"The Jeffrey Dahmer Story" is a (pseudo) documentary released by Netflix in 2022. Netflix is very good at producing this type of series, but in the past, the quality has not been very high. However, this one is well made.
The film tells the story of Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, a notorious American serial killer who engaged in necrophilia and cannibalism. The series consists of 10 episodes, recounting Dahmer's story of killing and dismembering 17 men from 1978 to 1991. It further explores the reasons behind it, revealing the ugliness of various social aspects at that time. Such heinous events are inevitably not solely the result of an individual's actions, but rather a systemic problem.
The arguments and divorce of his parents, the lack of education, and the discrimination against homosexuality all pushed Dahmer to the edge of psychological distortion. The feeling of being abandoned gradually led him to develop a paranoid personality of controlling others. He mainly targeted Asians or African Americans because these people would not receive much attention from the police, and a series of subsequent events proved this. His repeated successes made him bolder and even in a situation where the police were already involved, he was able to snatch his "prey" from their hands...
The horror of the film goes without saying, but this kind of horror is different from Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs". The calmness and high intelligence of the latter is chilling, while the former gives me a feeling of luck—if the police could be more responsible, there wouldn't have been so many victims.
We know that there will be people like Dahmer, but at the same time, we also know that the police, who are supposed to fight against them, are doing nothing. This creates a deep sense of powerlessness, which is an important part of the horror.