Serial Killers and the Production of the Uncanny in Digital Participatory Culture

With the evolution of media from the late 19th century onwards the ‘spectacle’ of serial killing moved beyond the realm of one-to-many, lean back and read-only media to be incorporated across our many-to-many, lean forward read-and-write 21st century digital environment. The new media landscape – where we do not live with, but in media - is not merely a state of having more media. Rather, it reflects (as much as it invites) a radically altered experience of being in the world, one that is at once collective and collaborative, inevitably shared and participatory (whether through surrendering our personal information or via our co-creative behaviours online), as the Pop Junctions blog consistently documents.

The marriage of participatory culture and the digital environment extends to all mediated phenomena – from the hybrid warfare of the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, to the various ways people find, maintain and break up their love online, up to and including cocreating and reshaping the modern mythos of the serial killer. Further, the serial killer, we argue, is not just yet another exemplar of contemporary digital culture—it is reappropriated as a unique totem upon which people can project their anxieties about either a real or perceived dehumanisation process experienced in the digital environment. This experience is part of our recurring encounters in the digital environment suffused with reminders of humanity’s potential obsolescence. Examples of such uncanny occurrences include when we are confronted with algorithmic curation, automation and robotics, and the results of generative artificial intelligence (such as intimate chatbots and hallucinating image and video generators).

Our argument is based on a consideration of the specific ways in which users can be seen as active agents in the process of co-creative meaning-making about serial killers online, and how such engagement links to the uncanny as both an expression and production of people’s lives lived in digital media.

In our digital environment, the generation and co-creation of serial killer mythology takes places through overlapping practices. These include:

streaming and binge-bonding over content (such as serial killer documentaries or podcasts on the major platforms);
sharing content (trading serial killer media across multiple channels);
commenting about serial killers (which fuels massive threads on YouTube and is the raison d’etre of Reddit subs like r/serialkillers);
creating amateur content (which is particular to platforms like YouTube and TikTok); as well as
remediating or remixing content into memes and other forms of creative expression online, such as shared through the DeviantArt community.

These practices all function to encourage the appropriation and reappropriation of modern serial killer discourses into a new media language particular to digital culture.

While many theorists expounded on what serial killing says about the social in any given context and the ways in which serial killing and media entangle, we ask: what is the current new media landscape doing to the idea of the serial killer as it is related to media publics? And how is serial killer mythology developing in relation to participatory culture? What we suggest is that people’s lives in media open up ways in which media publics consume, cultivate and perform knowledge about serial killers, enabling them to exercise a reconfigured sense of control over the story of the serial killer as a myth and as a deviant Other, all serving to establish oneself as authentically human confronted with a pervasive and ubiquitous digital environment heavily populated by non-human actors.

Serial killers then and now

While the ‘serial killer’ was defined and coined in the 1970s, the phenomenon took hold after the Ripper murders of the 1880s in London’s Whitechapel district. The serial killer evolved through different media iterations—from a celebrity of the newspaper tabloid to the spectacle of the television, to a ‘public property’ of the new media apparatus. The high-profile case of Jack the Ripper was perhaps the first ‘celebrity’ serial killer, as he was celebritised via the medium of the newspaper. Another example of this relationship, this time in turn of the century Australia, is the case of Martha Rendell in Western Australia. Despite major protestations of her innocence and the dubious evidentiary support presented at court in 1909, Martha Rendell was the last woman to be hanged in Perth. The newspaper coverage at the same carefully constructed her, managing the threat of the ‘wicked stepmother’ serial killer.

Charles Manson, we might then say, was to television what Jack the Ripper and Martha Rendell were to newspapers—Manson exploded into public consciousness within the historical moment of the rise of colour television across America, and concomitantly, with the media obsession with celebrity. These figures are therefore not just a product of context, but also a product of media.

