When Netflix released ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes’ in 2019, I watched it by myself. It was well-told, it was revelatory, it was shocking. All the things true crime should be. The detail was also so harrowing and depraved, however, that I lost sleep over it.
Afterwards, I told my wife all of this and she decided to watch it (albeit in daylight hours only to minimise the creepiness factor). And I found myself drawn to sit down with her and re-watch it. So I did.
What is that about?! Something I literally knew had rattled me enough to keep me awake at night, and I was choosing to put myself through it again.
That instinct, that contradictory lure of true crime was the starting point for How To Get Away With Murder.
What is it that draws us to content about utterly heinous crimes that are so far removed from daily life? I still don’t really know. But the closest I can get to an answer is very basic. We consume true crime because it is TRUE. Fictional horror can be horrendously scary, but there’s also an easy way for our minds to short-circuit that fear – by telling ourselves it’s not real. That’s not an option with true crime, and that makes it compelling. It’s that feeling that this couldn’t possibly have happened… and yet it did. That burst of fear-fuelled adrenalin is tantalising, it’s the car crash you can’t look away from. True crime also helps us understand the world that tiny bit better which is oddly comforting – forewarned is forearmed: If we know this is possible and is the absolute murkiest depth of human nature, then we can process and understand the world we live in more fully.
True crime therefore becomes a normal interest or hobby for many. But is there such a thing as being too fascinated? Can healthy pursuit become morbid obsession? When do you stop being simply interested in plumbing for dark truths and start letting them affect you more fundamentally, blurring morality and desensitising you to such an extent that it actually takes a physical and mental toll on you and those around you? And is there any way back once you start down that sinister, slippery slope?
Hopefully, How To Get Away With Murder goes some way to answering that terrifying question.