Netflix, websleuths and the contemporary urban legend

This article explores how Joe Berlinger’s Netflix true crime docuseries Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021) has appropriated the apparatus of the modern urban legend. The article demonstrates how Berlinger merges the aesthetics of true crime documentary, websleuthing, and urban legend to reconfigure the unusual circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Canadian student Elisa Lam into a form of participatory infotainment. The article contends that Berlinger’s recreation of the events and aftermath of Elisa Lam’s disappearance and death uses the processes of urban legend creation to first attract and entertain the audience, only to later challenge the audiences’ susceptibility to such legends. The article proposes that this mode of consumption functions as a form of ‘honey trap’ which, while passive, allows the viewer to become embedded in the narrative, inviting them to create and critique the processes of contemporary legend construction.