human nature. We become investigative journalists for a day, examining the microscopic details of a person’s life. It enables our guilty pleasure to hypothesise and create our own judgements from the safety of our armchairs. Something to discuss over coffee, or a new and different theory about a crime from a biased and dramatic retelling of events. Yet, most of these questions remain unanswered even after the final episode. These films, series and podcasts of true life crime are purely for entertainment, to step inside the motivations and details of these killers or abductors and for us to visit the darker side of life without ever answering the question posed to us in the first place. Part of the reason that films, books and art please us is that they appeal to our universal sense of human nature. Yet, is there something wrong with our motivations to sensationalise these when they are true-life crime stories?

There is no rule book to true crime. The distinct framing of a film or documentary can subtly alter our perception of events. The details that are revealed (or more notably, not revealed) – with added dramatic and tense music – does not work like a court of law where evidence is presented (in most jurisdictions) within a transparent framework. However, in the hands of a producer or director of a film, that target is purely to make entertainment, shock value, to get people talking. These questions largely go unanswered. We are brought on a journey from point A all the way to point Z sometimes without any true factual evidence or motivation for the outcome. What really happened to Madeleine McCann? What motivated the “handsome” Ted Bundy to kill all those women? Or why did a global pop idol like Michael Jackson invite those children to his bedroom? All of these questions are proposed, explored, dramatised, yet frustratingly, remain unanswered.

I recently finished the Madeleine McCann series The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann and do we find out what happened to poor Madeleine? (Non-spoiler alert): Nope! It is simply a regurgitation of evidence, revealed in a dramatic 8-part series, that brings us no closer to the answer of what happened to her. It’s no wonder her parents wanted nothing to do with the new Netflix docu-series, as they claimed, according to their spokesperson, Clarence Mitchell, that they “didn’t see how the documentary would help the search to find their daughter, and actually thought it might hinder the still active police investigation”. Without the involvement of the parents, is there any credibility to the facts that are told? It feels like our thirst for entertainment stops at no end. To dramatically publicise the events of a child gone missing, seeks only to hurt those who have to live through the reality of the pain. The documentary does convey, however, the pain, trauma and suffering Madeleine’s family endured. From grieving parents to prime suspects, the journey is not a pleasant one for them and at times becomes a difficult watch for us as viewers. At the same time, we play the role of investigative journalists, following different leads and different suspects, the documentary leads us down the line that they must have done it and we willingly go along with this presumption. It’s like a giant game of Cluedo, except for the fact that these are real people, who are still suffering the pain of the disappearance of their daughter. The lines become blurred between fiction, real life and entertainment.

It’s difficult and uneasy to draw the line since entertainment requires you to make characters out of the players in your story, to dramatise the plotline and to create suspense by withholding information from the viewer until a sudden plot twist at the end. But when this is a true life crime, dealing with the pain and suffering of real people, does this cross the line?

In the case of the docu-series and film about Ted Bundy, does it glamorise a monster? Thirty years after his death, Bundy has become the subject of a Netflix docu-series and film. We learn, or relearn, that he was an intelligent, articulate and charismatic man. We also learn that he confessed to the brutal murder and rape of thirty-six women and young girls. These two lines of truth seem to intertwine within the retelling of factual events. The issue, is where do the moral and ethical boundaries lie? By conveying the truth, do we also glamorise and hunk-ify a complete and utter monster? Casting Zac Efron as Ted Bundy surely doesn’t help. Unless we want an image of perfect hair, washboard abs (yes, he takes his top off in the film), and People magazine’s contender for sexiest man alive 2017, to truly depict the gruesome motivations of one of the world’s worst serial killers. This is how far this genre has progressed. Our search for truth reaches only so far as our search for entertainment. By glamorising an individual like this, we neglect to acknowledge the pain and suffering they caused. Viewers of the Netflix series described Bundy as “hot” and “attractive”, rarely seeming to point out the horrible nature of his crimes, which disturbingly reveals more about the entertainment than the factual value of these productions. One tweet after the initial airing of the show wrote: “Such a waste of a baby daddy #tedbundy.” Another said: “I know he is a murderer but we can say Ted Bundy is hot right? I mean Zac Efron is going to play him. Feel like that is okay.” This romanticisation of a murderer, whilst obviously unhinged, is the result of the merging of entertainment and true crime murder. Even the film starring Efron is called Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, pretty straight forward you may think, but then he takes his top off at every chance in the film. What I’m saying here is that the message we are proposed and the message we receive are two distinct parallel entities. The very reason we find Ted Bundy fascinating – his supposed charisma, charm and good looks – are the same dangerous, predatory techniques that this man used to kill innocent women. It is a double-edged sword, which, whilst it may be somewhat true to life, ultimately walks a narrow tightrope between understanding the dark and psychotic motivations behind true life murder and pure titillation and entertainment.

Our obsession with crime is not a new phenomenon. From Dickens to Orwell, Stephen King to Jack the Ripper, our long infatuation with dangerous crimes has become the hottest genre in true-crime films and documentaries. But are we now saturated with our guiltiest pleasures at the expense of the victims?

Take, for example, the 2018 Oscar-nominated film Detainment, which is about two young boys who brutally killed the young James Bulger in the early ‘90s. It was created without the consent of Bulger’s parents , or even the knowledge that such a film was to be produced. The film does not exploit the genre or sensationalise the story. However, it undeniably provoked anguish for the parents who have already grieved, been dragged through the public eye and now are forced to live out the whole scenario once again. Its Irish director, Vincent Lambe, denied it was a career move for him and in an article with The Guardian went so far to say: “I was told by everyone that this subject wouldn’t make my career – it would break it.” Did he have any regrets about making this film? “Only that I did not speak to the Bulgers.” The issue here is not with the film subject, or the director, but with the choice and freedom for someone to use their story to create entertainment, without the consent or any compassion for the parents. The Bulger film coincided with judicial requests to have the two guilty young boys – now adults – named to the public. The judge refused for their names to be made public as he feared it would result in “grave and possibly fatal consequences”.

Of course it would. In this day and age, lynch mobs and people taking what they see on the screen into their own hands has become a realistic fear. Despite living in a supposed ‘post-truth’ reality, as a society, we still seem to believe everything we see on television. Making a Murderer created riots and fights at courthouses, where fans of the show had conflicting beliefs on the innocence of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey and went so far as to fight each other over it, in front of a courthouse. What we are shown and what is true are two distinctly different narratives, and the director has the ultimate power in revealing to us what they wish us to comprehend. These stories have no happy ending; they frequently don’t even have an ending. People’s lives have become intertwined with a director’s ability to make us feel, to bring us on a journey that ultimately has no conclusion. We may become disillusioned with the judicial system in the United States of America if we watch any documentary from Making a Murderer to The Staircase to The Jinx. We may believe that Madeleine McCann’s parents are still the murderers of their own daughter, who they still continue to search for 12 years after her death. It may be impossible to make a true life crime series or film without distressing someone; it is ultimately a distressing subject. This is the very reason they appeal to us to the extent which they do.. But, should the power to retell events lie purely in the hands of filmmakers, who decide how and when we should feel, through stylistic choices and the deliberate disclosure and concealment of evidence? Of course not, but at the very least they should seek the approval, understanding and compassion of those affected first before making it the centrepiece for their latest thriller.