In seventh grade, I fell in love with a mass murderer.

I watched the first season of the Fox Television show “American Horror Story: Murder House.” The plot of “Murder House” was the idea that the house was homicidal and made people do bad things.

One of the characters, the fictional Tate Langdon, immediately sparked my interest; he was played by Evan Peters, a teenage heartthrob. Tate plays a school shooter who ends up murdering his fellow classmates, and he was based on existing school shooters.

Trying to separate Peters from Tate Langdon was difficult; they both are attractive while one is a murderer and the other one is an actor.

For example, when they killed Tate in the show, I was devastated but I shouldn’t have been.  It was because I loved the idea of his character and his obsession with another girl, which was what I craved as a 13-year-old girl.

So why do girls like myself

obsess over fake serial killers?

People offer stereotypical explanations such as that girls were victims of abuse, fall in love with a “bad boy,” or like the publicity of dating a serial killer.

In my experience, women obs

ess over serial killers because of who portrays them. For example, Zac Efron played Ted Bundy in the Netflix series “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” in 2019.

Efron has captured hearts since the Disney Channel movie “High School Musical.” Efron was portrayed as a tortuous serial killer of young girls, but his shockingly good looks depict him as trustable.

Peters comes up again because he played Jeffrey Dahmer in the Netflix series “Dahmer” in 2022. Peters portrays Dahmer brutally killing his male victims and eating them, but Peters is an attractive and respectable man.

When Dahmer was killed in the Netflix series, I found it almost humorous because I knew what he did and I considered him repulsive. When

Tate died it was hard to wrap my mind around how they could fictionally kill an attractive teenage boy.

Being an 18-year-old girl, I now realize that the roles that people portray changed my perspective as who they are as a person. From watching “Dahmer” this past year and rewatching “Murder House” recently, I changed my view of them due to seeing the character as a monster instead of a Hollywood actor. 

The use of these attractive men to romanticize these people who did horrible things must stop. In addition to the harm that it causes to the victim’s families, it is harmful to young girls who can develop unhealthy relationships with men as a result.