Is true crime just four horrors in a trench coat?
Naming the real world terrors is the only way to progress.
This essay comes from a dark-comedy running joke in my house where, whenever we watch a true-crime documentary, we place bets on which of a tiny group of horrors will be behind it. The ‘joke’, like a nightmarish version of Scooby-Doo, is that it’s always the same causes behind the true-crime mask.
Welcome to The Inciting Incident, where you’ll find weekly posts of fiction and non-fiction about horror and horror-adjacent writing. Subscribe for a weekly dose of spookiness all year around.
I often see the world through a lens of horror fiction, but with the 2024 US election result and the far-right gaining ground again in Europe, it’s clear there’s a lot of real-life horror to go around.
It hope it goes without saying, I don’t think these people should be in power for many reasons, ranging from ethics to finance.
Alongside these real horrors growing in their political strength, there’s also a lot of comedy, satire, and true-crime media. I’m not the first to see how these are obviously connected: the more horrific the world becomes, the more we need ways to process it. The more we need to feel that someone cares.
True-crime media intends to reveal the horrors of society - to alert us, to warn us, to bring us to our senses… and to entertain us.
What I find strange is that it’s rare for true-crime media to name the true horrors driving these events.
So, let’s pull off the Scooby-Doo mask and shine the light on the four horrors:
Patriarchy
Why are so many serial killers men? Why are men’s suicide rates so high? Why don’t men go to the doctor? Why are women so often the victims of violent crime? When we’ve got equal rights for women, why aren’t there equal opportunities? Why are trans-men discussed so much less than trans-women?
Each of the four horrors are a can of worms to themselves, but this one is a doozy. Patriarchy harms absolutely everybody — regardless of gender, patriarchy is working against you.
There are manosphere shills who will tell you feminism is the cause of men’s mental health and status decline, all the while hoping you don’t see the man behind the curtain is actually patriarchy.
In short patriarchy sets up men to be emotionally withdraw, stoic, isolated, leaders, who are calm and logical but also comfortable of violence (such as war), who should only be dating beautiful women, and who should never cry. In times of war, men are supposed to be honoured to be cannon fodder for whatever political choice has been made.
In short, men are seen as better than women in every area that counts. (This is also probably a big part of why trans-men are more accepted than trans-women - in a patriarchal society, it makes sense for a ‘woman’ to want to ‘become’ a man. Inverted commas added because trans-men are already men.)
And yet…
If all men are supposed to be leaders, the men who are led are failures.
If all men are supposed to date the most stunning women, the man who does not (or who doesn’t even desire women) is to be shunned.
If men are supposed to be rational all the time, never following their emotions, what is a man supposed to be if the most rational thing is to have a good cry?
All this gives men power while also setting up men to fail. When powerful people fail, their anger damages both themselves and others around them.
If you’re a failing man, who is going to be the easiest target? In a patriarchal society, it’ll be women and marginalised communities, such as queer folk, the disabled, of the poor.
The horror of Patriarchy is one of the most common pieces of the true crime quartet.
Capitalism
(and capitalism’s yappy sidekick, neoliberal economic policy)
The US and the UK are arguably two of the most advanced capitalist states in the world, and they are the top two countries for income disparity, i.e. the difference between the richest and the poorest is wider there than anywhere else.
As the post-World War II economies shifted slowly from socialist democratic policies towards business and capital-investment driven agendas, it became harder and harder for average people to build foundations in the world.
This began in the 60s with financiers finding ways around international banking laws, but became turbo-charged in the 1980s with the Reagan/Thatcher push for deregulation of trading, investment, and privatisation. Everything was for sale: energy, land, healthcare, water, you name it.
This resulted in a shift from public to private ownership, where every asset was guided by the principle of maximising the return on investment for people who often weren’t stakeholders in the service provided. For a clear example of this, check out the state of Thames Water, and other UK water companies owned mostly by businesses outside the UK.
The outcome for the average person is that owning your own home is a dream, wages have stagnated for decades, unions have been stripped of their power, and social mobility (the chance you’ll be significantly more of less wealthy than your parents) has plummeted.
In this unfair system, anger and envy find a potent feeding ground. When these emotions burst through the surface in a person, it can be a ‘burn it all down’ approach where people steal and kill and disregard others rights because they’ve never had their own rights respected. There’s nothing for that person to lose, and maybe free prison meals are but than nothing, so murder and mayhem seems like an okay way to pass the time.
Alternatively, people who work hard may build a tower of resentment. ‘I’ve slogged away and got nowhere - the system promised reward for hard work… so now I’ll take it.’
We see thieves and cheats winning all the time, from billionaires failing upwards until they’re the president, to AI tech-bros wholesale harvesting the work of authors to build intelligence-free chat bots. The rules don’t apply to winners, and society wants people (mostly men - see ‘patriarchy’) to be winners.
As the climate emergency heightens, the impacts are disproportionately effecting the poorest in society, making people more desperate than ever. Where there’s desperation, there’s crime.
The terror of late-stage capitalism is the second of our horrors.
White supremacy
Yep, racism.
Invented in the 1600s by profiteers who needed a justification to enslave African nations, white supremacy placed light-skinned folks at the top of the human ladder in terms of moral value, intelligence, and more. In a letter seeking permission from the Pope to support enslaving Africans, it was argued that black people were strong but stupid and unprincipled, so would benefit from white leadership.
