Ryan Murphy
's attraction
to sordid stories led him to develop a new series for
Netflix
devoted exclusively to
Jeffrey Dahmer .
.
This American from Milwaukee, a city in Wisconsin located north of Chicago, was sentenced in February 1992 to 17 life sentences equivalent to the number of victims he had between 1978 and 1991. His murderous madness and his penchant for alcohol began when he was only 18 years old: left to himself after the unexpected departure of his mother and the unexplained absence of his father, he brings a hitchhiker back to his home and kills him at using a dumbbell.
Subsequently, he reproduces the same modus operandi: he seduces young homosexual men in bars, brings them home, drugs them with sleeping pills and kills them in their sleep.
Fascinated by the dissection of dead animals and taxidermy from an early age, he developed a morbid attraction for the blood and flesh that
he satisfies through his criminal impulses.
After killing, he dismembers each body, keeps bones, lends itself to cannibalism and dissolves the rest in a barrel of hydrochloric acid.
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"We had one rule when embarking on this project with Ryan Murphy, we would never tell the story from Jeffrey Dahmer's point of view,"
Evan Peters
explained
in an interview with Netflix.
Favorite actor of the director with whom he collaborated several times in the
American Horror Story
series , the 35-year-old American from Saint-Louis studied the story of Jeffrey Dahmer by reading biographies, consulting investigation reports and looking at archive footage before embodying it.
"As a viewer, you're not really going to sympathize with him or immerse yourself in his distress.
You are more of an outside observer.
In
the United States as in France,
Monster: The Story of Jeffrey Dahmer
has become the most watched series of September on Netflix in the space of a few days.
A success enamelled by many critics, both from the specialized press and the public and also from the real protagonists of this dark story.
The families of the angry victims
While the despicable acts committed by Jeffrey Dahmer date back more than 30 years and the "Cannibal of Milwaukee" was killed in prison by a fellow prisoner in November 1994, the families of the victims claim the right to be forgotten and to respect for people disappeared.
Rita Isbell, sister of Errol Lindsey (killed at the age of 19 on April 7, 1991), criticizes Netflix for not having been consulted before discovering that his intervention at the trial had been reproduced with an actress to play him .
“I have never been contacted about the series.
Netflix should have asked if it bothered the families of the victims or how we felt about this series being made.
They didn't ask me anything.
They just did
,” she told
Insider
.
, the Jeffrey Dahmer murders were gruesome enough that Netflix could have spared us from making a series out of it.
Rolling Stone
believes that
"the great media conglomerate Netflix has once again dipped its toes into the well of profit that is crime stories"
.
“We felt it was important to be respectful of the victims, of their families, by trying to tell this story as close as possible to reality”
, underlined Evan Peters whose interpretation is admirable in the same way as that of Richard Jenkins in the role of Lionel Dahmer, the father of the killer, and of Niecy Nash in that of the neighbor Glenda Cleveland.
In ten long episodes and a story with a hazardous chronology, the creation of Ryan Murphy does not actually spare us much.
By trying to make us feel the anguish of Jeffrey Dahmer's prey, the director has made his series a real emotional torture for the public.
Apart from episode 6 told through the tragic story of Tony Hugues, a deaf young man killed in May 1991, it most often focuses attention on Dahmer and his family.
In essence, against a backdrop of homophobia and racism,
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story
denounces the inability of the police to intervene when, on numerous occasions, Glenda Cleveland, the neighbor of Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment in Milwaukee, alerted by the cries, the sounds of drills and the smell of corpses, has contacted.
On May 27, 1991, two police officers had even escorted the young Konerak Sinthasomphone, 14, to his executioner's apartment after having managed to escape.
Read alsoRyan Murphy joins Netflix for nearly $300 million
“It's not just Jeffrey's story. These are the repercussions. How our society and our system failed to stop it many times. Because of racism and homophobia. It's a tragic story”
, analyzes Evan Peters.
This is the fourth time that the story of Jeffrey Dahmer has been the focus of a film production after David R. Bowen
's The Secret Life of Jeffrey Dahmer
(1993) starring Carl Crew as the killer,
Dahmer the Cannibal
( 2002) by David Jacobson with Jeremy Renner and
My Friend Dahmer
(2017) by Marc Meyers with Ross Lynch.
On October 7, Netflix will release a three-episode documentary mini-series by Joe Berlinger titled
Jeffrey Dahmer: Self-Portrait of
.
