All those years on American Horror Story could never have prepared Evan Peters for taking on the unenviable role of Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial killer that far too many films and shows have chosen to make him the subject of. The world’s perverted obsession with real-life monsters should never come before the very real traumatization that affected families tend to go through whenever something like this gets made.
But, the heinously titled Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story did the numbers, and now we’re getting a dramatized cinematic universe about serial killers from Netflix, in case you needed to catch up on the trajectory of the world. The mammoth amount of hours viewed, meanwhile, didn’t come without a personal cost to Peters himself.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, the WandaVision star opened up about the discomfort that comes with merely talking about embodying such a role, so one can only imagine the internal tribulations that came with actively putting on such a performance.
It does feel uncomfortable. It’s all been incredibly complicated and I’m still processing all of it, to be quite honest.
I’ll be transparent here: I didn’t watch Dahmer, I don’t plan on watching Dahmer, nor do I plan on watching anything that will come out of Netflix’s Monster franchise, including the recently released Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. The negative impacts that have come from the commercialization of these stories are more than apparent at this point, and we desperately need to stop feeding them.
There is value in the true crime genre; sobering accounts can go a long way in teaching important societal lessons. But this value can only be truly realized in a society that has a healthy relationship with media consumption, and it’s probably safe to say that we aren’t quite there at the moment.
