The born bad myth in TV depictions of female serial killers
The born bad myth in TV depictions of female serial killers treats violence as a personality trait rather than a set of choices made under particular conditions. Television frequently compresses a life into a diagnosis, a notorious image or a final twist. That shorthand may make crime easy to consume, but it can erase survivors of abuse, the social costs of violence and the unsettling work of understanding how such crimes happen.
For Australian viewers, this framing meets familiar images of Sydney’s orderly suburbs, Melbourne’s intimate café culture and a streaming market split between public-service channels and global platforms. A feminist reading should neither excuse violence nor pretend that structural conditions erase agency. It should ask how television makes women dangerous, who benefits from that spectacle, and why a female killer’s body is often made more available for curiosity than a male killer’s.
The script television keeps rewriting
The myth starts with a supposedly self-evident label: she is bad. A diagnosis, a fetishised detail or an unstable portrait then appears to explain every action without examining history, motive or consequence. The result is a circular narrative in which a woman is violent because she was born that way, and evidence of violence becomes proof of an inborn essence.
Gender makes the script especially cruel. Men may be framed as skilled operators or monsters, while women are pushed toward clichés of hysteria, manipulation and sexualised menace. Race and class add pressure: a white woman’s descent can be sold as an individual fall from grace, whereas women of colour and poor women are more readily cast as inherently threatening. These are narrative choices, not neutral truths.
Monster and the manufactured monster
Monster turns Aileen Wuornos into a study of supposed monstrosity, pairing Gill Davis’s performance with sensational material about abuse, sexuality and diagnosis. The series gives Wuornos’s history weight, yet its title continually tells viewers where to place the explanation. Her criminal identity becomes the organising principle before her capacity for choice can be examined.
Killing Eve broadens the repertoire through Villanelle’s fashion, wit and appetite for violence, although she is better described as an assassin than a serial killer. The Fall uses Stella Gibson to pursue a serial killer, while newer true-crime dramas repeatedly blur fact, dramatisation and psychological speculation. When women occupy either side of an investigation, they are often made charismatic enough to command attention, while the dead are reduced to plot devices or flashes of gore.
From dangerous woman to premium spectacle
The commercial logic is crucial. A dangerous woman can become a repeatable character, a meme, a podcast host’s irresistible subject or a streaming bundle’s promotional hook. This is not simply a case of audiences seeking violent women; producers actively shape the appetite. The female body becomes branded spectacle, with suffering packaged as personality.
The premium appetite for curated subcultures has a parallel in boutique festival economics, where smaller music events attract audiences beyond mass-market spectacles. True crime operates similarly: intimate storytelling and niche fandom can create loyal communities around disturbing material. The comparison is not that violence is entertainment in the same way, but that specialised products can monetise transgression while their ethics recede into the background.
Australian screens and local anxieties
In Australia, television can trade on the contrast between familiar domestic space and hidden danger. Sydney’s manicured suburban image has become shorthand for safety, even as true-crime programmes map violence into ordinary streets and family homes. Australian classifications, including MA15+ and R18+, make intense violence a conspicuous content marker on screens and streaming menus. A feminist reading can separate each screen device from the assumption it carries.
| Screen device | Born bad logic | More accountable account |
|---|---|---|
| Retrospective diagnosis | A label explains the whole person | Evidence, context and choice must be weighed separately |
| Female villain as fashion icon | Style makes violence consumable | Ask who is aestheticised and who remains unseen |
| Monster branding | Difference becomes the explanation | Show history without making pathology destiny |
| Crime as shocking backdrop | Victims exist to frame the killer | Preserve victims’ names, agency and lasting harm |
| Shock value | Disturbing content proves realism | Question how shock is produced and sold |
Melbourne’s café culture and habit of discussing crime over coffee, beer or a podcast create another route into the genre. Australian viewers encounter it through ABC and SBS documentaries, commercial publishers, podcasts and services such as Netflix and Stan. That mixed market rarely guarantees complexity: imported formats can dominate while local stories still treat Indigenous women, migrants and working-class women mainly as evidence of social breakdown.
Who gets to tell the story
Who controls the camera also controls whose evidence counts. A feminist account must look beyond individual actresses and directors to commissioning, writing, editing and marketing. The underrepresentation of Indigenous women is part of this story, not a side issue. Although its focus is Canadian, Canadian industry criticism shows how barriers facing Indigenous female directors can narrow the stories available to women in a supposedly progressive industry.
Australian production can confront the myth by supporting First Nations and migrant filmmakers, paying disabled and female experts, and centring victims rather than treating them as evidence of a killer’s inner life. It can also reject retrospective diagnosis presented as certainty. Context can explain pressure and pattern; it cannot make coercion disappear, and explanation should never become acquittal.
A practical critical viewing checklist
Viewers can apply a more demanding framework without pretending criticism is simple:
- Ask which evidence supports any diagnosis, and who benefits from repeating it.
- Separate historical context from moral responsibility, then examine both.
- Notice when female menace is sexualised while male violence remains procedural.
- Centre the people killed, including their names, relationships and lasting harm.
- Compare portrayals across gender, race, class, disability and nationality.
- Prefer stories that complicate a killer instead of using trauma as an aesthetic.
None of these questions makes violence attractive or forgivable. They change the object of attention: from diagnosing an allegedly born-bad woman to examining the systems, choices and storytelling decisions that made her spectacle.
Choose complexity over spectacle
The strongest television does not ask audiences to abandon judgment. It asks them to resist easy moral certainty while still acknowledging responsibility. Female serial killers should be treated as people whose histories and actions matter, not as freak shows whose visibility outpaces their humanity.
Read, stream and discuss these stories with that standard. Support SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS and Australian and Canadian creators working against exclusion, subscribe to the newsletter, and tell producers when a serial killer’s glamour eclipses the lives she destroyed.