6 surreal Netflix documentaries that prove fact is much stranger than fiction

On October 16, a new documentary called You Can See Everything will open in theaters. It's about tech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, who was famously convicted of fraud after raising hundreds of millions of dollars for her biotech company, Theranos, based on misleading and false claims. The trailer gained attention thanks to how utterly bizarre it looked. How can a woman who's been widely exposed as a fraudster maintain her innocence? What does she think she's going to gain by allowing a documentary crew to record her every waking moment?

Documentaries like this one highlight how, oftentimes, real life can be much stranger than fiction. And there are plenty of documentaries like this you can stream at home on Netflix.

Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer

The internet is a strange place

We're going to jump right in with a weird one. In 2010, Canadian actor Luka Magnotta posted a video of himself suffocating two kittens on the internet, although the video didn't reveal his identity. A growing circle of internet sleuths were horrified by his actions and dedicated themselves to finding out who he was. Things escalated in 2012, when Magnotta killed an engineering student named Jun Lin and posted about it. An international manhunt followed, with Magnotta finally getting arrested in Germany.

Don't F**k With Cats is unsure whether the amateur internet detectives are heroes or obsessive enablers whose attention inspired Magnotta to escalate his crimes. Perhaps it's impossible to be sure. In the internet age, we're still working out where the line is between worthwhile organizing and parasocial preoccupation. This three-episode series is a fascinating, occasionally uncomfortable attempt to answer those kinds of questions.

Evil Genius

Real-life Batman villain or deeply unwell woman?

Evil Genius is about a bizarre crime that happened in Pennsylvania in 2003. A pizza driver named Brian Wells walked into a gun with a shotgun and demanded $250,000. He had a bomb strapped to his neck, and claimed he had to complete a kind of "scavenger hunt" to get the code to unlock the bomb. The bomb went off before authorities could stop it, killing him.

This four-part documentary explores the conspiracy behind this crime, introducing us to "masterminds" Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and Bill Rothstein. Like many true crime documentaries, there's a tension here between the value of profiling these dangerous people and the potentially pernicious affects of giving attention and notoriety to people who are, at bottom, mentally unwell. Whatever the underlying morality, the show is extremely watchable, in large part because of how strange the personalities involved are.

Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives.

Eat your vegetables. We have crime to do.

True crime offers a bottomless well of strangeness. This four-episode series introduces us to Sarma Melngailis, an owner of a trendy Manhattan raw vegan restaurant frequented by celebrities. She meets Anthony Strangis, who convinces her to siphon millions of dollars from her restaurant into his personal accounts. Eventually the two go on the run and are caught in Tennessee after they order Domino's pizza, not something you'd expect a vegan to do.

Easily the weirdest thing that Strangis promised Melngailis is that he could make her beloved dog, Leon, immortal. That's the kind of thing you wouldn't believe if you saw it in a movie, but it happened in real life.

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Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski

A break from true crime

Not every stranger-than-fiction tale involves crime. Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski is about Stanisław Szukalski, a sculptor and painter who was hailed as Poland's "greatest living artist" in the 1920s. Much of his work was destroyed in Nazi bombings during World War II, and he lived much of the rest of his life in obscurity in California.

This documentary movie reintroduces his work to a new audience, and explores Szukalski's fascinating life and perspective. Szukalski invented his own artistic style as well as a philosophy that saw life as an eternal struggle between human beings and the half-human offspring of humans and Yetis. The movie also examines his anti-semetic views prior to World War II, views he spent the rest of his life repenting for. It's a great movie about a "mad genius" artist many people haven't heard of.

Abducted in Plain Sight

Why would you make that decision?

Abducted in Plain Sight is another true crime documentary, this time about a woman named Jan Broberg, who was kidnapped on two separate occasions in the 1970s, each time by the same man: family friend Robert Berchtold.

The documentary details how Berchtold groomed not just Jan, but also her parents. Berchtold told Jan that they must run away together as part of a mission to save an extraterrestrial species. Meanwhile, he had sexual affairs with both Jan's mother and her father, manipulating them into compliance and silence. Even after Berchtold kidnapped Jan for the first time, her parents decided not to press charges and to let Berchtold back into their lives, after which he kidnapped her again.

Abducted in Plain Sight is exasperating to watch, and proves that real-life people can be weirder than any fictional character an author can come up with.

Tiger King

Oklahoma, drama capital of the world

Tiger King is perhaps the prototypical "stranger than fiction" Netflix documentary, a seven-episode profile of not just Joe Exotic, the Tiger King himself, but of other people who voluntarily keep dangerous, wild animals. Why would anyone choose to keep animals capable of tearing you limb from limb as glorified pets? Watch this documentary to find out.

Naturally, the series also dips into true crime, as Joe hires a contract killer to try and murder his rival, wildlife activist Carole Baskin. Joe himself is extremely eccentric and clearly loves the camera, which makes him an unforgettable subject.

You Can See Everything

There's a leering quality to all documentaries, especially ones on Netflix. We almost can't believe that the people we're watching would do the things they do, and the documentarians are happy to indulge our disbelief.

The best documentaries temper that voyeuristic impulse with education and analysis, but we shouldn't feel too bad about it. There are a lot of very odd stories out there, sometimes it's fun just to gawk.