How we see them, how we project our fears and anxieties onto them and their horrific acts, how we make sense of the serial killers in our midst – this is very much a function of both mediation (how we learn about serial killers in media) and mediatization (how media come to play a profound role in the way institutions and society as a whole function over time).

Importantly, the newspaper, radio and later on television were the original mass media, symptoms as well as signposts of massive urbanization, the rise of the industrial age, and the emergence of the ‘mass’ society – where the uncannily anonymous nature of everyday life contrasted as well as aligned with the horrific acts and identity (as also one of us, just ostensibly less human) of the serial killer.

With the shift from the static imagery of the newspaper to the spectacularised moving image serial killers were reborn in living colour. As a result, during the post-War period, the function of the serial killer construct evolved and became, more than ever before, a function of media spectacle. The strategies of television formats developed in this era find eery parallels to the techniques of serial killer ritual, as Mark Seltzer writes, “Repetitive, compulsive, serial violence... does not exist without this radical entanglement between forms of eroticized violence and mass technologies of registration, identification, and reduplication, forms of copycatting and simulation” (1998: 265).

Since at least the late 1960s, with the ubiquity of colour television across the domestic sphere, media primed mainstream culture for the popularity, fascination, and endless imagery of the serial killer (Stratton 1994: 7). The site of the serial killer became a locus onto which media publics could project their own pathology, and emergent languages about perversion and trauma came to the fore. As such, the ‘serial killer’ reminded people of their corporeality as well as confronting them with its dismissal at the hands of these murderers. The visceral engagement between publics and celebrities that was fostered during this era intensified this relationship.

Television provided the necessary grounds for the production of violence as celebrity spectacle. A screen cultures evolved and professionalized, a pathological repetition of the subject of serial killing in the form of television news, true crime documentaries, and ‘serial crime drama’ ensued. As Brian Jarvis pinpoints in his work “Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture,” a serial killer consumer culture emerged where ‘fans’ “avidly build collections which mirror the serial killer’s own modus operandiof collecting fetish objects” (2007: 27). We agree with Jarvis that it would be too simple to “dismiss this phenomenon as the sick hobby of a deviant minority” and rather understand it as “merely the hardcore version of a mainstream obsession with the serial killer” (327) engendered by and in media.

The serial killer of the 1960s onward, as represented (and promoted) in mass media culture, can also be seen as exemplary of this era’s relative affluent and peaceful nature and the rise of consumer culture, as the middle-class flocked to generic, lifeless suburbs and shopping malls of major metropolitan cities around the world.

The ‘serial killer’ construct continued to gain currency later in the 20th century as a manifestation, or even of ‘symptom,’ of postmodern media culture itself. In effect, labelling serial killing and serialising it on television and film also brought it, like murder back into the home—where it belongs (as Alfred Hitchcock was famously quoted in an interview with the National Observer of 15 August 1966).

The mythologising of the serial killer through postmodern media, in many ways, led to the conflation of the mythic with the abject, the grotesque with the sensational, and the tragic with the iconic. This is also what led to the glorification and even glamorising of serial killers that some commentators have condemned (“Netflix’s Next ‘Sexy Serial Killer’ Documentary,” 2019). Regardless of problematic ethical implications, late century broadcast models set the tone and conditions for the mediatisation of the serial killer on the new media platforms and practices of the 21st century.

Being human in the digital

Given the participatory nature of our digital environment, we recognise how users are active agents in the process of meaning-making about serial killers. The newly interactive style of public commentary exercises a kind of ‘public ownership’ over the ‘social problem’ of serial killing in ways that traditional media did not and could not. Commenting on serial killers fuels massive threads on nearly every social platform, the most notable of which are perhaps YouTube and Reddit, where one can witness raw and unfiltered exchanges. Partly, this phenomenon stems from the near-zero gatekeeping mechanisms on new media platforms. Users can also participate in these threads as anonymously (or as visibly) as they wish, a choice that provides another dimension of control over the practice.

