Normal people tend to be repulsed by the idea of murder, but that doesn’t stop us from being weirdly fascinated by it at the same time. Normally, this manifests itself in marathons of Making A Murderer or debates about the innocence of Adnan Syed, but a woman named Abigail Goldman has come up with a slightly more fun way to scratch that particular itch without having to resort to using actual people’s lives for entertainment. As explained in this Atlas Obscura profile, Goldman makes tiny dioramas of fictional murder scenes, and—weird as it may be—they’re super cute.
As Goldman explains it, her dioramas (or “Dieoramas”) are like the scenes surrounding model train sets, only you “get rid of the trains and add murder.” They typically involve tiny figurines (often with guns) standing over gruesomely mangled corpses covered in splatters of red paint, but when reduced to this scale, the shocking imagery of a forklift dumping bodies in a yard or two lumberjacks cutting a guy in half actually seems kind of funny. Goldman’s husband has posted a couple galleries of her work on Reddit, and you can see some highlights below:
The Atlas Obscura article goes deeper into Goldman’s life, with her explaining what gave her the idea and how she came to make her first Dieorama (like all of the best internet stories, it involves a cat), and you can find more information at her Facebook page.