Of online voyeurs and offline vigilantes

Hindustan Times

19-06-2025

True crime squirmed under the spotlight of two documentaries at Sundance 2025, earlier this year. Charlie Shackleton's Zodiac Killer Project opened up the genre playbook to dismantle the codified conventions that go into choreographing an investigative spectacle for the screen. David Osit's Predators charged the stakeholders of a booming industry on multiple counts: for the genrefication of tragedy, for inviting voyeurs to play moral arbiters, for galvanising vigilantes into enacting DIY justice, for feeding a singular and collective appetite for the macabre, and for seeding an adverse parasocial mania. The schadenfreude-pilled addicts searching for their next fix are put under scrutiny, same as the opportunistic peddlers of grisly stories.
In recent times, true crime has gotten more confrontational, more introspective, more aware of its shortcomings, more committed to addressing the system, not just the individual. The two Sundance docs examine our relationship with stories which in so many ways have become our modern myths in this internet age. Predators reviews the legacy of a popular NBC show that delivered a uniquely American brand of public spectacle. For three years, the Dateline spinoff To Catch a Predator (2004-2007) became a rating sensation with its ambush journalism. Dubbed 'Punk'd for paedophiles,' the programme was built on a winning formula: actors posing as minors online would lure potential predators to a house rigged with cameras; on arriving at the house, these older men would be cornered by host Chris Hansen with chat transcripts and difficult questions; outside, local police would be waiting to swarm the man and charge him with online solicitation of a minor. This humiliation routine was broadcast on national television.
However, bypassing due process left a majority of the cases unprosecutable. Not to mention this extralegal enterprise undermined the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Especially when it turned out it wasn't so much the show working with law enforcement as law enforcement working for the show. NBC cancelled To Catch a Predator when one of the targets, a Texas assistant DA, shot himself after his house was surrounded by police and Hansen's production crew. But by then it had left its mark. It spawned enough copycat sting operations targeting suspected predators online to become a YouTube phenomenon. Vigilante groups began to surface around the US with their own participatory true crime iterations. As Osit finds out following one crew, it is less justice that incentivises these operations, more the righteous satisfaction of catching someone with their pants down. It is social cleansing for clout, for subscribers, for our viewing pleasure. It is mass-mediated dehumanisation peacocking as public service. It is gotcha TV premised upon revelling in others' ignominy.
To Catch a Predator capsuled the spectacle of public shaming via subterfuge into 20 episodes. But what happened beyond the runtime? The show had no interest in the family left behind: the betrayed wives, daughters and friends who had to endure through their shock, anger and grief. When Osit sits down with the distressed mother of an 18-year-old decried by Hansen for dating a 15-year-old in the ongoing web series Takedown, the ruinous cost of public shaming becomes glaring. Interviews with some of the young actors hired to play underage decoys on To Catch a Predator reveal the toll it took on them. Hansen would always confront his targets with the statement: 'Help me understand.' Osit confesses his own childhood trauma as a survivor of sexual abuse made him keen to understand why some adults would prey on children. But Hansen was never interested in the why. When he is interviewed in the film, it only confirms to Osit the aim was never to decode the minds of predators. Nor was it to alert parents to online dangers. It was to grant audiences the feeling of a moral order briefly restored coupled with the pleasure of self-exoneration from disorder. But by making a spectacle of shaming predators, the show became predatorial in its own way.
Zodiac Killer Project is a quasi-documentary filmed in a conditional mood: a feature as it might have been but couldn't be. Director Charlie Shackleton had set out to adapt The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, a 2012 book by ex-cop Lyndon Lafferty. Just as he was locked in research and scouting locations, the negotiation for securing the rights fell through. Thereupon he decided to make a film about an unmaking, his abortive bid to hop on the true crime bandwagon. Much of the film comprises long static shots of unpeopled streets, buildings and homes, accompanied by Shackleton's sometimes wistful, sometimes tongue-in-cheek descriptions of how he would have recreated milestone scenes from the book in these nondescript