Do we really need another show about Jeffrey Dahmer?
CBC
The new Netflix series Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story has a title nearly as long as the trail of Dahmer shows and movies it follows.
The series from writer-director Ryan Murphy comes roughly five years after the feature film My Friend Dahmer (about the Milwaukee serial killer's high school years), itself an adaptation of a graphic novel by childhood friend and cartoonist Derf Backderf.
That book arrived in 2012, the same year as the documentary The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, which looked at Dahmer from the perspective of a detective who interviewed him and a neighbour. Two years before, an early-career Jeremy Renner took on the role in Dahmer, from director David Jacobson.
Of course these are not the only pieces of media about him. In fact, they're just the ones I've seen myself. Alongside are so many TV specials, books and podcasts analyzing a man who murdered 17 people — mostly Black men — that it's become hard to imagine there's much more ground to cover. Even with Renner's Dahmer, which saw a generally positive critical reception, the Seattle Times criticized it for not offering "any insights that haven't been thoroughly debated in the media already," released 20 years before Monster.
And Netflix is already offering another: the newest season of Joe Berlinger's Conversations with a Killer series premiered Friday with a focus on Dahmer, after previously profiling serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.
Though Berlinger said in a recent interview he was completely unaware of the other show while making his, he was "sure Netflix programmed it with the Murphy show in mind."
The glut of shows about Dahmer is just the tip of the iceberg. He, together with Bundy and Gacy, are the three most well-known killers from what investigative historian and author Peter Vronksy calls the "golden age of serial murder."
The three decades between 1970 and 1999 saw roughly 88 per cent of all American serial killers, he said, and laid the groundwork for their transition to what might, unfortunately, be referred to as celebrity.
"They have kind of a mythical status almost," said Vronksy, the author of several books on the history serial killers, "because we knew so little about them, they were so mysterious."
The reason there are so many productions now has to do with that "golden age" and what happened after.
The concentration of those killers and their ubiquity in the news ended with Dahmer, who was caught in 1991, Vronksy says. He was "the last of the epidemic era" in the U.S.
After him, the novelty of the phenomenon began to taper off, as did reporting on serial killers. Serial killing itself also declined, said Vronsky, due possibly to the perpetrators being caught earlier, the ubiquity of cell phones and a decline in murder in general.
But by the early 2000s interest in them, and true crime in general, had again exploded.
"There's been a huge increase in popularity, and [in] true crime all across the board," said Chicago-based true crime filmmaker and author John Borowski, whose documentary Serial Killer Culture looked specifically into the widespread fascination with such criminals.