There had been slavery before, but not based on skin colour, and not designed so explicitly for profit. Not surprisingly, the rise of slavery was also linked to the invention of capitalism — i.e. where monetary wealth became about more than simple value storage and exchange, and instead was invested and expected to accrue returns.
Skip forwards hundreds of years, and in many countries it seems to only be the blink of an eye ago that people of colour gained voting rights, the ability to own property, and many other indisputable human rights.
White supremacy still scars our world, in so many ways. Here’s a snippet from a 2011 study of race in video games:
A content analysis of top-selling video game magazines (Study 1)
and of 149 video game covers (Study 2) demonstrated the commonality
of overt racial stereotyping. Both studies revealed that
minority females are virtually absent in game representations.
Study 1 revealed that, in video game magazines, minority males,
underrepresented generally, were more likely to be portrayed as
athletes or as aggressive, and less likely to be depicted in military
combat or using technology, than White males. Study 2
also showed evidence of the ‘‘dangerous’’ minority male stereotype
in video game covers. Again, underrepresented overall, minority
males were overrepresented as thugs, using extreme guns, and also
as athletes.
400 years after slavers said black people were uncivilised but strong, in our video games, if black people appear at all, they’re often thugs or athletes.
When you feel the world is unfair, it creates anger.
When the world is set up to disadvantage you because of your skin colour, it creates anger.
When you feel a privilege is being taken away from you (e.g. by affirmative action), that can also create anger.
When you’re angry, you target those without power or authority or safety, and in societies organised under white supremacy, a person of colour is far more likely to be in that target group.
For multiple reasons, white supremacy is the third of the four horrors inside true crime’s trench coat.
Organised religion
Want to feel like God’s gift? Or like sinful trash? Or how about you’ve a divine right to pass judgement on others?
Oh boy, do organised religions have a place for you!
From cults to the extremes of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or other faiths, believing either of the following doesn’t generally go well for others around you: a) you’re one of a chosen few, and/or b) others are abominations in the eyes of a divine creator.
If you are told you’re special, you can believe your needs are greater than the needs of others. If great power corrupts greatly, divine power corrupts divinely.
If you’re told that others are damned, luring others into depravity, or servants of some kind of evil (either knowingly or otherwise), then you might feel it’s your right or even duty to destroy them.
Of course, not all faiths work like this.
As a random example of a different approach, purely plucked out of the air, Catholicism tells people they’re sinful from birth and constantly observed to see if they’ve earned out their sin-debt. Potentially, that could work out well, with people constantly striving to perform good deeds. What seems to mostly happen is that followers feel like crap for their whole lives, even when they’re doing nothing wrong.
None of this is good for anyone’s mental health, with predictable true-crime outcomes.
It’s not surprising that so many serial killers have some form of ‘strict upbringing’ in their background. Organised religion has many flavours of horror available, waiting to flourish in just the right mix of social opportunity.
… So why aren’t these named more often?
I find it bizarre these things are so seldom called out by name in true-crime media.
Under so many documentaries, there’s the question: Why did the killer do it?
Their mother was too strict! (And they happened to be religious.)
They were poor! (Despite holding multiple McJobs for capitalist mega-corps that barely paid a living wage.)
They were angry at women’s rejection! (Because they were never taught to respect women’s exigency and consent.)
Their mental health disorders were never addressed! (Because privatised healthcare is too expensive, free services are overwhelmed, and they’re typically a man and so can’t admit emotional vulnerability under the rules of patriarchy.)
Time and again, the same horrors rear their heads.
Time and again, the deeper sources of these crimes are never named.
To defeat these horrors, we need to bring them into the light.
So why write horror?
I spend a bunch of my free time thinking about terrible things.
For me, it’s a way of finding comfort - in stories, the characters’ voices are heard, even if they are snuffed out. If I want there to be justice, there will be.
Stories can be a spotlight onto cruelty. I’m not in charge of society, but I am a participant, and through stories I can talk about injustices.
I also write mostly supernatural horror, so the root of terror in the fictional world often isn’t the mundane social blights I’ve talked about above…
And yet… it is. They’re always there in the background.
In the novel I’ve been sending to agents, there is witchcraft, ghosts, and the supernatural, but the reasons these cause such big problems ties into patriarchy, capitalism, the climate emergency, and a touch of racism. The main events are haunted-house/cursed-village scares, but life’s real horrors lurk in the wings.
For me, this is part of the point of horror: we provide escape and distance, and sometimes give hope for justice, but we also hold up a mirror to society. We name the terrors that stalk our victims.
Facing these fears, confronting them, and hoping we can beat them — these are essential in building a more just future for everyone.
!!Before you go!!!
I’ve a favour and a gift for you:
The favour:
Alongside writing, I’ve been drawing things again recently, and entered one picture into a competition.
There are 4 days of voting left on a T-shirt design I’ve done. Please take a moment to vote for it on Threadless:
The gift:
All my Threadless designs are currently only $10 on Threadless! Offer ends 3rd December at 12PM CST.
At the checkout, use the code:
HOLIDAYTEES10
Check out the other designs in my shop and pick up a T-shirt for only $10!
It was a serious post this week, but I hope you found it interesting or, if nothing else, the racoon pictures made you smile!
See you next time, when I promise I’ll be back with a little fiction for you.
Go be kind and spooky!
Mata xxx
Jinkies! It was old man patriarchy all along