locations. As the camera slow zooms in on the locations, their emptiness invites us to envision the ghosts of a past when the Zodiac Killer haunted San Francisco and the ghosts of a documentary that almost got made. The opening scene takes us to a highway rest stop where Lafferty came face-to-face with the man he suspected to be the killer. So that it doesn't feel like we are watching a podcast remodelled for the screen Shackleton adds insert shots and 'evocative B-roll': bullet casings dropping, blood pooling on the floor, overhead lights swinging in the interrogation room. For an illustration of how he might have gone about assembling the title sequence and dramatizing events, he pulls in footage from series like The Jinx and Making a Murderer.
Shackleton is quite forthcoming about the deceptions of true crime. He shows us a library that would have been recast as a police station. He admits to the liberties he would have taken and the facts he would have withheld to make Lafferty's conclusions more persuasive. Lafferty claimed to have unmasked the Zodiac Killer. But the evidence he laid out was circumstantial. And as his book title suggests, he accused local officials of stymying his investigation. Shackleton confesses he himself doesn't buy Lafferty's claims but it wouldn't have stopped him from selling the same as highly credible to the viewers for the purposes of making engaging true crime. There is a sense of playfulness and bitterness to Shackleton's narration. We hear a filmmaker reluctant to probe his own ready indulgence in the deceptions of a genre he is eager to anatomise. We hear a fan more amused than alarmed by the mechanics. We hear someone whose desire for closure becomes a comment on our own denied by cold cases.
Last year, Canadian filmmaker Pascal Plante interrogated our cultural fixation on serial killers and true crime with an entirely different approach in Red Rooms. Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is a model by day and hacker by night obsessed with the case of Ludovic Chevalier, a man accused of killing three young women on camera and livestreaming the crimes on the dark web. On the days of trial proceedings, she forgoes the luxuries of her Montreal high-rise to sleep in a back alley near the courthouse, just so she can secure herself a seat in the gallery. Gariépy is sphinx-like as Kelly-Anne. Her dispassionate poker face crystallises her ambivalence. It is impossible to gauge her motives beyond a restless need for certainty that pushes the curious to play detective. It is hard to read her moral compass, or if she even has one. If she is alone, it feels like a choice. It is disconcerting to watch her so airily dart back and forth between playing hold 'em online and bidding on a snuff film of a 13-year-old girl (definitive evidence linking Chevalier to the crimes). Parasocial mania reaches a fever pitch when Kelly-Anne turns up to court, dressed in a school uniform like the victim. She gazes fixedly at Chevalier seated in his glass booth as if willing him to return the gaze.
Early into the trial, Kelly-Anne befriends Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a Chevalier groupie convinced of his innocence. When Clémentine learns Kelly-Anne has access to two of his alleged snuff films, she insists upon watching them. Plante holds the camera on the two women staring at the screen, faces aglow in the blood red of the kill room. The horror is relegated off screen. All we hear are piercing screams of agony. Clémentine, sickened, breaks down in tears, the reality of Chevalier being guilty catching up with her naive delusion. Kelly-Ann, unruffled, looks on with the numbed expression of someone who has presumably seen the video several times before. The two make for parallel but contrasting portraits of pathological fixation.
Ostensibly a fan of Arthurian tales, Kelly-Anne calls her jailbroken AI assistant Guenièvre and goes by the online handle 'Lady of Shalott,' named for the noblewoman cursed to only see the outside world reflected in a mirror. The Tennyson poem she inspired speaks to Kelly-Anne's own condition: alone, confined to a tower and engaging with the world through (digital) mirrors. Red Rooms adds a wrinkle to the true crime genre by situating us both behind and front of the camera to confront how easily we are lured in by the promise of voyeuristic opportunity. We as consumers are bystanders shielding our eyes while still peering through the fingers at the scene of a fatal car crash, our reptilian fear instinct and our deep-rooted curiosity caught in a tense parley. We observe from a safe remove while staying unobserved. We wish to be anonymous yet belong. We suit true crime up in academic garb, style it with artistic flourishes, call it victim-centred, all so we feel less queasy about consuming trauma repackaged as entertainment.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.