True Crime Documentaries Quotes

What are you watching? Is it comforting? I don’t have the bandwidth to give a fuck about anything not comforting to me most of the time. I know that’s “uncultured,” but also I don’t care because who are you, person challenging me? I want to watch Veep before bed because it makes me laugh, and I want to watch true crime documentaries, and I want to watch British actors in terrific costumes battling through emotions they weren’t even aware they had. That’s all. I’m tired. Find your comforting shit. Build your mental fort and hang out there.

Her interest in true crime books and documentaries was a hobby turned obsession. It was her one escape from the dullness of her own reality, the emptiness of everyday life that suffocated women far stronger than she was. And personal closeness to such human atrocities brought excitement like a pulsing, electrical charge, a feeling she’d grown addicted to. In conversations with those who took life, Lori no longer felt dead inside. Killers, of all people, made her feel alive.

And I actually think that’s probably not that unusual a reaction. I mean, that’s why cars slow down when they’re passing a traffic accident, right? Or why people watch true-crime documentaries, or read books about Ted Bundy. This stuff is, in a weird way, exciting. Right?’ ‘You think that’s what Liz is?’ I said. ‘Excited?

Other books depended less on personal contacts than on certain abiding concerns. Early in his career, Dreiser had become interested in a crime that he saw as a dark version of the American success motif: the murder of a woman who stood in the way of her lover’s dreams of social and material advancement through a more advantageous marriage. For An American Tragedy (1925) he investigated numerous case histories, many of them sensational murders involving well-known figures such as Roland Molineux and Harry Thaw. He finally settled on the 1906 Chester Gillette trial for the murder of Grace Brown that occurred in the lake district of upstate New York. The novel benefited from the popular interest in criminal biography, a form to which Dreiser’s masterpiece gave new life as the progenitor of documentary novels of crime such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser

It felt like something that couldn't happen, and certainly shouldn't - and yet that's why there were so many true-crime documentaries and podcasts. It was always about how the police had missed something that later seemed obvious

I watch true crime documentaries, not participate in them. I have no idea how I’m supposed to survive this.

I’ve devoured every serial killer-based film and series I can, read the biographies, listened to hours of true crime podcasts, watched intensely questionable YouTube videos and every new Netflix true crime documentary. I’ve rewatched The Silence of the Lambs every year, as my own sort of holiday classic, and if stressed out, I’ll turn to Zodiac as my comfort blanket movie. I see it as a safe peek inside a psychology so far removed from my life, so totally inconceivable morally, that it’s the cinematic equivalent of bungee jumping.

That’s what they say at the start of every small town true crime documentary.

To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase "crime and punishment" in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, neces-sary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today? The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations--and this is not only true of the United States, but of Europe, South America, and Australia as well--is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.

But do not call me a psychopath. And I request this for two reasons. One, it shows you know little of what a true psychopath is. You would most likely go along with the Hollywood stereotype or the image created by true crime documentaries you binge watch on Netflix for 8.99 a month. Two, it demeans what I do and makes it seem alien. It removes the human nature from human nature. It makes it seem as if what I do is unusual or not of the norm or is done because something is wrong with me. As I said, gladiators killed and died for entertainment. People were hung for stealing in the 1800s and families would go watch it like the picnic in the park.

In May 2016, there appeared a website called WhoIsElonMusk .com. Most prominent on the site was an autoplaying video on the home page that featured foreboding music and the dark, smoky-voiced narration of a true-crime TV show. It spent two minutes shifting through B-roll footage and clips pilfered from documentaries about Musk.

The kind of people who have a favourite serial killer, who buy true crime merch and watch documentaries about death over dinner, who visit places where terrible things have happened like they’re going to Disneyland: Chernobyl. Alcatraz. Fukushima.

He was right. I was treating it like some Netflix true-crime documentary. Janelle Beckett was a person. I needed to show respect. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

The only way people change their perception of abuse survivors is if they are challenged—if they hear about what it’s really like from someone who experienced it, rather than have the usual cult stereotypes and clichés reinforced by whatever trashy true-crime podcasts they listen to and documentaries they love to watch.