If you're an avid Netflix watcher, you will know all about Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. It is the first season of the controversial American true crime series, Monster, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan for Netflix. The first season focused on the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, an American serial killer and sex offender who killed 17 men and boys. The show was extremely popular with viewers and was streamed at number 1 globally, with 196.2 million hours viewed following its premiere.
It was recently announced that Murphy's Monster series has been renewed at Netflix for a further two seasons. The show will take on an anthology format with each new season focusing on a new subject. Future seasons will tell stories of other monstrous figures who have impacted society. But after the families of Dahmer's victims spoke out about the damage the show has done on their mental health, do we really need more seasons of the show?
From the viewing figures it's clear: the world's appetite for true crime drama's are only on the rise. From Ted Bundy to John Wayne Gacy and Charles Manson - there is a real fascination surrounding the dramatisation of these serial killers. The world is clearly moving away from documentary style storytelling which includes firsthand testimonies often told from point of view of the victims or families.
Furthermore, attempting to rationalise and understand the gritty inner thoughts of such a criminal seems to now be a part of the appeal. But through doing this, the creators are only sensationalising and attempting to rationalise the unthinkable. Like it or not, true crime seeks to humanise inhumane acts. So, is this healthy and do we really need yet another retelling of a prolific serial killer?
I was curious about all the hype surrounding the show myself, and started watching the first few episodes. However, I had to stop very early on in the series; watching the gruesome acts which I knew were not fictionalised was too much to digest. So, I can't imagine what it was like for the families of the victims having to relive the trauma. If anything, the new series highlights the increasingly glaring problem with true crime and how it deals with its victims. The focus of these true crime drams needs to shift and the narrative should be about regaining the victims' and their families' voices.
The show, which at times portrays Dahmer sympathetically despite depicting how he got away with murder for so long because authorities ignored the concerns of Black and other minority community members, has been criticized for purportedly not consulting the families of those killed.
Rita Isbell’s brother, Errol Lindsey, was murdered at age 19 by Dahmer. She gave a victim impact statement during Dahmer’s 1992 sentencing, when the killer was given 15 consecutive life sentences. The emotional moment is also re-created in the series. She spoke out to Insider about the show, 'When I saw some of the show, it bothered me, especially when I saw myself — when I saw my name come across the screen and this lady saying verbatim exactly what I said. If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve thought it was me. Her hair was like mine, she had on the same clothes. That’s why it felt like reliving it all over again. It brought back all the emotions I was feeling back then.'
Isbell says she wasn’t contacted by the streaming giant, 'I feel like Netflix should’ve asked if we mind or how we felt about making it. They didn’t ask me anything. They just did it,' she continued. 'I could even understand it if they gave some of the money to the victims’ children. The victims have children and grandchildren. If the show benefited them in some way, it wouldn’t feel so harsh and careless. It’s sad that they’re just making money off of this tragedy. That’s just greed.' She added,'The episode with me was the only part I saw. I didn’t watch the whole show. I don’t need to watch it. I lived it. I know exactly what happened.'
Furthermore, The mother of aspiring model Tony Hughes, who was deaf and just 31 when Dahmer murdered him in 1991, told The Guardian that events on the show 'just didn’t happen like that.' She explained, 'I don’t see how they can do that, I don’t see how they can use our names and put stuff like that out there.'
Series creator Ryan Murphy’s remarks counter claims by some victims’ relatives that no one from the production notified them of the show or consulted them. He told The Hollywood Reporter, 'It’s something that we researched for a very long time and we, over the course of the three, three and a half years when we were really writing it, working on it, we reached out to 20 – around 20 – of the victims’ families and friends trying to get input, trying to talk to people, and not a single person responded to us.'
In a Netflix interview with Evan Peters, who portrays the role of the notorious criminal, he said, 'It felt important to be respectful to the victims, to the victim’s families, to try to tell the story as authentically as we could.' He added, 'You need to have certain plot points because he did do these things, but you don’t need to embellish them. You know, we get it. We don’t need to see it over and over again.'
However, this is the third Hollywood reimagining of Dahmer's horrific acts. They have watched the unimaginable play out repeatedly in front of the world. And while I’d like to believe that a series like this doesn’t seek to romanticise the acts of Dahmer and profile the lives of his victims instead, it’s hard to believe this after watching the reality of it all play out on screen.
We get an unnecessary detailed insight into the early life of Dahmer; highlighting how he came to be a horrific killer, while we only get a brief exploration into the innocent lives he took. Along with the soundtrack, slow-moving montages and sympathetic outlook surrounding his upbringing, they clearly wanted to evoke an emotional reaction.
Through doing so, it has led to some people online expressing that they felt ‘sorry’ for Dahmer. Which in short, is horrifying. How did the public perception shift from seeing this man as a cold-blooded killer to feeling apologetic for him? The series attempted to justify his actions – whether it was though highlighting elements of his troubled childhood or lonely teen years. We can still take this as facts but remember that he still brutally murdered and stole the futures of many innocent men. That should be the key takeaway from the series. The sympathy should be with the victims, always.
Going forward, we don’t need more true crime drama’s sensationalising the inner thoughts or ‘emotional’ backgrounds of serial killers in an attempt to create sympathy. The only thing we can do, as viewers, is to choose whether to engage with these shows. Now that Monsters has got the green light, we can only hope they can take a different approach to the upcoming seasons. I want to know about the background of the innocent victims - what were their upbringings like ? What were their aspirations for the future before it was so cruelly snatched away from them? These are real families, who will always have raw feelings. What we really need is for the platform to give a greater voice to the victims and their families.