ON 5 MAY 1993, THREE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD BOYS-Chris Byers, Michael Moore, and Stevie Branch-were murdered in woods outside of Memphis, Arkansas. The murders themselves were enough to unsettle small, southern community; but passions climbed even higher when, within month, police arrested three local teenagers for crime. Those passions reached a fever pitch after prosecutors developed a theory that murders had been committed as part of a satanic ritual. One always hesitates to begin deconstructing such an event, for fear that very fact that three innocent children lost their lives might be overshadowed by what can seem in comparison to be trivial questions of theory. In this case, however, of events seems already to have been irretrievably lost. If murders were real, what followed appears much less so, and in this instance some measure of dissection may almost be necessary if we are truly to understand what took place. Viewed analytically, it becomes clear that nothing in case is as it seems. The arrests, ensuing trials, debate over guilt or innocence of West Memphis Three (as three teenagers have come to be known)-a debate that has only grown more intense in ten years since they were convicted-all has come to operate as a kind of simulation of reality. Events, reactions to those events, all occurred and continue to occur at level of appearances only, with little or no substance beneath those appearances. Everyone involved behaves as they are expected to behave, their actions, even their emotions dictated by constant presence of camera. My goal is to explore how this simulacrum developed, particularly how media helped to substitute for real. To a certain extent, substitutions such as these are predicted in work of a number of postmodern thinkers, especially that of Jean Baudrillard. I focus, however, on two important documentaries about Memphis events, Paradise Lost (1996) and a follow-up filmed five years later, Revelations (2001). Together, these films probe media effects, but they also participate in them. Indeed, they blur lines between real and filmic in ways that not even Baudrillard could have anticipated. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard argues that we have arrived at age of hyperreal, where what was previously has been replaced by models of a without origin or (1). The world around us is now nothing more than an elaborate simulation. At root, Baudrillard's work draws on a common idea of postmodern. Fredric Jameson, for example, explains that we live in a world where the contents [of our images] are just more (ix). There is no depth, no foundation, no bedrock referent left; all that remain are signs themselves. Baudrillard details how we reached this state, suggesting that images build one upon another, eventually masking fact that that was once represented by sign has ceased to exist. He defines four successive phases of image: image first reflects reality, then masks and denatures that reality, then hides fact that reality no longer exists, and finally becomes its own reality. He points, for example, to caves at Lascaux, France, which public is no longer allowed to view. Instead, an exact replica of caves sits beside them, a replica so precise as to be realer than real. Thus replica has replaced caves in all essential ways. We respond to it emotionally with awe and wonder, as if it were thing. As a result, original is now no more real than its copy: the duplication suffices to render both artificial (9).1 It is not only objects around us that have been replaced: our behaviors, too, have been modified. We spend bulk of our time sitting behind desks, so we substitute jogging for what once would have been natural exercise of our day-to-day lives. …