AFTER DARK
Hooked on a Killer Story by Taylor Johnson Contributions by Madeline Wilson Design & Illustration by Sara Roach Chills run down your spine and your mind begins to wander as you lay in bed listening to your favorite true crime podcast, Serial. You can’t see the horrific actions depicted but the audio conveys everything you need to know. In 2014 this popular true crime podcast, reached five million downloads faster than any other show on Apple Podcasts. Why are so many people tuning in week after week for this gruesome content?
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SPRING 2020 | ISSUE ONE
Associate Professor Melanie-Angela Neuilly at Washington State University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology shares, “Rare and extreme things are a lot more interesting than regular things to a lot of people.” In other words, people are collectively drawn to the unexplainable. Scott Bonn, author, criminologist, professor and public speaker, shares in his Psychology Today article titled “The Delightful, Guilty Pleasure of
Watching True Crime TV”, “Serial killers are so extreme in their brutality and so seemingly unnatural in their behavior that society is riveted by them.” Wanting to check to see if there are monsters under the bed is similar to “the thing that draws us to scary stories as children,” explains Kim Douthit, paranormal investigator and tour guide for Spooked in Seattle Ghost Tours and Museum. It’s the fascination with the unknown that makes people curious from a young age.
