Tiktok’s Crime Scene Cleaning Addiction Is Bloody

Sadie Marshall’s business has hold music that may be described as “Dracula chic.” When you contact Sadie’s Pro Cleaning, you’ll hear some cheesy organ music before being offered a list of extensions for things like “biohazard raw sewage,” “animal hoarding,” “radical insect infestation,” and “disgusting stench eradication.” Also, the murder, suicide, unattended death, and crime scene cleaning extension I was trying to reach her at.

Clearly, I had no need for her expertise. Marshall’s organization is only one of several such private companies that provide crime scene cleaning services in various states. Sadie’s Pro Cleaning, in contrast to its rivals, has acquired an improbable household name.

Marshall boasted to The Daily Beast, “Almost 80 million people on TikTok know who I am.” In addition to the millions of people who saw Sadie’s Pro Cleaning on the A&E reality show, the company has over 500,000 followers on social media.

One video asks, “Have you ever touched death flies?” as Icona Pop’s “I Love It” thumps in the background. A person in a yellow hazmat suit picks up handfuls of black pupae from the ground with a broom and displays them for the camera. (Blowflies, flesh flies, and other species of flies, gnats, and beetles are also possible candidates for the title of “death fly.”)

Despite TikTok and Instagram’s hazy content control standards denouncing violence and gore, these videos have found a home on the platforms. TikTok videos with warning labels on them nonetheless get hundreds of millions of views from accidental and intentional viewers alike.

Unsurprisingly, Marshall does not consider the material she posts to be gratuitously violent. Her honest assessment was that “it’s educational” to her. Inquiring minds need to know more about this field. And every legitimate company needs an online portfolio.”

Everyone dies every day. Marshall used the slang term for suicide popularized on the video sharing app TikTok: “there’s a lot of individuals in America who die alone, for whatever reason—heart attack, diabetes, they swallow their own spit, or they unalive themselves.”

TikTok’s preoccupation with videos involving the cleansing of dead bodies may be better understood with knowledge of internet ephemera and psychology. Science believes their appeal is due to a mix of people being naturally curious about mortality and having a fight-or-flight reaction that prevents them from mindlessly scrolling through grim news.

Cleanup After a Crime TikTok is the hub of many popular online communities. CleanTok is one extreme; its popularity stems from its before-and-after pictures, with a side of ASMR for good measure. The Real Deal When It Comes To Crime The popularity of TikTok, a platform where “armchair detectives” may watch and chat about one other’s “mystery” solutions, also contributes to the phenomenon’s allure. Finally, there are the horror fandoms, whose videos include graphic violence and jump scares in honor of figures from well-known media.

But psychologically speaking, what benefit do we get from experiencing terror and death? Despite its obvious societal and economic significance, morbid curiosity has received very little academic attention; yet, the studies that have been conducted provide clues as to why humans are so fascinated by death and decay.

Dr. Suzanne Oosterwijk of the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Social Psychology has devoted a great deal of her career to studying the causes of morbid curiosity. Several hundred college students participated in her research, which was published in PloS ONE. They were shown with a total of sixty sets of paired photographs covering topics including nature, society, and the body. A football huddle represents neutrality, whereas images of a great white shark with its jaws gaping and a person having their hair pulled represent physical and natural threats, respectively.

After having each thumbnail shown for two seconds, students were then instructed to pick one to examine more closely. While the students in the research tended to concentrate on negative social imagery, they preferred neutral pictures of physical objects and natural settings.