Evan Peters Creepy Portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer Can’t Save Terribly Told ‘Monster’

Savas Abadsidis September 21, 2022

Ryan Murphy’s latest mini-series in his effort to tell all aspects of being gay in America, Netflix’s Monster, about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, is a wasted opportunity. His go to star Evan Peters delivers a creepy performance but is given little material to work with stretched over six episodes.

The sepia toned lurid tale definitely wants you to watch but you should probably read a book on Dahmer instead.

Variety sums it up perfectly:

While knowing (or at least hoping) that Murphy and Brennan aren’t trying to engender sympathy for Dahmer, it’s egregious nonetheless that so much of this show is devoted to watching Peters’ Dahmer self-flagellate for being “weird” as if reenacting the serial killer version of Jughead’s now infamous “Riverdale” speech. (Dahmer: “I’m not a normal guy; I’m weird; I don’t fit in”; Jughead: “I’m weird; I’m a weirdo; I don’t fit in.”) Then, after spending six episodes (of 10) detailing Dahmer’s psychological profile and murders, the back half of the series turns to the aftermath of his arrest and the righteous fury the sheer horror of his transgressions inspired.
This includes many attempts at underlining exactly how Dahmer could get away with so many astonishing crimes while the marginalized communities he trafficked in — particularly queer, Black spaces — protested the obvious unease surrounding him. If there was a story worth telling here — and that’s a big if, given the onslaught of true crime overwhelming television these days — it was this. And yet, despite the detour of “Silenced,” these crucial moments are largely rendered in two-dimensional platitudes that rarely go as deep as the subject requires. Not even the formidable Nash, so good as Dahmer’s suspicious neighbor, can do much to change that. For as much as “Monster” makes moves to decenter him in its final episodes, it’s still “The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” after all.
If you want to see Peters fight internalized homophobia by fondling a mannequin, masturbate to memories of gutted animals, or solemnly fry up a human kidney, I guess this show is here for you. Beyond that, though, it simply can’t rise to its own ambition of explaining both the man and the societal inequities his crimes exploited without becoming exploitative in and of itself. The story of Jeffrey Dahmer has been told over, and over, and over again. This version, despite its prestige trappings, has little else to add.

In an interview with Netflix in September 2022, Peters explained why the serial killer was the hardest role he’d ever played. “I was very scared about all of the things that Dahmer did, and diving into that and trying to commit to [playing this character] was absolutely going to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life because I wanted it to be very authentic.” Peters said. “But in order to do that, I was going to have to go to really dark places and stay there for an extended period of time.”

He continued, “I have to say that the crew was instrumental in keeping me on the guard rails, I cannot thank them enough and I could not have done any of this role with them…It was a challenge to try to have this person who was seemingly so normal but underneath all of it, had this entire world that he was keeping secret from everybody.” “It was so jaw-dropping that it all really happend. It felt important to be respectful to the victims and to the victims’ families to try to tell the story as authentically as we could.”

Dahmer is also the subject of Netflix’s 2022 docuseries, Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.