The Daily Beast in 2019, under the subheading “Sick in the Head,” interviewed author Dave Cullen who wrote Columbine (2010) about the infamous school shooting. He said that the romanticization of killers on blogs is “similar to the phenomenon on death row, where women want to marry them or visit them.”¹ He went on to hypothesize that these women tend to believe that they could reform these men if they were together. The same year, SyFy Wire wrote about this in the context of hybristophilia—otherwise known as Bonnie and Clyde syndrome—in which someone is sexually aroused by being with someone who has committed horrible crimes.² Only you understand him and only you would be exempt from his wrath. In 2017, David Schmid, author of Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, pathologized these women further to Bitch Magazine, stating: “Not surprisingly, many of the women who form these attachments to serial killers have also been in abusive relationships.”³ Vice and New Statesman, further indulging in this fascinating examination, interviewed several of these young women at length, asking how they reconcile their feminism with their love for these men (One said: “I am a radical feminist who also happens to be highly attracted to people that abuse and murder women.”⁴) or whether they have a maternal instinct toward them (Another stated: “Maybe. I guess I don’t want him to be ostracised.”⁵). One woman remarkably claimed that “Ted [Bundy] had a better grasp of consent than most men do now.” The point being: We’re obsessed with talking about these women’s obsession with killer men.

In truth, of course, these fans—often stereotyped as young women lusting after dangerous men, the ultimate bad boys—have existed as long as public figures have been covered in the media and certainly since the intensification of celebrity culture in the twentieth century and the coining of the term “serial killer” by FBI agent Robert Ressler in the 1970s and the discursive avalanche that followed, particularly into popular culture with films like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13^th (1980). Indeed, based on his study of the fandom around the Columbine shooters, Ryan Broll concludes: “These communities often form online where those with deviant interests can congregate without regard for geographic boundaries and can be seen as extensions of the celebrification of murder and a longstanding cultural interest in death and violence.”⁶ In other words, this interest isn’t new, but the communities and practices online are.

Scholars have chronicled these desires in books like Schmid’s as well as Ruth Penfold-Mounce’s Celebrity Culture and Crime: The Joy of Transgression (2009). To put it simply, these fans of real-life killers are, in most cases, not relating to the actual person. Criminology scholar David Wilson summed it up to New Statesman, saying that “the Ted Bundy fans engage with isn’t real, it’s just a glamorous media conception of a real person.” Wilson goes on to blame media depictions of serial killers for ways in which fans come to idealize them and see them as aspirational or identifiable figures, with a particular focus on The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Hannibal Lecter: “[Lecter] was an aspirational figure and a real turning point in making people look at serial killers in a different light. A lot of serial killer fans are women too, which could be the Clarice effect.”⁷ While this feels a bit too unambiguous, it usefully reorients us toward the presumably nebulous distinction between fandom over real-life killers and fandom over fictional ones.

As Badgley put it, “I didn’t want to do it—it was too much. I was conflicted with the nature of the role. If this is a love story, what is it saying? It’s not an average show; it’s a social experiment.”⁸ Positioning the series as a “social experiment” is a savvy way of addressing the show’s controversial reception by both the media and segments of the viewing public. Casting Badgley was key to the approach taken by series co-creators Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti. Badgley is very attractive and well-known for playing Dan Humphrey on the teen drama Gossip Girl (The CW, 2007–2012), a similarly devious character who fans nevertheless thirsted and lusted after. Just as Zac Efron caused a bit of a stir when he was cast as Ted Bundy in the 2019 Netflix film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Badgley’s casting has been understood as a strategy to complicate audience reaction to a character that exhibits such horrific behavior. This is indicative of the show’s driving force: the intention to offer a subversive commentary on romance and the ways in which serial killers have come to be romanticized and commodified. As Gamble put it, “[I]f you turn off the sappy music and turn on a David Fincher score, romantic comedies are stalker movies.”⁹ Perhaps most famously, Badgley began responding to tweets by fans by underlining this intention, such as when he quote-tweeted someone who said “@PennBadgley is breaking my heart once again as Joe. What is it about him?” and Badgley responded, tongue-in-cheek: “A: He is a murderer.”¹⁰

This fandom around Badgley’s character—who stalks, murders, and manipulates his way through the series—is representative of a variety of psychodynamics and cultural factors, from the noted celebrification of serial killers to the ways in which many of Joe’s actions directly call back to romantic films or fairy tales. The show is adept, in most cases, at navigating this balance, as it thoughtfully mocks and critiques these behaviors while simultaneously indulging in them—Joe does whatever it takes to create the idealized relationship of his dreams, informed by the culture and media he has consumed. By highlighting the intrinsic manipulation and violence behind these tropes, the series walks a fine line. Even the book’s author, Kepnes, said in an interview that she didn’t initially think of Joe as a serial killer, noting his sensitivity and the way he largely only kills bad people.¹¹

Well aware of the criticism the show has received, in interviews Gamble became increasingly clear about what the show was trying to accomplish: “We’re interested in exploring the character and we’re well aware that what the character is doing is not ok—it’s deeply, deeply problematic. So what’s interesting to us is: what does he think he’s done wrong, what does he think he has to do differently, and to really explore that while still keeping that clinical cold eye on the whole show. And that eye is on a show that’s about a guy who kills people.”¹² Of course, a work of art such as a television show is not necessarily beholden to the ways in which its audience interprets it, yet there seems to be a responsibility felt by Gamble, considering the fact that the series intends to depict the misogyny inherent within traditional romantic structures and yet fans—many of whom were young women—seem to either misunderstand this message or dismiss it in favor of becoming obsessed with Joe.

This fandom is typically considered less deviant than fandom for real-life serial killers, yet it is a strange situation when a work that hopes to deconstruct these tropes actually serves to reify them. Still, You seeks to make clear that even the polite and well-groomed guy working at the bookstore can end up being a monster, which is a familiar notion, particularly when understood, as Eric W. Hickey points out in his book Serial Murderers and Their Victims (2015), as a proxy for societal aggression or frustration—a catharsis for the measured and controlled everyday lives of regular citizens. Likewise, as Corey Call notes (referencing Robert Cettl and his 2008 book Serial Killer Cinema), media and cultural depictions of serial killers took a shift beginning with films like Psycho (1960) as “the image of serial killers in film began to soften as some serial killers were portrayed as outwardly normal people who had sympathetic facets to their personalities.”¹³

This recalls how Jean Baudrillard, reflecting on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, described the hijackers and supposed sleeper cells within the US: “They have even—and this is the height of cunning—used the banality of American everyday life as cover and camouflage. Sleeping in their suburbs, reading and studying with their families, before activating themselves suddenly like time bombs. The faultless mastery of this clandestine style of operation is almost as terroristic as the spectacular act of September 11, since it casts suspicion on any and every individual. Might not any inoffensive person be a potential terrorist?”¹⁴ It is common, then, for us to pinpoint the cause of our greatest fear and focus on its possible existence around every corner. This is boilerplate fearmongering as the media, for example, will tell story after story of a serial killer on the loose or of the homegrown domestic terrorist seduced by extremism. It could be your neighbor, your grocer, the guy working at the bookstore. Particularly in the 1980s, as the slasher genre became increasingly popular, this was America’s greatest fear: the killer with impunity, hidden in plain sight, waiting to strike. After 9/11, David Schmid and others argue, this same basic fear was grafted onto the figure of the terrorist, who could likewise strike at any moment and could, potentially, be anyone in your neighborhood.

This comparison of serial killers to terrorists is not random or irrelevant as Schmid and others convincingly point out—over the last two decades in ...