This article explores how Joe Berlinger’s Netflix true crime docuseries Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021) has appropriated the apparatus of the modern urban legend. The article demonstrates how Berlinger merges the aesthetics of true crime documentary, websleuthing, and urban legend to reconfigure the unusual circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Canadian student Elisa Lam into a form of participatory infotainment. The article contends that Berlinger’s recreation of the events and aftermath of Elisa Lam’s disappearance and death uses the processes of urban legend creation to first attract and entertain the audience, only to later challenge the audiences’ susceptibility to such legends. The article proposes that this mode of consumption functions as a form of ‘honey trap’ which, while passive, allows the viewer to become embedded in the narrative, inviting them to create and critique the processes of contemporary legend construction.

Read Netflix, Websleuths and the Contemporary Urban Legend

This article explores video sharing application TikTok and its use in the quest for judicature concerning missing person Alissa Turney as conducted by sister Sarah Turney. The article explores the platform’s impact upon the structure, delivery, and content of non-fictional crime-centred social network media, as creators reframe appeals for action into short-form entertainment. This shift towards self-produced social media-based content is seen as both freeing and limiting in how it allows messages to be structured and narrativized, as Turney must work within the conventions, trends, and affordances of the medium to allow her content to garner maximum viewer retention and engagement. Turney utilises an unconventional approach towards death and grieving to adapt justice efforts towards an individualised and communal endeavour, implementing online calls to action aimed at viewers, inviting and rewarding them for promoting and engaging with her content. While much of death studies focuses on the grieving process made possible through the affordances offered by social media, this article will show how Turney uses new media to create videos and interact with viewers in order to bring attention to and affect real change for Alissa’s case.

Read Justice Online: TikTok, Platform Properties and the Fight for Familial Conviction