Netflix's new hit is about Jeffrey Dahmer, a man who killed and ate people—here's why he did it
There are a lot of scary and nightmare-inducing films and shows lined up on Netflix, but perhaps one of the most terrifying is the biopic of real-life criminal Jeffrey Dahmer, or as others call him, "The Milwaukee Cannibal."
Considered one of the most notorious and most disturbing killers in America, Dahmer was a serial killer who confessed to having raped and murdered seventeen men between 1978 and 1991, some of them he ate.
He kept the victims' body parts in his apartment, which grew more and more rancid as his body count grew. According to a 1991 report by Vanity Fair, when the police arrived at his place to arrest him, they found "seven skulls and four heads, three in a free-standing freezer, one in a box on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator."
They also found assorted body parts in the refrigerator as well as headless torsos and mutilated body parts in a gallon barrel.
There were also photos of the victims while Dahmer was dismembering them, something so disgusting that "even seasoned police officers could not look at them without feeling faint."
Killing someone is one thing, but consuming them like they were some kind of food is on another level of twisted. What exactly happened to Dahmer that he ended up this way?
Unlike most criminals who typically have a "dark past" that led them to commit heinous acts, Dahmer doesn't seem to have any of that.
While he said in an interview with NBC that he had a "fairly normal" childhood, he admitted that his parents were a bit neglectful of him. According to HITC, his mother underwent depression when he was young and even attempted suicide. His parents eventually got divorced after his father discovered that his mother engaged in an affair.
Dahmer's obsession with killing ultimately boiled down to the pleasure he felt from wanting to "control" his victims.
"I had these obsessive desires to wanting to control them, possess them permanently. As my obsession grew, I was saving body parts such as skulls and skeletons," Dahmer revealed to Inside Edition in a rare jailhouse interview in 1993.
His first kill was when he was just 18 years old. As he got older, he began to read pornography and pick up gay men from bars to bring home, where he would take advantage of them before killing them—something he described as "addicting."
He later developed an interest with cannibalism "out of curiosity" before it evolved into the idea of "wanting them to feel a part of me."
Dahmer's killing spree eventually met its end when one of his victims managed to escape his clutches and report to the police. He didn't try to deny his actions and was completely honest about the killings.
He died in prison after he was beaten to death by one of his fellow inmates.
If you want to learn more about his history, you can watch Netflix's true crime series about him titled Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, starring Evan Peters as the titular killer. Watch the trailer below.