The Glamour of Evil: Our Unhealthy Fascination with Killers

There’s something deeply unsettling about the way serial killers have become pop culture icons. We watch documentaries about them. We wear their faces on Halloween. We binge dramatizations of their lives on Netflix and then tweet about how “weirdly charming” they were. It’s a bizarre, almost grotesque trend—one that begs a simple but loaded question: why do we idolize serial killers?

You don’t have to look far to see the evidence. Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story became one of Netflix’s most-watched shows, sparking TikTok trends and Twitter fan accounts. Before that, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring Zac Efron as Ted Bundy, turned a brutal killer into a glossy, charismatic anti-hero. Efron’s portrayal wasn’t inaccurate—but it was seductive. The movie leaned into the “handsome killer” angle so heavily that you almost forgot the man it was based on was a manipulative sadist who murdered at least thirty women.

And that’s the problem. These stories are told through stylish cinematography and tight scripts, with soundtracks that make evil feel cinematic. When the killer is the protagonist and the victims are just names in a courtroom montage, we’re not watching true…