Among the plethora of thrillers about American serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the most heinous monsters of the late 80s. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan brought a captivating thriller about him to the Netflix screen in the most gore and gruesome way possible. Even after Jeffrey Dahmer is a widely studied and filmed character, Murphy’s Dahmer doesn’t differentiate the portrayal of the killer till its sixth episode, when it takes a twirl to show the actual side. After loads of sympathy towards Dahmer and his behavioral disturbances, you will find out how your sympathy would make him invincible. The series will slowly burn with the killer’s mental turmoil and end up showing the justice that he deserves. But most of the show will have you furrowing your brows as you watch the rise and fall of Dahmer’s character when eventually his motive would be unveiled. All studies on Dahmer have been done to explain his psychopathy. But the crux of the issue is still in a blur. So, let’s see what’s inside this wrecked psyche that Murphy and Brennan have shown in their latest thriller show.

A sepia-toned filter is everything to make you feel eerie, especially when it’s a matchbox apartment where the neighbor, Glenda Cleveland, is complaining about the rotten smell coming from her vent. Jeffrey Dahmer, in the next apartment, chopping someone’s body or cooking is something that you already know, but the presentation is grotesque. When we entered the room, the dim yellow light and raunchy belongings would tell us the hellish actions that Dahmer had committed. When the neighbors cannot keep calm in a smelly periphery, then it doesn’t even bother Jeff. He walks away steadily without moving his hands, like a man on a mission. There’s a gay bar outside in Milwaukee where he hunts for his victims, but rather with a “lover” look on his face. He often succeeds in wooing some of the black gay people there as a target of his victims. Dahmer’s speech is incoherent, and his appearance is that of a drunken man with dizzy eyes and slurred speech. But with an innocent smile, he can subdue his prey. One of the victims, ‘Tracy Edward,’ arrives at his apartment, falling for Jeff’s ‘another drink’ trap. In the room, which is a miniature version of hell, filled with the smell of rotting flesh, Edward realizes that his death is imminent. As he contemplates leaving the room, Jeff asks him why everyone wants to leave him. And so, we stop, being eager to go somewhere deep inside to find out the secret underlying this demonic mentality.

His room contains a machine gun driller, a satanic bible, and a TV that only shows Jeff his favorite movie, “The Exorcist 3,” which makes it pretty presumably that he chooses to prepare himself for evil. But he claims not to hurt him as all he wants to do is to drug that man and take some steamy pictures of him. Then after drugging him, Jeff would be able to chop up the body and preserve it in the acetone tank. However, nothing goes as planned as Edward struggles out of the room without stepping into his trap. When the police arrive and search, Jeffrey Dahmer’s dark dynasty is highlighted to the world. Jeff mutters that he should die for what he did.

Jeffrey Dahmer is a terrifying cannibalistic serial killer whose human form hides a demonic entity. He was arrested on July 22, 1991, for murdering a total of 17 youths. One by one, the body parts of his buried victims were found in his apartment, suggesting that Dahmer not only killed them but also kept their corpses to himself and conducted various experiments on them. Sometimes, those bodies were eaten by him. During the interrogation, he confesses how he hunted down his victims and drugged them to death bit by bit. But Jeff makes it clear that he felt a compulsion during the murders—not that he wanted to kill them—but to keep them forever. He even makes it clear that he did not commit these attacks out of anger or hatred toward any race. Rather, his murders and victim targets were focused on the most attractive people. The ones Jeff couldn’t take his eyes off, the ones he was forced to remove from the world. Throughout the interrogation process, Jeff barely makes eye contact, but in a steady gesture, we see him confessing one crime after another. He honestly and willingly admits all guilt, which distinguishes him from the dishonest alibi of other killers. Jeff presents himself as a clear example of repentance and failure, which automatically drives us to see him as a victim of long-term psychosis, and we are eager to find the root cause of it.

Although Jeffrey Dahmer is a much researched and studied topic in criminal psychology, the kind of mental disorder he was suffering from has not been found. However, if we look at his character traits, behavior, and history, all the signs of the psychological disorder can be seen. After Dahmer’s arrest, his father, Lionel Dahmer, was subpoenaed for investigation. Although he is shocked by his son’s actions, his first question is about his parenting. He repeatedly searches through Dahmer’s childhood memories to find the cause of his son’s brain malformation.

