4. Anime

Still, at least Dexter is a widely-respected show. Then there’s the people who based their crimes on watching anime. A man in Japan, Hiroyuki Tsuchida, killed his mother after watching the rather depressing anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Apparently, the anime had convinced him that ‘humans should be eliminated’. Convinced that he should start with his mother to get the hardest part out of the way, Tsuchida was stopped before he could go on a full-fledged killing spree, presumably because he was a puny anime nerd. Look dude, everyone sometimes gets the idea that humanity deserves to die after they watch anime, but did you really have to take it out on a helpless victim? Let alone your mother, who had to put up with a grown adult relative watching anime in the first place?

Okay, maybe we’re being a bit harsh. As anime goes, Neon Genesis Evangelion is actually one of the better ones. But then there’s the group of men in Belgium who were recently arrested over a body found with the words ‘Watashi wa KIRA dess’ scribbled on lined paper nearby. For non-anime fans, that’s Japanese for ‘I am a killer’, and a reference to Death Note, a Japanese comic and anime about an emo high school kid with a magic book. And as if that’s not bad enough, the Japanese is spelt wrong, which means that even the other anime fans won’t respect them in prison.

5. Kill Bill

In England in 2006, a guy called Sean Wilson teamed up with a young accomplice to kill his neighbor, and subsequently blamed it on watching Kill Bill beforehand.

The advantage to this excuse: the movie actually involves brutal violence! The disadvantages: the real-life victim was not killed with anything resembling a samurai sword, and there was no blood feud involved. Also, I wasn’t there, but I’m 95% sure no one delivered any well-written speeches about pop culture. No, these were just two ordinary losers that killed someone smaller and weaker than them.

But way more importantly: guys, the movie was about sexy female assassins. Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with a man having female role models, but really? When you’re committing murder? You really want to go to jail and explain to your large new cellmate that you’re in there because you got caught up in an elaborate fantasy about being Uma Thurman?