Understanding why and how YouTube extends users’ agency in the process of meaning-making is complex and challenging. In part because of its originally open nature, and the ability to share and embed YouTube videos on every other platform or messaging service seamlessly and effortlessly, YouTube has become an incredibly powerful and impactful social phenomenon. In other words: YouTube is a ‘media public’ especially because it is a loosely knit co-creative practice.

The top three results sorted by ‘view count’ for the search term ‘serial killer documentary’ on the YouTube platform (at the time of writing): “Inside the Mind of Jeffrey Dahmer: Serial Killer’s Chilling Jailhouse Interview” (Inside Edition, 2019) and “Ghosts of Highway 20”[1] (The Oregonian, 2019), boasting more than 37 million views each. The Dahmer interview video alone hosts more than 70,000 discrete user comments. When sorted by ‘popularity’ (ranked by ‘likes’), the top three comments on this video (on 27 March, 2023) are as follows:

The fact that he is so aware and still did it is absolutely terrifying. (51k likes)

It’s terrifying how calm and normal serial killers seem, you just never know. (7.5k likes)

This interview is literally insane. The way he’s able to recognize the bizarreness with such clarity but at the same time almost be completely detached from the carnal side of himself. Very strange man, it’s like he’s split in two mentally. (3.2k likes)

Each of these top comments separately and distinctly engender a notion of the uncanny: the unsettling feeling that the once well-known, familiar, and reliable fabric of reality—whether another person, specific social relations, or people’s sense of belonging to a community—becomes strange and unsettling. As both Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger have argued in different ways in their published works, the first focusing on the uncanny as a feeling, the second on its relation to ontology, the experience of uncanniness goes to the heart of the human condition.

In fact, much of people’s actions and behaviour in life revolve around reducing, downplaying or altogether ignoring the uncanny, yet it is always there. The uncanny is waiting to be discovered, acting as a source of estrangement that makes us instantly aware of the fact that who we (think we) are, how things (are supposed to) function, and what all of this means is simply just an act of sensemaking that is essentially arbitrary, and permanently unstable. It is here that we meet the figure of the serial killer, as the comments above demonstrate, this is the place where the human figure is both monstrous and “calm and normal,” the place where the human figure is “split in two” (the other half clearly comprising a non-human, unfeeling and therefore unknowable entity). Here, people are forcibly moved beyond the horrors of their actions to the rather unsettling notion that these human beings can do what they do as part of our human community, part of us.

Users are active agents in the process of meaning-making about serial killers in relation to the uncanny specifically when looking at the kinds of gatekeeping operations that are active in Reddit’s true crime communities (r/TrueCrime and r/SerialKillers). Take for example the ‘patrolling of borders’ about what can be said, could be said, and what can absolutely not be said (with the consequence of being permanently banned). Three of the nine rules for participating in the r/SerialKillers community are specifically directed to these language rules:

#3. No glorification of serial killers

#5. No Self-promotion / Merchandise Links / Murderabilia

#9. No Writing To Serial Killers. (https://www.reddit.com/r/serialkillers/)

These rules are self-regulatory and independent of traditional ‘rulemaking’ structures (in the sense that there is no legal obligation), reflecting the way the community sees its position in shaping the language and knowledge around serial killers—namely what is right, what is wrong, and how users should or should not engage with the cultural site of the serial killer. That is, the ‘serial killer’ must remain actively conscripted to its place as deviant Other—the celebration of which is not tolerated.

These structures can also be read as a mechanism of protection against the psychic threat of violence upon the community. This is activated both through the attempt to collectively ‘figure out’ the serial killer as a problem to be solved. For example, users provoke conversations on this issue by posting questions such as:

What are some of the wildest conspiracy theories for why SKs killed people? (https://redd.it/1257iun)

Why is it commonly believed that a serial killer doesn’t stop killing until they die or are imprisoned? (https://redd.it/xwne4h)

Why serial killers don’t kill bad people instead? (https://redd.it/vjr903)

Of course, users could consider referencing or reading the medico-scientific literature on the bio-psycho-social makeup of these kinds of offenders to discern motivations, but there is a preference (and easier access point, especially considering most people do not have access to journals outside the field or the academy) to do this in an online community as it provides the power of collaborative knowledge-seeking and knowledge-making with the additional psycho-social safety of group dynamics and collectively policed boundaries.

