This article was originally published in Le Point on 17.08.2025
Among the cringe-worthy—and in retrospect slightly disturbing—decisions of my youth was, at the age of thirteen, selecting serial killer Ted Bundy for my classroom presentation on “culturally significant figures.” That he was, of course, but in the worst possible way. It was early 1989, and although Bundy’s atrocities were by then already a macabre artifact of the previous decade, his name was in the news again as his execution neared. On January 24th, he was put to death by electric chair, with thousands of jubilant revelers gathered in the prison parking lot to celebrate his demise for the murders of dozens of women and girls.
Now, why I chose to spend hours in the dark of the school library that cold Ohio winter, flitting through microfiche slides of old news articles about Bundy’s brutal crimes and devouring salacious details of his sexual deviance, might be chalked up to adolescent titillation. This was also the pre-Internet era when VHS rental stores were cropping up in suburban strip malls everywhere, and the old docuseries Faces of Death (1978), which featured “real” death scenes allegedly caught on camera, was suddenly all the rage among teenage boys. I do vividly recall, however, that my eighth-grade teacher—a slender, serious, middle-aged woman with horn-rimmed glasses—not only encouraged my dubious interest in Bundy but was far more engaged than she was with my classmates’ spiels on, I don’t know, Ronald Reagan or Madonna. I also remember my parents being deeply uncomfortable with my obviously inappropriate choice of topic, but the greenlight from my teacher led them, reluctantly, to allow me to indulge my morbid curiosity.
That—morbid curiosity—it turns out, is a real, measurable psychological trait, and one that my teacher and I seemed to share. Defined as “a mixture of excitement, fear, and compulsion that fuels the desire to know about horrid subjects that include, but are not limited to, death and terror,” researchers have only recently begun teasing apart the core features of this curious personality variable. We’re all morbidly curious to some extent. For better or worse, it’s human nature. Aristotle wrote long ago that we humans “enjoy contemplating the most precise images of things whose sight is painful to us,” and the blood-soaked spectacles of gladiators in colosseums were basically the real-life grindhouse films of Ancient Rome. These days, “if it bleeds it leads,” as the journalistic expression goes. Anyone who has ever contributed their hard-earned money toward the multibillion-dollar horror movie industry, listened to an addictive true-crime podcast, or fought the urge to rubberneck at a crash scene, can attest to this strange desire to consume sad, terrifying images and content.
Note, what is interesting is not necessarily pleasant. The basic cognitive penchant to attend to negative or threatening stimuli is clearly adaptive. “While the factors that lead to death often inspire aversion,” explains the psychologist Coltan Scrivner, “completely avoiding these phenomena would result in dangerous naivety.” Disgusting, dangerous, threatening cues are hugely attention-grabbing, and that is by evolutionary design. Yes, there are serious psychological risks involved with spending too much time on such upsetting material (consider nightmares, anxiety, even vicarious PTSD), but prioritizing the negative helped to counteract a potentially fatal Pollyanna syndrome in which our ancestors would have been blissfully unaware. “Morbid curiosity manifests as a balance between the costs of exposure to morbid content,” writes Scriver, “and the perceived benefits of learning about that content.”
Investigators even apply this logic specifically to our otherwise head-scratching fascination with serial killers. My erstwhile teacher and I certainly weren’t alone in this regard. I’ve since met many others too, mostly female friends who’ve shyly disclosed their encyclopedic knowledge of serial killers. And judging by the surfeit of podcasts and Netflix documentaries, fictional TV series with a serial-killer plot device (consider Mindhunter or Dexter), “dark tourism” companies offering, say, Jack the Ripper tours, or even the grim trade in so-called murderabilia (with paintings or locks of hair from serial killers fetching thousands of dollars), this ghastly fascination is very common.
Again, there appear to be meaningful differences on this personality dimension. One recent study, by psychologists Marissa Harrison and Erika Frederick of Pennsylvania State University, showed that college students who had a strong interest in serial killing also tended to have an interest in similarly morbid psychology topics, such as psychotic disorders, mass murder, sexual sadism, and suicidal terrorism. It wasn’t that they were just into the subject of psychology generally, as these dark interests were unrelated to their curiosity about non-morbid topics (e.g., therapy techniques, parenting styles, intelligence, and so on).
The most interesting part of Harrison and Frederick’s study, however, was their finding of significant gender differences. Participants were shown a series of 10 vignettes, half obviously fiction (“During a zombie apocalypse 5 zombies attack a group of teenage girls, eating their flesh off of their faces while the girls are still alive”; “Half human half serpent attacks hunters in the woods early morning, if bit the victims will turn into a partial serpent as well by nightfall,” etc.) and half based on absolutely horrendous real news events (“A body is found in the woods without pinky fingers, pinky toes and is missing a nose”: “A 22-year-old male is found boiling his victims’ heads, fully convinced he is making dinner for his family, seemingly unaware that real heads are in the pot,” etc.).
When asked how much each story “interested” them, men’s morbid curiosity was whetted equally by the fictional and nonfictional stories. Women, however, preferred—if that’s the correct term here—the tales of true crime. Indeed, it’s no secret that the true crime genre is built on female fandom. One study found that, irrespective of the book author’s gender, 70% of the reviews of true crime books on Amazon were written by women, and these were overwhelmingly (95%) positive. “It is not the case that [women] are simply more interested in books containing violent content, given that men were more likely than women to submit reviews of books on war.” It doesn’t seem to be merely that female victims inspire this primarily female readership, either (see: teenage girls having their faces mauled off by those boring, ravenous zombies). Women do prefer violent stories featuring female victims over male victims, but only if it’s a true crime story.
