Oh, what’s become of us? Just a few years back all we needed for entertainment were a few chirpy sitcoms and campy comedies but now, everything’s different. Only a fortnight ago we were wondering whether terrible times are making us more sympathetic to terrible movies and while the jury’s still out on that, one thing we know for sure is that these days it takes a full-on bloodbath to keep us truly hooked. It’s true. At the time of writing, five of the top 20 most popular podcasts in the US feature murder or crime, while This American Life’s 2017 viral hit S-Town shattered records by earning 10 million downloads in its first four days of release. Clearly, our hunger for the macabre is strong. 

There’s a clear market for it too. Whether it’s before-it-was cool mainstays Sword and Scale, Criminal or Generation Why or relative newcomers My Favourite Murder, the aptly titled Serial Killer or UK’s own All Killa No Filla, audiences don’t have to look far to satisfy their feverish need for gore. Meanwhile Netflix has carved out its own share of the killing frenzy, starting with 2015’s watercooler megahit Making A Murderer and culminating (so far) with a rehash of Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s The Staircase earlier this year. Realising our need for another murder fix, the network tried its best to find more bloody hits in the meantime but ultimately shows like The Keepers or Evil Genius never quite managed to achieve the same success. Poor Netflix, it must be desperate for someone to get brutally-yet-mysteriously murdered right about now. 

So what happened? Workspaces once dissected the exploits of fictional baddies like Walter White or Tony Soprano, now they’re debating the innocence or guilt of real life would-be killers. Who knew we had so many armchair defence attorneys amongst us, eh? Meanwhile, the shows' unjustly murdered (and usually female) victims are reduced to nothing more than TV show MacGuffins, here to help us kill a lazy afternoon in front of the telly. When you put our current content trends on trial (because courtrooms seem to be all the rage at the moment), it paints a pretty bleak state of affairs and one that undoubtedly says a lot about how we like to spend our downtime in 2018. 

Maybe it comes back to the age in which we live and the constant barrage of shocking events we're faced with every day, every time we open our phones. The world is a pretty chaotic place and finding a way to rationalise or compartmentalise the craziness can be overwhelming and all-but impossible but neatly contained podcasts or nicely rounded episode arcs on Netflix don't have that problem. By investing our spare time in them could we in fact be finding a way to take control of the uncontrollable and get some much needed solace from the outside world? The fact that the vast majority of these cases are unsolved even gives us an opportunity to force our opinions and unique takes down everyone's necks which - as Twitter has proven - is something we just can't get enough of. Maybe when the world calms down a bit we'll return to Friends, Scrubs and reruns of tame comedies from times gone by. In the meantime though, we need the harder stuff to survive.  

Why do you think we're obsessed with murder? Sound off in the comments section below!

This blog was written for the print brochure of The Dark Page, HOME Manchester's film season celebrating Noir adaptations from a variety of authors. Find out more here.

On the surface, Jackie Brown sure looks like a Blaxploitation movie. It features Pam Grier for starters, the subgenre-icon who famously embodied the entire movement in films like Coffy, Bucktown and of course, Foxy Brown. Expletive-spitting arms dealer Ordell Robbie (played by Director Quentin Tarantino’s good luck charm Samuel L. Jackson) provides the lowlife crime element that featured heavily in similar films of the 70s. Even the sound of it screams Blaxploitation with its street-smart mixtape of transportational funk, R&B and soul pulsing throughout. However despite all this Tarantino has assured us that Jackie Brown doesn’t belong in this genre - and on closer inspection it’s clear that he’s right. 

Hot off the success of his first two movies, 1997’s Pulp Fiction follow-up saw Tarantino remain in the world of pulp to helm his first - and so far, only - adaptation. Taking Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Rum Punch as his inspiration, the Director quickly injected his own personality into the story of a drug smuggling airline stewardess drawn back into business for one last job. His translation process turned the film’s titular heroine from white to black and her surname from Burke to Brown - however almost all other aspects of Leonard’s crime thriller remained intact. 

The most notable of which is surely Max Cherry (Robert Forster), the LA bail bondsman with a heart of gold who’s seen it all. Through Cherry, Tarantino is gifted the opportunity to subtly indulge in some classic noir tropes and mash together two cinematic worlds which rarely - if ever - collide. Cherry feels out of step with the movie he’s in, sat in a shabby, run down office that screams 1940’s gumshoe far more than his contemporary LA surroundings. He’s a nice guy in a bad line of work and it’s during a key conversation with Jackie (who’s fast becoming his femme fatale) where he comes to a key realisation. “Why am I doing this?” he asks, “19 years of this shit?” 

Max is tired, world weary and surprised by nothing, like many noir PI’s that have came before him. The way he sees it, his future involves either dying LA’s last remaining good guy or living long enough to break bad himself and it’s here where Jackie tests his will with an alluring proposition. “If you could walk away with half a million dollars,” she asks, “would you take it?” It’s an offer that would drastically change his world, removing him from his pokey office and LA’s petty crime scene and introducing this nice guy to a potentially nice future - if he’s ready to grab it.

As the jangly chords of Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” starts to play, signifying both Cherry’s decision and the film’s climax, we come to the stark realisation that his world hasn’t changed at all. Tarantino’s return to the same track that opened Jackie Brown is a harsh reminder of things coming full circle, with that noir motif stepping fully into the spotlight. Here, the good aren’t always rewarded and sometimes, crime does pay. Max Cherry may not belong in Jackie Brown’s empowered Blaxploitation world but make no mistake: he’s right at home in The Dark Page.

The Dark Page runs at HOME Manchester from Sun 5 Aug - Wed 5 Sep. Find out more here.