The ‘experience’ in New York sensationalizes history’s most gruesome murders – and pays little respect to the victims
I
t occurred to me the second I idly tapped “submit” on the waiver required to enter Mind of a Serial Killer: the Experience – perhaps I should have read this one more closely. Just what were they going to do to me in there?
I was entering an exhibit about the (mostly) men who committed some of history’s most gruesome murders: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy and others. The extravaganza just hit New York after opening in Dublin earlier this year. Though it looks like a low-budget haunted house, the exhibit purports to examine the motives of murder via crime scene recreations, wall texts and psychological profiles.
It is fitting that it has landed in the states, as psycho killers are a distinctly American obsession, haunting our dark interstates and deserted alleys, our tucked-away suburban basements and cabins in the woods. Serial killers exist elsewhere, but they loom especially large in this country’s collective consciousness, the subject of both fear and fascination.