A classic series of experiments by the psychologists Amanda Vicary and Chris Fraley set out to test the hypothesis that women are attracted to the true crime genre because it taps into an unconscious evolutionary strategy of “protective vigilance.” By consuming such material, they reasoned, women gather survival information and learn what not to do to avoid falling victim. In one experiment, people were given two ostensible true crime book titles with brief summaries, either Danger in Denver: The True Story of an Escape from a Killer or Turmoil on Thunder Trail: The True Story of a Confrontation with a Killer. In the summaries, half the participants read a line about the victim escaping the killer by using a clever trick she’d learned online (removing a pin from her watch to unlock a set of handcuffs he’d placed on her), whereas the other summary omitted this line. Which of the two books contained the key sentence was randomly distributed across participants. When asked to choose which book they’d rather read, female participants were more likely than male participants to choose whichever one included that passing detail about the watch trick. In another experiment, Vicary and Fraley manipulated the book summaries so that one mentioned that the killer was interviewed by an FBI profiler to understand his motives, whereas the other didn’t mention anything about a psychological assessment. Again, it was women more than men who said that they’d rather read the book that included this forensic examining tool.
Men, incidentally, displayed the same overall reading preferences. . . it’s just that these effects were greater among the female sample than among the male sample. Such findings, as well as those in a similar vein, are interpreted as reflecting evolutionary biases in the brains of men and women. Over history and across cultures, men are far more violent than women. While, yes, other males are more likely to be murdered by those males, women are more fearful of being victims, especially of sexual violence. Understandably so. Given the physical power imbalance that comes with being a sexually dimorphic species, as well as the differential reproductive costs of sexual assault (rape may result in conception), women’s protective vigilance—in the form of a heightened interest in information about dangerous males and other threats—had adaptive utility. Sure, the “true crime genre” didn’t exist as a media category in the Pleistocene (those caves must have had great podcast acoustics), but true crime certainly did. Those ancestral females who paid attention to such events—or stories, rumors, and gossip about such events—might have gathered strategic survival information that gave them a genetic advantage over those who didn’t. “Despite the fact that true crime [stories] are often gruesome, shocking, and frightening,” Vicary and Fraley explain:
…. they have garnered a considerable audience. As long as serial killers, rapists, and jealous lovers continue to commit their horrific crimes, it is likely that accounts of their dreadful deeds will continue to be written. Fortunately, as women continue to read [or listen to] these stories, they may well be learning important skills that will prevent them from one day becoming the victim of a killer and, in turn, the unwitting star of their own true crime stories.
Morbid curiosity, however, isn’t just about having an interest in true crime. There are lots of dark corners of the world where the morbidly curiously might sagely (or foolishly) poke their heads. And by and large, males are more morbidly curious than females. Back in 2021, that psychologist I mentioned earlier, Colin Scrivner, developed a psychometric tool called the Morbid Curiosity Scale, which is free to take here if you’re, erm, curious. He identified several distinct facets of personality with an underlying theme of curiosity about threatening phenomena. A person can score high on all or just some of these morbidly curious personality traits, but the items on Scriver’s 24-item scale coalesced reliably into the following “factors”:
· Minds of Dangerous People: centers around understanding the motivations of dangerous individuals (e.g., serial killers).
· Paranormal Danger: suggests an interest in phenomena that may appear to defy the scientific understanding of the world or violate natural laws (e.g., magic or ghosts).
· Interpersonal Violence: reflects an interest in seeing (but not necessarily understanding the motives for) violent acts.
· Body Violation: suggests an interest in understanding the limits of the body and what happens when the body is damaged.
Personally, I score high on that first and second one, perhaps unsurprising given how I started this article and what I ended up doing for a living (the titles of my books are a dead giveaway). As for the other two factors, no thanks. I’d rather watch paint dry than view a gastric bypass surgery or crime scene photos. Aristotle’s point about ‘enjoyment’—and the fact that many people appear entertained by others’ pain, fear, and distress, whether fictional or nonfictional—is very unsettling to me. It’s one thing to be morbidly curious, and quite another to be sadistic. (There were some survey items and examples in the studies I’ve reported here, about animals and kids, that I can’t even bring myself to write.) It’s like that group of boys in the movie Stand by Me (1986) whose coming-of-age tale begins with the question, “you guys want to see a dead body?” Maturity is realizing that such human but puerile interests lead only to a cold, sobering, often tragic reality that can scar one for life.
That said, it’s also not as though those who score extremely high on morbid curiosity, including “interpersonal violence” and “body violation”—chose that particular personality profile. Some studies find a link between this individual difference trait and sensation-seeking. People who score high on the latter—those who enjoy, say, swimming with sharks, having hundreds of sexual partners, or jumping out of airplanes—require extra physical stimulation to maximize their arousal. If such disturbing stimuli activates the nervous system, this offers an “intrinsic reward” for indulging their morbid curiosity.
Given the importance of our fellow ingroup members avoiding dangerous threats, there may even be a place in society for the exceptionally morbidly curious among us. “If a critical mass of individuals perpetuates information about dangerous material,” Scrivner points out, “it can quickly spread throughout the group [and prevent death and tragedy].”
Combined with the inherent danger in being curious about dangerous situations and phenomena, the premium placed on dangerous information might result in only a small number of individuals being extremely morbidly curious. The rest of the population would only require a moderate degree of morbid curiosity—just enough to listen to those who are sharing the information—in order to benefit.
See, there’s room for us all. Just don’t ever share with me anything horrible about dogs, my emotional Achilles’ heel. Frankly, I’m still traumatized from reading Where the Red Fern Grows as a kid (which I’m guessing I read after completing my Ted Bundy homework).
Like what you read? Toss a tip in the jar—any amount that makes sense for you—so I can keep overthinking things on your behalf.