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This is a podcast where we treat movies, television, and other popular culture artifacts not just as entertainment, but as cultural evidence. As artifacts that reveal how we think about crime, justice, power, and culture. I’m Kevin Buckler, PhD in Criminal Justice, and a professor at a four-year public university. On Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours, I bring you sharp, unfiltered content about how film, television, and media shape the way we understand crime, law, and justice — and what those stories reveal about our legal system, our communities, and the world around us.
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Send a text 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 fi...
Send a text 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 ov...
Send a text 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 ...
Send a text 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 sha...
Send a text 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.
Send a text 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 cr...
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