It’s tough to pin down exactly when we all became so obsessed with true-crime documentaries and series, but I reckon the genre owes a lot to the team behind Making a Murderer.

The main players in that saga continue to make headlines, and we, the general public, continue to gobble up the latest tale of somebody else’s misfortune.

If you’re thinking that the word ‘schadenfreude’ is apt then boom, you’ve nailed it. Business Tech quoting psychiatrist Dr Sharon Packer below:

It’s basically a fancy German word that was used by Freud and the psychoanalysts back when they spoke German, about people getting pleasure in other people’s problems and other people’s suffering. And really, it’s vicarious. It’s not necessarily sadistic, but if bad faith had to fall on someone, at least it fell on someone else.

There’s something else that’s a little bit darker, that a lot of people don’t want to accept, but there’s this sense of relief that it wasn’t you who did it.

Eerily true.

We’re going to run through some of the offerings on Showmax, starting off close to home with Stealing Sunflowers:

On April 20, 2017, two white men allegedly caught 16-year-old Matlhomola Moshoeu stealing sunflowers on a farm. They claimed he jumped off the back of their bakkie and broke his neck on the way to the police station, but an eye witness says Matlhomola was pushed. On that day, everything in the small town of Coligny, South Africa changed.

You can watch Stealing Sunflowers here.

Next up is Captivated: The Trials Of Pamela Smart:

It was the first televised court case ever. See how a small-town murder in New England became one of the biggest cases in history pulsating with sex, drugs, betrayal and murder.

You can watch Captivated: The Trials Of Pamela Smart here:

A little something for fans of Silence of the Lambs, perhaps? Check out Thought Crimes: The Case Of The Cannibal Cop:

This documentary will make you question your own code of ethics. Former NYPD officer Gilberto Valle was convicted of conspiring to kidnap and eat women. He never committed the crimes he was charged with “conspiring to commit”, and never acted on his fantasies, which were recorded on a dark fetish website, but the jury still found him guilty.

You can watch Thought Crimes: The Case Of The Cannibal Cop here.

Returning back home, Crimes Uncovered SA is a fascinating look into some of South Africa’s most infamous crimes.