True crime has quietly become one of the most dominant forces in modern entertainment. A YouGov poll found that 57% of Americans say they consume true crime content. That’s not a niche audience. That’s a cultural phenomenon. Data shows that, taking Netflix as an example, 15 of the top 20 documentary titles ranked by reach were true crime docs in 2024, compared to just six titles in 2020. The genre has evolved far beyond dramatized reenactments and grainy courtroom footage, and the best recent entries are as artful as they are deeply unsettling. Here are five documentaries that earned their place in the genre’s hall of fame.
1. One Night in Idaho: The College Murders (2025)
In the middle of the night on November 13, 2022, four university students were brutally murdered in an off-campus house in the quiet college town of Moscow, Idaho. With exclusive and intimate access to figures closest to the victims, One Night in Idaho: The College Murders explores the emotional twists and turns of this American tragedy and its continued fallout. It premiered on July 11, 2025, on Amazon Prime Video. Directors Liz Garbus and Matthew Galkin made a deliberate creative choice: the killer’s name gets far less screen time than the lives of the four people he took.
Nearly three years after four University of Idaho college students were stabbed to death in an off-campus house in Moscow, Idaho, in the early morning hours of November 13, 2022, a 30-year-old former criminology student Bryan Kohberger confessed to the murders on July 2 and signed a plea deal that would save him from the death penalty. Kohberger, who was a graduate student at Washington State University near the University of Idaho, admitted responsibility for the murders of sorority girls Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and fraternity brother Ethan Chapin, 20. On July 2, 2025, Kohberger entered a guilty plea to all charges against him as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty. Three weeks later, he was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences in prison without the possibility of parole, plus ten years for burglary. The documentary’s release and the guilty plea happened almost simultaneously, making its impact all the more staggering.
2. Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer (2025)
Speaking of acclaimed HBO docuseries, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer had a very similar journey of development as The Jinx. Both projects saw a filmmaker go from dramatizing a long unsolved crime to exposing audiences to the true story, as well as the contemporary movement to provide justice for the victims’ families. Director Liz Garbus manages to accomplish this narrative feat while keeping the story focused on the figures that actually matter. The Long Island Serial Killer case has haunted investigators for well over a decade, with victims’ remains discovered along Ocean Parkway beginning in 2010 and the perpetrator never conclusively identified.
The HBO series had a very similar journey of development as Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer. Both projects saw a filmmaker go from dramatizing a long unsolved crime to exposing audiences to the true story, as well as the contemporary movement to provide justice for the victims’ families. What separates this from other cold-case documentaries is its refusal to reduce the victims to their final moments. Storytelling that centers the experiences of the victims and their families instead of turning killers into mythologized monsters, and subjects that challenge our preconceived notions of who the “heroes” and “villains” of true crime normally are, defines this new wave of documentary filmmaking that Gone Girls exemplifies at its best.
3. The Mortician (2025)
David Sconce talks openly about his time as a mortician during the 1980s when, among other injustices, he cremated thousands of people a year, most of them together, which is not protocol to say the least. Director Joshua Rofé’s series is a sobering trek through the crimes and callousness of Sconce, whose bizarre candidness offers a lens into the mind of a truly terrifying individual who is part Mafia boss, part Scrooge McDuck, and entirely devoid of remorse for profiting off the vulnerability of his clients. Everybody dies, and this series leaves its audience with a new fear they might end up in the hands of someone as cold-blooded as Sconce. It’s the kind of documentary that makes everyday life feel less safe than it did before you pressed play.
Sconce and his victims are interviewed at length for this series, with the man himself uncomfortably eager to share all the nasty details of his side of the story. It often feels reminiscent of The Jinx, another massively popular HBO docuseries, as Sconce seems almost as self-incriminating as Robert Durst. At the end of 2025, The Mortician was ranked as one of the favorite HBO Max series of the year. There’s something uniquely disturbing about a predator who operates in the shadow of grief, targeting people at their most vulnerable. The Mortician forces viewers to confront that discomfort head-on.
4. Unknown Number: The High School Catfish (2025)
The premise of Unknown Number: The High School Catfish is a little different than many documentaries in the genre. Instead of dealing with murder, Unknown Number tells the story of two high school kids, Lauryn Licari and Owen McKenny, who were the subject of a 20-month harassment campaign. For more than a year, they received dozens of texts a day from an unknown number, missives that ranged from the personal to the sexually explicit to the downright threatening. At first they thought it was a jealous classmate trying to break them up, but the reality was infinitely more twisted. It’s probably the biggest twist in a documentary released that year.
The documentary about a teenage couple who were relentlessly bullied through anonymous text messages immediately became a phenomenon when it premiered in August. The 2025 version of word of mouth, with TikTok users filming their families and friends watching the twist that comes about halfway through, made the film from director Skye Borgman a spectacle that everyone was talking about. 2025 was another strong year for true crime content, with Netflix titles such as American Murder: Gabby Petito, Amy Bradley is Missing, and Unknown Number: The High School Catfish all dominating conversations amid their respective releases. In a landscape full of murder docs, this one proved that psychological horror doesn’t always require a body.
5. My Father, the BTK Killer (2025)
Few can claim to be closer to generational evil more than Kerri Rawson, the daughter of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer. By shifting the focus of the documentary to Rawson, director Skye Borgman manages to track the ripple effects of BTK’s crimes, especially the permanent wounds left on a daughter picking up the pieces of her life after so much death. Dennis Rader murdered ten people in the Wichita, Kansas area between 1974 and 1991, taunting police with letters and eluding capture for decades. His arrest came in 2005, when his own daughter’s DNA helped investigators confirm his identity.
Family man and Scout leader Dennis Rader led a double life as the BTK killer. His daughter Kerri Rawson shares her experience with her father’s horrific crimes in a way that no previous documentary has dared to explore. The film does not flinch from the pain Rawson carries, but it also doesn’t exploit her grief for shock value. Through the best true crime documentaries of 2025, a few trends emerge: filmmaking that subverts the genre’s stock visuals through unconventional use and sourcing of footage, and storytelling that centers the experiences of the victims and their families instead of turning killers into mythologized monsters. My Father, the BTK Killer is perhaps the clearest example of that shift.
Why We Can’t Look Away: The Psychology Behind True Crime’s Grip
A 2024 YouGov poll found that 30% of Americans engage with true crime content every week, and 41% engage with crime-oriented content every month. Those are extraordinary numbers for any media category. A 2024 YouGov survey of 1,000 Americans identified the primary motivations for true crime consumption to be “interest in mystery,” “watching cases being solved,” and “interest in psychology.” It turns out we’re not just watching because we’re morbid. We’re watching because we’re trying to understand something fundamentally human about fear, control, and justice.
True crime’s popularity isn’t just about morbid curiosity. It offers insights into fear, control, emotional regulation, and human connection. True crime, often described as both frightening and comforting, presents a paradox that aligns with our lived experiences. For women, who statistically face a higher risk of violent crimes, true crime media can serve as a form of psychological rehearsal. Overall, consumers enjoyed an average of 3.8 hours of true crime per week, but Gen Z tuned in for 4.6 hours per week. Fans most often tuned in out of curiosity, at 73%. The numbers tell a clear story: this genre isn’t going anywhere, and its best entries continue to raise the bar for what documentary filmmaking can achieve.