During Dahmer’s childhood, he did not see a harmonious relationship between his father Lionel and mother Joyce instead saw intense arguments, fights, and even threats of his mother showing up with knives. Since then, the disgust inside him, started to increase. In the meantime, Lionel spent quality time with him and taught him to pick up dead animals on the street, dissect them, and then dissolve them by immersing them in acid. From a young age, Jeff was attracted to flesh, blood, and guts, which gradually turned from curiosity to obsession. He kept the bones of dead animals with himself. As he grows up, his weirdness increases, and he becomes an introverted kid at school. Neither can he make friends with anyone nor fall in love. But he had an attention-seeking personality since childhood, and he became the amusement of everyone in the class by pretending to have a seizure. However, through this, he was presented as the weirdest kid in the class. Other classmates used to call him “Doing a Dahmer.”

Lionel’s outward appearance is gentle, and he can blend in with the rest of society, but problems arise with Joyce. Joyce abused drugs during her pregnancy, which caused her to suffer from prolonged postpartum depression. She was completely ignored by her husband, Lionel, who did not give his wife the minimum amount of time due to his workload. Thus, the ignorance made his wife, Joyce, furious and forced her to take all the anger out on her domestic life. When they eventually divorced, Joyce completely neglected her older son Jeff and took away her younger son, David, which seriously traumatized Jeff at a young age. He somehow completed his graduation while living all alone in his parents’ house in Ohio; not even his father came to see him.

Dahmer becomes lonely, and the devil takes up residence in his mind; he drowns himself in alcohol without anyone to share his loneliness. After many failed attempts, Jeff is unable to reveal his sexuality. The first reason was the lack of liberation of that generation and its norms, and the second was his loneliness. Jeff has never been attracted to the opposite gender, so it becomes tough for him to meet his physical demands at that point. In this situation, his first encounter is with a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks, who was brought home by Jeff in order to get intimate with him. But Hicks makes it clear that his and Jeff’s needs are not the same. As Hicks tried to leave the house at the last moment, Jeff stopped him, demanding that he did not want him to leave. As Jeff’s loneliness consumes his entire psyche, his inner beast is revealed through killing Hicks. He killed him by throwing a dumbbell at his head and strangling him. In the aftermath of the murder, Jeff realized that he had done something wrong, but instead of making amends, he started experimenting on the dead body like the ‘roadkills.’ It becomes apparent how blood and flesh start to arouse him, and gradually this murder becomes an addiction. However, he later tries to mend his behavior, as he says he didn’t want to hurt Hicks in the first place, but later, he even drugged and raped a fellow army man while in US army training. The venom of his evil spread through his mind. Even after getting expelled from the Army due to excessive drinking, while he took shelter at his grandmother’s house, his killing spree never stopped.

While drugging the young boys at a hotel, he even drugged himself, and without even knowing, he used to kill those men while being in a trance. But he never tried to correct it; rather, we see him cutting the head off and kissing it. How much gore and hellish it could be! Time after time, when the series becomes unwatchable, we’re reminded that someone has done it for real. Dahmer even called the younger guys to his grandmother’s house, where he did the same. He made the basement for himself to chop the bodies and store them in acid. The smell disturbed the grandmother too, but Jeff was so imbalanced due to excessive alcohol abuse and the devilish attributes inside him that he slowly erased the circumstances surrounding him. Even after Granny’s presence in the next room, he continues his harassment of innocent people, especially black people.

See More: ‘Dahmer-Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’ Ending, Explained – What Happened To The Milwaukee Monster?

After his arrest, while in prison, Dahmer’s psychological aspects were checked, and some doctors suggested that he suffered from splanchnophilia, which means he felt turned on by flesh and blood. However, in many of his interviews, the word “compulsion” is used in his mouth. He repeatedly said that there was a compulsion working inside him that he couldn’t stop, even if he wanted to; even after getting arrested for molesting a Laotian teenager at his grandmother’s house, his compulsion took over. After his release, he moves into an apartment in Milwaukee, where he falls in love with Tony, a deaf-mute young model. He repeatedly stops himself from drugging Tony but finally murders him and stores his severed brain in a freezer to keep him forever. Therefore, love and friendship are all lost to this destructive compulsion of his mind. He repeatedly hunts his victims in the same manner and fills the entire apartment with his demonic energy. A fourteen-year-old teenager failed to escape his grasp, as after being freed from him, poor law enforcement handed him over to the killer, believing Jeff’s mere statement.