Further, these relatively organic and self-directed rules suggest a broader attempt to distance the Self from the deviant Other. In her research on Reddit, Judith Fathalla (2022) points out that the term “‘True Crime Community’ (TCC) is a self-description used by enthusiasts of true crime media on Tumblr, Reddit and social media sites. Fathalla suggests that the very fact that these media publics self-describe as ‘a community’ is telling because it denotes a need for “boundaries and norms of behaviour” (3). This is borne out in rules and community discussions about ways of speaking. For instance, the r/serialkillers community reminds its members that “phrases like ‘favourite’ killer can be construed as glorification and are better phrased as ‘most frequently discussed’” (https://redd.it/gctnjx). These collectively policed ordinances enable anyone to delve deeply into the phenomenon, while such mechanisms of digital culture simultaneourly keep the threat of the serial killer at bay.

The Internet produces just as many unregulated spaces that cultivate taboo as it does self-regulated ones that attempt to contain it. In these spaces we see the uncanny emerge in other ways, namely, via the production of user-generated, and remixed material. An endlessly creative range of work is posted on the site DeviantArt, a user-generated portal self-described as a place where “art and community thrive” and through which users can “explore over 350 million pieces of art while connecting to fellow artists and art enthusiasts” (https://www.deviantart.com/).

By its very name, this community positions itself as the deviant Other. Members are referred to as ‘deviants’ and pieces submitted to the site are called ‘deviations’. It is unsurprising then that users remix serial killer iconography in ways that focus on some of the most troubling aspects of their crimes. Two pertinent examples are Jeffrey Dahmer’s cannibalism and John Wayne Gacy’s clown costume. In the case of Dahmer-themed content or ‘deviations,’ the notions of cannibalism and ‘ordinariness’ collide in a morbid excursion into the uncanny: cartoons of Dahmer ‘cooking’ with a frypan while skulls emanate from the pan (Star90skid), artwork remixing Dahmer in a scene together with American 1920s era serial killer Hamilton Howard “Albert” Fish casually discussing dinner (AGwun 2015a), and disturbingly ‘cute’ depictions of a child-like Dahmer with a knife and fork exclaiming “yummy” (AGwun 2015b). The range of John Wayne Gacy amateur work hosted on DeviantArt illustrates a preoccupation with assemblage and transformation that uses the evil clown as a leitmotif. There are literally dozens of remediations all conflating Gacy’s role in the community as ‘Pogo the Clown’ and the horror of his crimes.

https://www.deviantart.com/kazekage-of-the-sand/art/The-Bay-Harbour-Butcher-269494098

The incongruity provoked by the ‘ordinary cannibal’ trope cuts to the heart of the experience of uncanniness: all of them are just like us, and yet they are not – and one of the few ways we have to handle this, is to participate in remixing and deconstructing them. What these remixes on the tip of the digital serial killer iceberg remind us of is that rather than the ordinary being the opposite of our horror, the ordinary is in fact its twin, that is, the banal and mundane operate in dialogue with the deviant drive as a fortification against these taboos. DeviantArt functions as a site (both a cultural site and a web site) that holds space for the uncanny in this way. The ‘realities’ about us that we take as ‘given’ are disturbed and un-realised, made real again. In participating with this digital media, we are both normal (products of our environment) and not-normal (enjoying our taboo par excellence).

