The true-crime genre is an interesting lens for examining societal views on crime and related themes. Our lobotomy film series shows how film can help us understand the society in which the film was produced. By examining how these movies depict lobotomy, we learn how people viewed the operation at the time. Our analysis unveils insights about the operation’s perceived seriousness and awareness of its side effects. Fiction offers an entry point for exploring people’s assumptions and beliefs.1
Anna Kirsch contends that film and fiction are not mere forms of entertainment but cultural mirrors that reflect ideas about crime, justice, and more. Unlike a mirror, Kirsch argues, these forms of media actively shape public views and other art.2
Recently, true crime shows like Netflix’s Monster have found wide success, raising questions about the role media can play in shaping the public understanding of these issues.
This week is Halloween, a time of spectacles and play. A time in which many embrace and consume horror for pleasure.3[2]
Crime Fiction, True Crime, and Real Life
Authors like Agatha Christie often draw on vast knowledge to craft their stories. She was well-versed in poisons and their effects and had worked in a hospital dispensary during both World Wars.
Media portrayals of crime and its investigations significantly affect real life. Kirsch suggested that Christie’s had “great knowledge” of poisons, allowing her to depict their use, symptoms, and effects rather accurately. Christie’s work also played a remarkable role in identifying real-world cases.
For example, Christie’s accurate descriptions of poisoning helped a real-world nurse identify thallium poisoning in a 19-month-old baby from Qatar who had accidentally swallowed some insecticide in 1977. In a stunning case, her descriptions and depictions of thallium in The Pale Horse (1962) helped identify the poison used by a serial poisoner called Graham Young. One of Scotland Yard’s doctors claimed that having read the novel helped him identify what happened. Christie’s novels are said to have saved lives in other countries too.
Another example of how media can shape the public’s perception of crime and its investigation is the so-called CSI effect. The term was coined to describe how CSI’s slick, rapid forensic analysis shaped the public’s expectations. A study found that about half of all prospective jurors expect some kind of scientific evidence in every criminal case. Some studies have disputed the degree to which these shows have had an effect. The point is that media both reflects and restructures people’s views and perspectives.
These examples show that fiction is not mere storytelling; it can affect real cases and real people.
True Crime, Causation, and Ethics
Netflix’s Monster is hard to deny as a success, with a new series set to release this year. Meaghan Allen and Neil Pemberton have examined Monster’s Ed Gein. This is Netflix’s third instalment of Monster, following its debut on Dahmer (2022) and the second on the Menendez brothers (2024), which drew heavily on court records and other sources. This contrasts with the instalment on Gein (2025).
Allen and Pemberton claim that each Monster instalment presents a monster and their crimes. Each one opens with a crime and goes hunting for a cause. The show draws on places and spaces and assigns specific importance to certain events; thus, its reconstructions reimagine them. Allen and Pemberton conclude that Monster makes monstrosity an inscribed status, resulting from a transformation driven by social and cultural processes.
The Gein instalment, Allen and Pemberton suggest, is especially significant because Gein became one of the “foundational narratives of modern American horror.” Gein’s crimes inspired lots of fictional characters, including Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. According to them, stories about Gein grew increasingly more shocking.
Allen and Pemberton posit that this instalment’s departure from evidence is another reason it deserves further scrutiny. They claim that the first two (Dahmer and Menendez) appear to be exercises in creative nonfiction, but in the third instalment things go awry. They see the Gein series as a docudrama which frequently uses invented dialogue, and radically fictionalised relations to reconstruct Gein’s past.
Allen and Pemberton introduce two analytical frameworks to investigate the show. The first is the forensic demotic, which draws on Carlo Ginzburg’s work and his focus on making larger claims from reconstructing smaller, evidence-based events.
Allen & Pemberton claim Netflix’s Monster offers a subverted reconstruction in which showmakers decide which details count as important and set causal links, creating the appearance that the viewer is reaching evidence-based conclusions. These researchers claim the show subverts the process of inferring conclusions from evidence.
The second is the forensic demonic, which they define as the channelisation of popular habits of clue readings through gothic conventions organised around contamination, inheritance, and transmission. This process references loaded visual and textual imagery, making guided inferences feel like revealed evil rather than a constructed narrative.
In the Gein instalment, the showmakers take great liberties and, for example, claim Gein was inspired by Ilse Koch. Allen and Pemberton claim the show portrays Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald, as some kind of sexualised Nazi dominatrix.4 This imagery is juxtaposed with her wearing a yellow dress, which they think flattens and caricatures her for spectacle. Monster’s Gein consumes and is partly transformed by images of Koch, depicting evil as transmitted from one person to another through images. This, they claim, is emotionally compelling yet deeply problematic.
Taking crime seriously requires thinking deeply about possible causes and examining how these factors affect individuals. It can be easy to concoct a compelling narrative where an event allegedly transformed a person into a monster. It is easy to forget that many people who experienced several events did not turn into monsters.5 One of our earlier posts explored ideas about monsters being born or made. The implications are immense because they will, in turn, affect the design of interventions meant to reduce crime, and the approach, if any, to rehabilitating those convicted.
Allen and Pemberton draw on the work of Tomaz Jardim, who argued that the most sensational allegations against Koch were never substantiated. He suggests that despite a lack of evidence, Koch was prosecuted because thinking about a monster made more sense than realising that everyday people can engage in everyday complicity.6 Allen and Pemberton sustain that the show sensationalises and, rather than explaining Gein’s background, obscures it. The use of Koch as a muse is a salient example of this. Moreover, they identify a hypocrisy at the core of Monster, because it aims to criticise an appetite for spectacle through spectacle. In other words, the show argues that violent images corrupt while also making such images central to its appeal.
Happy Halloween, and may you enjoy playing with monsters, lest you end up corrupted by them.
This article is based on a panel held at the British Crime Historians Symposium, held at Oxford Brookes on September 3-4. The article is based on published abstracts and my notes. I am thus responsible for any mistakes that may have crept it or if I have unknowingly misconstrued any of their claims.
According to Kirsch, some authors significantly impacted what came after. For example, Agatha Christie set the standard for the clue-puzzle procedural. Her stories and others like it include planting clues, a restricted pool of suspects, gathering all the facts, and a revelation. Kirsch suggested that distinct cultures have their own crime fiction. Between 1920 and 1939, American and British crime fiction took different turns. In the USA, crimes tend to be more violent and occur in an urban setting. These often present moral ambiguities. In contrast, British crime fiction at the time focused on clue puzzles.
By all means, enjoy Halloween. I am merely mentioning this because it is this week, and one tries to make things relevant in one way or another.
Koch is rumoured to have killed people to use their skin and body parts as adornments.
I often think of this as a numerator-versus-denominator problem.
An exceptionally interesting and thoroughly investigated book follows the story of an ordinary group of German police officers who transform into monsters.