Edward was the one who survived his capture, putting an end to his murderous spree. However, Dahmer was convicted in Wisconsin, where they didn’t have the death penalty, because of which he was sent to Colombia’s correctional prison instead of being executed for his crimes. There, slowly, the veil begins to lift from his contrite and tormented self. Some dirty-minded people in society who are known as Dahmer’s so-called fans sent letters and money to the imprisoned Dahmer. In the letter, they sent comics written about Dahmer, making him look like a “superhero.” Slowly, Dahmer begins to think of himself as invincible, boasting that he has a fandom and belittling other inmates from the prison’s black community. It is not sickness, but pure evil. Lionel continues to garner publicity by interviewing his son to promote his book, whereas, on the other hand, the victims’ families are counting the days until Dahmer’s death sentence. But the question remains, if, after repeated calls from Glenda Cleveland, the police do not come to rescue the fourteen-year-old boy, what will the law enforcement do to give justice to the victim’s family?

Dahmer has always lived his life in darkness, so fan appreciation is delicious to him in prison, but one day he thinks baptism might absolve him of all his wrongdoings. In fact, his baptizing process began in prison, where his 17 murder sins were washed away by only drowning in a pot of water. However, real justice is breathing down Jeff’s neck. Jeffrey is murdered by another inmate of the prison, Scarver, who sees Jesus’ vengeance as justice. Scarver gives him the agony of death, which he has so long inflicted on his victims. Jeffrey Dahmer’s terrifying chapter closes here.

In the eyes of the psychiatrist, Jeffrey is a healthy, strong, and conscious person who has no other symptoms except external ones. This is the outward appearance that he himself has repeatedly expressed in interviews. But he has been discussed as suffering from various disorders, ranging from borderline to schizophrenia, but no final conclusions have been reached. However, Dahmer stated that he never heard a voice in his head, but instead, a compulsion was born from his obsession. But it can’t really be called OCD because OCD doesn’t make people horrible. Although Jeffrey never said anything about intrusive thoughts, possibly he had some intrusion working inside him that made him choose this deadly path. Jeffrey’s superficial charm and manipulative behavior make him unusual to define, but his low consciousness and self-isolation can be attributed to psychosis.

In fact, not letting anyone go from him and keeping their existence to himself makes him paranoid and borderline, which forces his compulsion to urge more quickly. The diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia has led many psychoanalysts to define Dahmer. But none are clinically documented. We find examples of necrophilia everywhere in his misdeeds. In one case, after hearing the news of the death of a beautiful person in the newspaper, he even dug a grave to sleep in with the dead body. His necrophiliac obsession is an eye-opening matter in this case. However, in my opinion, what other psychoanalysts also think, is that Dahmer was never able to open up his physical needs, which exploded inside. He was bullied and labeled “weird” as a child. Dahmer believed that everyone wanted to leave him, which became more apparent to him after his mother and father’s terrible separation. As a result of the loss of his loved ones, his bodily demands are pent up in his mind, and he outbursts when someone prepares to leave him alone. On top of that, his splanchnophilia takes over, which prompts him to eat the victims’ hearts because he thinks that by eating their hearts, they would be kept forever.

However, in the series, the aftermath of his arrest appears to be intentionally justified. After receiving letters from fans, a remorseful Dahmer felt even more evil, which led him to start torturing other black people in jail, which explains why most of his victims belonged to the black community. The real reason is that black people have always been killed and tortured like ants. As a result, Dahmer’s targeting of black people saved him time and time again from the eyes of racist lawmakers. Finally, upon hearing of the execution of serial killer John Gacy, Dahmer immediately wanted to be initiated into Jesus. It becomes clearer that he never wanted to die, as he came to the door of God in fear of death. However, the ending was not even saved. Dahmer was brutally murdered by Scarver on November 28, 1994, ending his notorious life of psychopathic mentality and invincible aura.

Murphy and Brennan’s “Dahmer,” Evan Peters, is a stunner. So intense is the role he portrays with such an ace that it’s hard to get his portrayal out of your head. The series brings out the hellish side in every possible way, but its stellar cast is bound to keep you glued to the seat with its outstanding performances. Niecy Nash, Richard Jenkins, and others will not make you feel out of reality for once in this series. However, in this case, the series presentation is extra pragmatic and matter of fact. Sometimes it is so realistic that its horror is ten times more nerve-clenching than any stereotypical horror movie. However, what is more frightening than reality itself?

COPYRIGHT © Digital Mafia Talkies | DMT. All rights Reserved. All Images property of their respective owners.