The serial killer belongs to all of us

Of salience in our collective reworking of trauma, through the historically conjunctive development of mass media and social order, is the spectre of the serial killer—ostensibly human and non-human. In every era, the serial killer gets reinvented, in each step engaging more of us in its co-creation. Statistically, most people will never interact with a serial killer ‘face-to-face’. Our entire relationship with this character is therefore mediated through all the communication practices which bring this archetype into our knowledge, which is the very basis of discursivity. The serial killer, time and time again, proves to be an enigmatic figure, particularly produced by the mass media of its time, available us to act out and cope with our anxieties about what it is to be human, yet also reproducing us as inhuman cogs of the machine of mass society, industry, and culture.

In doing so, our media act on two levels, at once offering us human agency and effectively reducing it to (almost) zero. First, mass media operate as a way for the collective to regain some psychic protection from the threat of horror posed by the ‘serial killer’ as a social phantasm, not in the least because it is the ‘average person’ that is the typical victim of the serial killer. However, if we are all potential victims of serial killer attack, then through social practice we are all also potential guardians against it, as much as we are participants (in and through media) of making the serial killer.

In our analysis, we combine notions of serial killing through mediation and through understanding media as practice to explore the entanglement between the media public, the media apparatus, and the serial killer archetype, in a current interaction becoming re-articulated through digital modes of exchange that provide grounds to share, remix, watch, like and comment simultaneously, in the most voyeuristic and compulsive of ways. These new practices tend to reconfigure the role of the serial killer as a site of shared, complex and profound interactions with our bodies, the notion of bodies-in-pieces, and indeed our humanity and non-humanity all at once.

The mediation and mediatisation of the serial killer provides a historically embedded trajectory through which we can appreciate, as much as appropriate, our engagement with this abominable figure and the horrific acts they engage in. In short, we suggest that the serial killer today has become the totem with which we work through the fear of losing our humanity—and vitally doing so in a digital environment where the serial killer has come to belong to all of us.

Works Cited

AGwun (2015a) Quarrel. https://www.deviantart.com/agwun/art/Quarrel-573920579

AGwun (2015b) Serial killers doodle 3. https://www.deviantart.com/agwun/art/Serial-killers-doodle-3-587528606

Fathallah, J. (2022). ‘Being a fangirl of a serial killer is not ok’: Gatekeeping Reddit’s True Crime Community. New Media & Society, OnlineFirst: 1-20.

Freud S (2003 [1919]) The Uncanny. Translated by D Mclintock. London: Penguin.

Glitsos L and Taylor J (2022) The Claremont serial killer and the production of class-based suburbia in serial killer mythology. Continuum 36(4): 508–527.

Goodall M (2012) The ‘book of Manson’: Raymond Pettibon and the killing of America. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics3(2): 159–170.

Haebich A (1998) Murdering stepmothers: the trial and execution of Martha Rendell. Journal of Australian Studies 22(59): 66–81.

Jarvis B (2007) Monsters inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture. Crime, Media, Culture 3(3): 326–344.

Seltzer M (2013) Serial killers: Death and life in America’s wound culture. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

Star90skid (2018) In the kitchen. https://www.deviantart.com/star90skid/art/In-the-kitchen-777431010.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2019) Netflix's Next ‘Sexy Serial Killer’ Documentary. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eMw4ojPWs0 (accessed 4 June 2023).

[1] Comments for the “Ghosts” documentary have been disabled—this can be enacted by the creator, which often happens when users become too involved, over-invested, or inappropriate or can be enacted by YouTube administration if the content/comments are of a sensitive nature and directed toward minors.

Biography

Laura Glitsos is a writer, academic and musician based in Perth, Western Australia. She is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, author of the book Somatechnics and Popular Music in Digital Contexts (Palgrave, 2019), singer in the band Agent, Red.

Mark Deuze is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam (before that at Indiana University). He is author of 9 books, including McQuail's Media and Mass Communication Theory (Sage, 2020), and Life in Media (The MIT Press, 2023), and co-editor 5, including Happiness in Journalism (Routledge, 2024). Mark is the bassist/singer of the band Skinflower.