Serial killers and the production of the uncanny in digital participatory culture

Abstract

Many theorists have expounded on what serial killing says about the social in any given context and the ways in which serial killing and media are entangled, in particular, Mark Seltzer, Jon Stratton and Elliot Leyton. However, in this article, we ask, how is serial killer mythology developing in relation to participatory culture typical of our current digital environment? In scaffolding discourse analysis with theories from various literature, such as Judith Fathalla and Mark Deuze, what we find is that people’s lives as lived in media open up radically new spaces through which media publics consume, cultivate and perform knowledge about serial killers, enabling them to exercise a reconfigured sense of control over the ‘story’ of the serial killer as a myth and as a deviant Other that embodies an encounter with the uncanny.