Popular Culture and its Skewed Ethics
As Halloween quickly approaches, controversial costumes are rising into the scene – a tangible reminder of biographical crime dramas growing into popular culture. Although some may believe that dressing up as these real life people is considered ‘harmless’, we should not support that type of behavior in order to remain mindful of the real life victims affected.
As different dramas such as “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”, “Under the Banner of Heaven”, “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile”, etc. have come out over the past few years, the popularity of each drama has grown with the help of social media platforms. From TikTok reactions to Twitter threads, these shows have become mainstream at a rapid pace.
While that may have been a positive outcome for the creators of those crime dramas, the public has blurred the line between these true stories and fictional horror or thriller dramas.
Although recent horror films such as “Halloween Ends” were created as fictional stories in order to entertain the public with jump scares and eerie effects, crime dramas stem from a much different direction: revolving around the stories of dangerous people who have committed appalling crimes in real life and left many victims and civilians traumatized. Glorifying serial killers and other criminals by dressing up like them as if they were fictional characters isn’t just unethical, it is also disrespectful to the victims and families who have suffered from their actions.
Throughout this current year, several blockbuster movies and drama series have come out including, but not limited to: “Stranger Things”, “Doctor Strange: The Multiverse of Madness”, “The Batman”, “Top Gun: Maverick”, and “Minions: Rise of Gru”. All of these movies have become mainstream throughout the U.S. and include an insurmountable amount of characters that people of all ages can dress up as as opposed to something controversial.
While crime dramas have risen in popularity, dressing up as these real life nightmares romanticizes a story that was made to inform people of the dangers of the world, which makes light of each victim’s trauma.
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