Occult Crimes

Pro Tip: Goth/DnD do not equal occult. Sure sometimes there's some overlap...but 4 goth kids in a car jacking gone wrong is not an occult crime. This show covers money laundering, serial killers, sexual deviants, and crimes of passion, but it doesn't really have a lot of occult in it, over all. Some of the episodes try so hard to make the occult connection that it's almost laughable. Oh, they were playing an online role playing game as they talked about killing someone...that makes this an occult motivated crime. No. it doesn't. I honestly don't know why I kept watching this show, it was just...bad.

This is just your average crime documentary TV show. It doesn't go much into details about the "occult" and several of the crimes have extremely loose connections to occult material/beliefs. That's not exactly a huge problem but it doesn't make the show shine.

What really pulls the narrations down, however, is the narrator and voice-overs. They continually mispronounce words such as Samhain, Nosferatu, macabre, and vampirism - words which at least one person on the production staff should have known or taken the 10 seconds involved to research. It really shows that those involved in the show didn't have a remarkable interest in its content, they were simply interested in producing a mediocre crime show with a gimmicky twist.

I do give them credit for looking at cases outside of the English speaking world and including a lot of non-English speakers in their interviews (which are translated into voice-overs which makes it almost impossible to hear the original speaker, so even though I speak some French I couldn't attest to how accurate the translations in those cases were). If not for this show, I doubt I would have ever heard of those cases.

Not only is the information regarding goth, roleplaying, and other subcultures is dismal (hint: most people in these groups are perfectly harmless, responsible adults), but the utter lack of research into the terms is kind of hilarious.

Dear narrator, Samhain is pronounced SOW-en, not SAM-hayn. Nosferatu is pronounced Nos-fer-AH-too, not Nos-FER-ah-too. Macabre is pronounced ma-CAHB, not ma-CAH-bruh.

Nothing says 'I have on idea what I'm talking about' like not knowing how to say simple terms.

Other than that, it follows the true crime show format, and the stories are interesting. It's just presented by hopelessly clueless people.

Apparently "trash metal" is part of the Gothic subculture. Despite the fact that it's a true crime show, one can't help but chuckle at the idea that the people who put the show together sound like your concerned parents from the 1980s who watch too much Geraldo and have a really poor grasp on the words they are using. Don't listen to the trash metal and play Dungeons and Dragons, it'll turn you into a Satanic Gothic vampire! The cases themselves are pretty interesting and disturbing, but it's hard not to focus on how clueless the show's producers and narrator sound. I can't help but wonder if the staff were all homeschooled by fundy parents during the Satanic Panic.

A badly researched series that focuses on blowing up stereotypes of subcultures and using religious fanaticism rather than psychological evaluation to emphasise the wrongness of the criminals involved.