By Abigail Wurster Subcultures of infantilizing morbidity and insistence on the innocence of the murderous of our society have found refuge in the dark corners of our internet. Serial killers, mass murderers, domestic terrorists and a handful of other gruesome criminals are framed to simply look like the average heartthrob on the cover of a tweenage magazine. Users also post edits of them wearing flower crowns or post straight up crime scene photos with a completely ill-minded caption. Users also are not particular about what cultures they post about. Posts can range anywhere from extremely vintage serial killers, like Albert Fish, to the two most notorious recent mass murderers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who influenced countless copycat crimes. A popular site to post about these criminals is Tumblr, as this website is easy to remain anonymous on. Young teenage girls run “Confession blogs” that allow anyone to send submissions about their “favorite serial killer” and talk about how alluring and appealing these publicly loathed criminals are. However, this behavior is not limited to young teenage girls on blog posting websites. Older males on Twitter have created pages supporting the release of Jodi Arias, a conventionally attractive, cold-blooded murderer. These subcultures aren’t just exclusive to real-life murderers and havoc-wreckers. “It,” a film based on the best-selling book by Stephen King, has become the top grossing horror movie of 2017, with a box office performance of $482.4 million and over 31 million tickets sold. The movie has obviously reached a large demographic, most of which found it “a terrifying, hallucinatory, and ludicrous nightmare,” also of which film reviewer, Andrew Barker, found it to be. The main antagonist and premise of plot in this movie is a shapeshifting and outwardly frightful “Pennywise the Dancing Clown” who lives in the sewers in the fictional town of Derry, Maine. Pennywise comes out of hiding every 27 years to exploit the town’s fears and prey on the town’s children. The movie’s intention is to thrill and frighten all audience members, and, generally speaking, the movie achieved that. However, there is a select portion of moviegoers who found the Dancing Clown to be attractive, alluring and innocent. We can also see this behavior deriving from a popular television program, “American Horror Story” which airs on FX. Hundreds of viewers have created pages for the antagonists from each season. For example, the first season featured an unstable mass murderer. The second season had a spin on Ed Gein, a famous serial killer, but in an asylum setting. Both were equally disturbing, yet able to attract countless viewers to romanticize them. These people have found safe places to express their opinions on popular social media websites such as Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram. Users can collaborate on fan made stories, make edits of, and have general discussions about criminals they find attractive. The question to ask is “Why?” Why are these cold-blooded real and made-up entities reaching heartthrob status? The answer lies at the very surface. Those who have been brought up to respect human life and have emotions of remorse cannot comprehend the thought processes behind a relentless murderer, which leads to an increased interest in who they are as a person and the potential they could have. Scott A. Bohn, a criminology professor, explains that by delving into information about those who kill triggers guilt and curiosity in the reader, which in turn leads to the interest in more information. The more information that is known about a figure, the more you are likely to favor them, which can end up as a romanticization viewpoint for a lot of people. Like popstars and celebrities have extremely exotic lives, full of luxury and spotlight, those who kill have lives of mystery and disregard for human life. The idea excites average joes and in hand causes them to reach the status of a killer household name, which is the topic of dinner conversations and internet search history. Photos Courtesy Of: pixabay.com
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Elena Caputo
Hi! My name is Elena, and I'm a senior at Wilson and one of the Editors of the Editorial section. If you have any questions or ideas or if you want to write, email me at [email protected]! Olivia MonosHello! My name is Olivia and I'm a junior this year, and one of the editors of the Editorial section! I'm really excited to write for the Paw Print again this year!
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