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Black Christmas (1974) is more than an early slasher film. It is a reflection of 1970s cultural anxiety. Set in a sorority house during the holidays, the film follows a group of young women stalked by an unseen killer whose threatening phone calls originate from inside the home. Through its use of point-of-view shots, fragmented voices, and domestic invasion, the film helped establish many conventions that later defined the slasher genre.

But beyond its stylistic influence, the film engages deeply with issues of gender, autonomy, and institutional failure. Jess’s decision to seek an abortion places the story inside the political tensions that followed Roe v. Wade, while her growing fear of Peter complicates the idea that danger comes only from strangers. The police are dismissive and ineffective, reinforcing themes of distrust in authority.

By blending holiday imagery with violence, and by ending without closure, Black Christmas captures a moment when safety, tradition, and institutions all felt fragile.

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In this final episode of our four-part series on the Houston serial-killer panic of 2025, we look beyond the rumors in the bayou to examine the deeper forces shaping the city’s fear. We unpack why “targeted” violence still feels threatening in urban space, how clearance rates and investigative delays cloud public understanding, and why trust in institutions fractures when answers are slow or uncertain. We also explore the real impact of strained policing, forensic backlogs, and overburdened social systems—and how these pressures shape the experiences of citizens, grieving families, and frontline professionals. Finally, Dr. Heather Goltz joins us to ground the discussion in the human side of fear, uncertainty, and the systems people must navigate when tragedy strikes.

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In this episode, death investigations expert Elizabeth Gilmore takes us inside the medical examiner’s office to explain how cause and manner of death are determined—a process that is far more complex and far more critical than most people realize. She breaks down the five official manners of death, what each classification really means, and how those determinations shape everything from criminal investigations to prosecutorial decisions to charge. She also helps us understand the challenges and gray areas that forensic pathologists confront, especially in cases where evidence is limited or circumstances are ambiguous. Her insight brings much-needed clarity to a system that often sits at the center of public controversy and, in the case of the Houston serial-killer panic, played a pivotal role in how the story unfolded.

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This is the second episode in our four-part series on the Houston serial killer panic of 2025. This episode takes a closer look at how we think—and often misthink—about serial murder. I sit down with two criminologists who bring both clarity and nuance to a topic that’s usually buried under myth and media hype. First, Krista Gehring joins me to unpack the cultural narratives we’ve built around serial killers: the tropes we repeat, the fears we amplify, and the ways pop culture shapes what the public believes these offenders look like, think like, and act like. Then, Casey Akins helps ground the conversation in the empirical reality, walking us through how serial murder is actually defined, what the data really show, and why our cultural imagination so often drifts far from the facts. Together, their insights help us understand how the gap between perception and reality played a significant role in shaping the 2025 Houston scare.

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This is the first episode of a four-part series on the Houston serial killer panic of 2025. This installment traces the panic’s deeper lineage, following its evolution from the serial killer anxieties of the 1970s and 1980s through the rise of true crime culture and into the social media era, where fear can rapidly intensify into full-blown frenzy.

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This inaugural episode of Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours introduces the podcast concept and purpose. Crime and popular culture artifacts become cultural rituals that shape our fears, values, and sense of social order. Using Videodrome's (1983) iconic “The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye” moment as a starting point, it breaks down why popular culture artifacts resonate so deeply—and why this podcast exists to document the importance of popular culture and crime.