'Hunt a Killer' Is a Murder Mystery Subscription Box for True-Crime Fans
It's like a "real world escape room" that's delivered monthly to your front door.
Are you tired of just sitting there and watching one TV show after the other about murder? Are you finally ready to get in the game? Of course, you probably aren’t qualified to investigate a real murder. But we’ve got the perfect solution. It’s a murder mystery subscription box called Hunt a Killer, and it’s basically like if a Netflix true-crime documentary and an escape room had a baby.
Hunt a Killer was launched in the fall of 2016 by Ryan Hogan and Derrick Smith, and it’s not exactly hard to see how they came up with the idea. Murder as entertainment has never been more popular. From true-crime TV shows like Evil Genius, Making a Murderer, The Keepers, and The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, to true crime podcasts like My Favorite Murder, Serial, The Murder Squad, and Criminals, to fictional murder mysteries like The Fall, Trapped, The Break, and Marcella, this is the golden age of homicide-based programming. Hogan and Smith simply came up with an ingenious way to make it more interactive, combining murder mysteries with escape rooms and subscription boxes.
“You’ve got television, you’ve got movies, you’ve got books—a few short mediums, ways to communicate to tell stories and absorb stories,” Hogan explained to the Washington Post back in 2017. “We’re kind of reinventing the way of storytelling, and we’re telling it through touch and smell and actual physical items.”
Hunt a Killer
Given that explanation, it shouldn’t come as a shock to learn that Hunt a Killer works very much like a TV show. Each new mystery is called a season, and each season consists of six boxes of clues called episodes.
The newest season of Hunt a Killer revolves around a mysterious murder at a high school reunion in a fictional small town called Chestnut Falls. Each month, subscribers are sent a box of high-quality clues, which include everything from old letters and newspaper clippings, to maps, police reports, and even high school yearbooks. It’s your job to play detective and piece everything together over the course of six boxes of clues received over the course of six months.
Worried you’ll get stuck, and the fictional murderer will go free? Don’t be. Although Hunt a Killer is more fun if you solve the murders all by yourself, or maybe a group of mystery-loving friends, there’s also a pretty extensive online community that can help you out if you really hit a wall.
Of course, given the amount of time and effort that goes into conceiving these elaborate murder mysteries, not to mention creating each box of authentic-looking clues, you might expect a subscription to Hunt a Killer to cost a small fortune. But amazingly, that is not the case. At just $25 per month—or less than it costs for two people to go to a movie—Hunt a Killer is shockingly affordable. And although technically you can cancel your subscription at any time, you probably won’t want to.
The only downside to Hunt a Killer? Due to the fact that each box of clues is meticulously handcrafted, supplies are extremely limited. So if you want to try your hand at being a detective, don’t wait, because the newest season is very likely to sell out. Check out HuntAKiller.com today for more info.
