Why Evil Fascinates Us: Murderers Monsters don’t exist. There are only people who stopped believing in humanity.

I’ve been watching stories about serial killers for years. Not because I’m fascinated by blood, but because I’ve always wondered what could awaken such darkness inside a person. I even have an encyclopedia of serial killers at home — I used to leaf through it as a teenager, feeling a strange kind of tension I couldn’t quite name. Recently, I watched a series about Ed Gein, and even though I had long known his story, seeing it unfold on screen was different. Not because of the gore, but because of how close it suddenly felt.

Watching real killers is a different kind of fear than watching a horror movie. Horror lets us rest in safety — we know the demon isn’t real, that the monster lives only inside the screen. But when we watch the story of a real murderer, something quiet stirs inside us. I’d argue that we’re afraid that one day we might start finding their actions understandable. Or that we’ll recognize something uncomfortably familiar within ourselves. The tension isn’t about fearing them — it’s about fearing ourselves.

Horror shows us fantasy. True crime shows us reality. And reality is far more terrifying, because it forces us to ask: what is a human being truly capable of?

Films like “Scream” build their entire concept on this idea. At first, we play along with the fiction — watching teenagers joke about “the rules of surviving a horror movie,” pretending the story could never reach them. But that’s the point. The film shows how fear seeps from the screen into real life. The masked killer isn’t a demon or a creature from another world — he’s a human being. And that’s what makes it so horrifying. “Scream” teaches us that monsters don’t exist; there are only people who become monsters. And the more we watch, the more we realize that evil doesn’t live somewhere out there — it lives here, in the same world as we do.

The case of the Menendez brothers shows this phenomenon perfectly. Two young men who shot their own parents — and the public immediately dove into its “story.” Rich, spoiled boys hungry for inheritance. Betrayal. Greed. Blood. The media broke the case into pieces and reassembled it into something easy to sell. But reality was far more complicated: years of alleged abuse, manipulation and psychological terror. The truth, however, is never as captivating as horror. And as viewers, readers and listeners, we often choose the version that frightens us more — because fear stays with us longer than empathy ever does.

The Menendez brothers were not heroes, but they weren’t demons, either. They were two people whose actions grew out of circumstances we’d rather not acknowledge. And that’s what terrifies us most about these stories — that their roots don’t lie in monstrosity, but in human nature. If we looked at them as people instead of as creatures, we would have to admit that evil has a beginning — and that sometimes it grows because we look straight at it and do nothing.

Ed Gein is similar in that way. His actions were monstrous, yes, but his mind was broken long before he ever hurt anyone. A diagnosis is not an excuse — it’s an explanation, a map that shows where something went wrong. Talking about that isn’t the same as defending him. It’s simply an attempt to understand what kind of silence, trauma or neglect can open a door inside someone that can never be closed again.

The truth is, we never really know everything about these stories. The only people who do are those who were there — and even they might not know the whole picture. The rest of us only guess, reconstruct and try to name the unnamable. But if we settle for simple stories about “monsters,” we learn nothing. Because monsters don’t exist. There are only people who, at some point, stopped resembling themselves.

Our fascination with evil isn’t proof of cruelty — it’s proof of curiosity. We ogle because we need to know where the line truly lies between “I never would” and “what if.” When we watch killers, we don’t only feel disgust; we also feel a strange calm, a quiet reassurance that we’re on the right side. It’s like a vaccination against darkness — we take it in small doses to make sure we can survive it. But if we look too long, we start to see reflections we never meant to recognize.

Evil is a mirror for humanity. It fascinates us because it’s human, not supernatural. It’s a part of our nature that most of us spend our lives suppressing and feeling ashamed of. When we look at someone who has lost control, we’re really studying what it would take for us to lose it, too. That’s why true crime isn’t just about killers — it’s about the viewers. We’re not outside the story. We’re inside it, standing safely on the other side of the screen.

Maybe that’s why the tension in these stories doesn’t come from blood, but from realization — the realization that the line between ordinary life and madness can be drawn by a single decision, a single moment, a single sentence someone heard in childhood and never forgot. So we watch, we analyze, we compare — not because we want to understand the murderer, but because we’re desperate to understand ourselves.

It’s good that we talk about these things. Every story — even the darkest one — can serve as a mirror for a society that isn’t afraid to look at its own shadows. I often find myself wondering what must have gone on inside these people’s minds — what kind of childhood, trauma, or silence could have triggered an avalanche that couldn’t be stopped. I think many others feel the same. We want to understand, because only understanding can stop history from repeating itself.

But there’s a very thin line between understanding and excusing. We’re afraid to cross it — and rightly so. Because the moment you fully understand someone, you start to resemble them. And that’s a line no one wants to cross. That’s why it matters to talk about these people with distance, not admiration.

Take Richard Ramirez, for instance — he too was once just a spectator. He was fascinated by other killers, reading about them, searching for something extraordinary, something darkly romantic. Fascination turned into desire, and desire into action. And that’s the danger — that the evil we only meant to understand begins to look aesthetic, intriguing, even inspiring. The moment horror becomes style, we stop feeling that it’s about real lives.

If there were no evil, we would never understand what goodness is. Maybe that’s why stories about killers draw us in — not because we want to be like them, but because their existence reminds us that we are not them. We watch and whisper to ourselves, “I could never do that.” And in that moment, we feel morally clean, strong, good. We need them in order to feel better about ourselves.

But if that’s true, why do we enjoy true crime so much? Why are we drawn to the kind of evil that would destroy us in real life? Maybe because evil is part of the equation we keep trying to erase — but without it, we’d understand nothing. 

Every one of us carries some darkness inside; we just give it different names — frustration, anger, revenge, the hunger for control. In murderers, those feelings simply grew beyond the limits that we still manage to hold. And maybe that’s why we watch them: to remind ourselves that we still have those limits.

Evil isn’t the opposite of good — it’s its shadow. And maybe that’s exactly why we need it: not to be consumed by it, but to feel, in its presence, that we’re still standing in the light.

We’re not here to judge. Everyone who lives has a reason for becoming who they are. Judgment is easy — it gives us a sense of power, of distance, of safety from the people we’re afraid to understand. But understanding is harder. It asks us to find humanity even in the places where we least want to see it.

It was the absence of that humanity that led many of these people to where they ended up. A murderer isn’t born heartless — he becomes one in a world that teaches him that empathy is weakness. When a child looks into eyes that don’t see him, when he calls out and no one answers, something inside begins to break. If he grows up seeing the world without compassion, maybe it’s because compassion was never shown to him.

And if, in some cases — like the Menendez brothers — there was a belief that evil was the only way to escape, then we have to ask: who truly started that chain? Their parents may not have harmed them only through actions, but through the loss of their own humanity. And the children felt it. Evil doesn’t begin with murder. It begins the moment we stop seeing each other as human.

When the screen fades to black after the final scene, nothing of the killer remains. There’s only us — left with questions, with silence, with a faint trembling we can’t quite name. Not because we fear him, but because we feel how close evil can come to an ordinary human being. And maybe that closeness is what drives us to search for goodness inside ourselves.

Every one of these stories carries both a warning and a mirror. They show us what happens to a world without empathy, without compassion, without the ability to see a human being in another human face. When we look at them with horror but also with understanding, we’re doing exactly what makes humanity human — learning to feel, not to judge.

And maybe that’s why evil will always fascinate us. Not because we want to imitate it, but because in its presence we realize most clearly how vital it is to remain human.