During his senior year of high school, Jeff finally finds himself accepted by a misfit group of nerds, who form The Dahmer Fan Club and encourage him to act out and throw epileptic fits in the hallways of school and in public for laughs.īut the connection, while important, is also superficial and for Jeff it also comes too late. Ross Lynch does an excellent job of portraying the young Jeffery Dahmer, an awkward loner who collects roadkill in part to satisfy his obsession with “what’s on the inside” and in part to escape his chaotic homelife, where his unstable mother, Joyce (a terrific Anne Heche) is constantly at odds with his father, shunning Jeffrey for his younger brother and acting erratically as a result of mental illness and an addiction to pills. How could Jeffery Dahmer go from awkward teenager to someone who murdered and cannibalized seventeen men? In both the graphic novel and the film adaptation, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, we get some insight into just that. My Friend Dahmer doesn’t just tap into our interest with serial killers, but it also checks off a very specific subset of that fascination: the answer to how someone could do something so heinous. My own fascination with serial killers led me to My Friend Dahmer, a graphic novel by cartoonist Derf Backderf, which depicts his recollections of his high school classmate, Jeffrey Dahmer. Our love of serial killers in the media is intricately tied to the love of horror films they expose a darker side of humanity, they allow us to explore our fears and some of our dark desires by proxy, without any transgressions on our part. We’ve made them popular in TV and film from The Silence of the Lambs to Dexter, podcasts such as My Favorite Murder or Last Podcast on the Left, or even the slew of wonderfully trashy airport authors like James Patterson or Mary Higgins Clark. There’s no question that we have a cultural fascination with serial killers.
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