I started watching American Horror Story in 8th grade. Surely, my mother will have a heart attack when she reads this, but my point here is that my thirteen-year-old self watched character Tate Langdon, played by the very attractive Evan Peters, murder fifteen people with a shotgun. But then I fell in love with the character through his psychotic and toxic love affair with Violet Harmon. My impressionable subconscious mind from that moment on believed this was what was, and still is, considered attractive.

News flash: it's not attractive.

I became aware of the romanticization of psychopaths and criminals when I watched the Netflix original You. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it's about a bookstore owner named Joe who falls in love and becomes massively obsessed with one of his customers. As the show progresses, he becomes a serial stalker and killer.

Now, I'd totally recommend this show if you're looking for a good binge. It's fantastically done, but the way they portray Joe as if it was attractive to have a man unhealthily and dangerously obsessed with you, is completely wrong. Young girls across the world are watching these shows and movies and believing that this is what's hot, this is attractive. So, better get into a toxic, abusive relationship with a guy that might kill you, right?

Well, the real reason I decided to write this article was due to the decision to cast Zac Efron, a man that is undeniably gorgeous to anyone with eyes as Ted Bundy. Now, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is one of the best movies I've seen in a while, and the Ted Bundy case is one of my favorites - Not in a weird way, in an "I'm an investigative journalist and I'm kinda obsessed with true crime" way.

But Bundy was considered quite attractive in his day. In fact, many young women would sit in the gallery of his trial to swoon over him. His attractive appearance and smooth nature with women were Bundy's greatest attributes when it came to his murderous lifestyle. Of course, people would call these girls crazy or delusional and remind them that he's a convicted serial killer. Yet forty some odd years later, we're not only allowing the fetishization of cold-blooded killers on our platforms, but we're also contributing to it. To provide with some examples of this contribution I speak of, I typed "Ted Bundy hot" into my twitter search bar and here are some of the results:

"I know he's a murderer but we can say Ted Bundy is hot right? I mean Efron is going to play him. Feel like that's OK" - @kellykeegs

"Would you rather have Jeffrey Dahmer kill you or Ted Bundy? Obviously Ted Bundy. He was so hot. Dahmer was a creep." - @CrzyCharly

"tbh, ted bundy is the most handsome and hot serial killers, damn not gonna lie im in love with him duh" - @nounscents

As the viewers, the feedback we give is what the media thrives on. If we keep telling them this is what we like, what we want more of, they will provide - that's just basic supply and demand. And it concerns me greatly that our society genuinely believes that there is nothing wrong with this. I strongly believe in self-education of matters that interest you, that's how I learned about a lot of the crimes that have happened in the past, too, but it's one thing to inform an audience about a string of serial killings, it's a completely different thing to make the audience believe that though they did bad things they should be forgiven just because they are so darn attractive.

I am in no way implying that this reflects the work of any actor portraying a serial killer or any other violent or sociopathic character or invalidating their talents. On the contrary, it's quite a compliment to them. Props to them for making me believe it! But the issue still remains. We are normalizing the psychotic and concerning behaviors of dangerous people and basically making us easier targets. They were monsters, they had no heart, and you wouldn't have been able to change them. Shows and movies are not real life, and if you suspect or know someone is a danger to you or anyone else, report them, don't fall in love with them. They're not quirky, they're psychopaths.